Crop protection companies must address infrastructure in Africa and other developing countries if they want to be part of the world’s food security solution.
食品风险
2 月初在华盛顿特区举行的全球食品安全会议上，专家小组讨论了食品安全问题。来自世界银行、JohnsonDiversey、NSF-CMi 和康奈尔大学的专家分析了来自 53 个不同国家的行业专业人士的调查回复。与会者一致认为，2020年全球面临的三大食品安全问题将是生物风险、供应链问题和污染物。故意食品安全事件的威胁也是一种恐惧，以及意外事件。
“Safe food will be a major economic and political threat for international security,” said moderator Serban Teodoresco, president of Preventa.
挑战
为回答如何养活 2050 年预计的 90 亿全球人口的问题，由 CropLife International、农业科学与技术委员会和生物技术产业组织主办的专家小组于 2018 年底在华盛顿特区召开。二月。来自美国和欧盟的专家向数百名现场观众和超过 35,000 名在线粉丝发表了讲话。该小组一致认为，转基因 (GM) 作物必须发挥作用，以提高有限农田的产量，以及在遭受干旱、寒冷、洪水泛滥、土壤贫瘠或病虫害侵扰的地区种植粮食。世界上大部分地区都缺乏农业教育，阻碍了对生物技术的接受以及正确使用现代农业设备的能力以及种子和农业投入的进步。
The challenges expected to face agriculture in 2050 were determined to be: the expected population load of an additional 3 billion people; climate change; the use and availability of potable water; and the diversion of crops to energy, such as biofuels, and feed for livestock. “It takes five to 10 times as much grain to make a pound of meat than a pound of you,” said Dr. Nina V. Federoff, science and technology adviser to the US Secretary of State and to the administrator of US Agency for International Development.
基础设施与政治
The two largest issues contributing to food insecurity, agreed the panel, are politics and infrastructure. The lack of rural roads in most of Africa is one of the largest barriers to transporting food and building processing plants. Farm-to-market roads, the land-grant concept and university extensions built in the US changed agriculture in that country, the panel said, stressing the need for similar changes in Africa. “Without infrastructure, you go back to subsistence agriculture,” said Dr. Calestous Juma, Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor. “People only grow what they can use because they can’t move it.”
Robert Paarlberg, author of “Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa,” agreed, blaming the lack of roads for the general lack of modern agriculture in the region. “Smallholder farmers do not have access to nitrogen fertilizers, irrigation or improved seeds,” he said. “They’re stuck with farming technologies that give yields one-tenth as high as yields in the industrialized world.”
This lack of infrastructure, as well as the opposition to GM crops, falls into the realm of politics. “Political barriers to modern science in agriculture” are preventing a green revolution in countries such as India, said Federoff. She explained that the amount of arable land around the world hasn’t changed in more than 50 years; therefore, maximizing yield through GM crops is necessary for producing the amount of food 9 billion people will need to survive.
“There’s a 70-20-10 rule,” said The World Bank’s John Lamb at the Global Food Safety conference. “Only 10% of productive land is going to come from continued expansion of the ag frontier; 20% from intensification on the land that’s already being used, and 70% has to come from innovations.”
安全之路
The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology report studies four regions, said lead author Dr. Gale Buchanan. China and India were studied because of their booming populations; Brazil, the “largest country with untapped potential for agriculture,” and sub-Saharan Africa, with its fragile economies and governments, where people live the closest to starvation.
Wellesley College Professor and Harvard University Associate Paarlberg said that in 1994, it was predicted that China would “starve the world” due to its high import demands. “But Chinese ag has responded,” said Paarlberg. “Production of wheat, corn and rice [has increased], and China is now a net exporter. The country has a modest land base compared to its population, but advances have made up for it.”
In addition to growing enough food to feed the world’s burgeoning population — and making sure the food safely gets to where it’s needed — farmers also need to grow food without depleting soil nutrients or harming the environment. When Federoff recited the idiom, “If you give a man a fish, you’ll feed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish, you’ll feed him for a lifetime,” former USDA Under-Secretary Buchanan added his own spin. “If you give a man a fish, he’ll get one meal out of it. If you teach him to fish, he’ll fish until all the fish are gone from the pond. But if you teach him to grow fish sustainably — well, then you’re OK.”