Dr. Carl Winter, director of the FoodSafe Program and 2012 winner of the Council for Agriculture and Technology (CAST) Communication award, said: “Rarely do you see the concept of communication recognized as an important element of science.” As an academic scientist, he explained, he has noticed that many times academia underestimates the importance of communication or allows others to do it for them.
The problem with that, he said, is that it can misspackage the science by not allowing the scientist to demonstrate their passion to the audience. This problem is one he has noticed particularly recently in the area of crop genetics and the public’s response to genetically modified organisms.
The CAST Communication award, presented at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa was awarded to Jeff Simmons, president of Elanco. Taking the stage to a wave of applause and congratulatory remarks, Simmons explained that the industry’s ability to communicate with the consumers is key not only to profitability, but to fundamental issues like food security.
“We need to shift this conversation from a crisis to a solution,” he explained of the ag industry’s ability to feed the world by 2050. “People working towards a cure for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, they don’t have a solution to their crisis. We have one. We’ve got enough innovation, let’s take our pipelines and feed the world. We spend too much time going to events and leaving and not doing a lot.”
他的信息在世界粮食奖 Borlaug 对话中得到了回应，各种活动和演讲者都强调需要宣传生物技术提供的安全解决方案。
Dr. John Soper, vice president of Crop Genetics Research and Development at DuPont hailed Norman Borlaug as not only a great scientist but a great communicator. “If you read the books, you know he had a lot of tough conversations. He talked to everyone from the poor farmers to the leaders until the science proved itself.”
The ability to allow the science to prove itself, Soper explained, will require private industries to be a part of the solution. “Political unrest happens, in large part, in countries where people are starving,” he explained. “We have technology that keeps people fed. The challenge we are facing,” he said, “is communicating the complexities of sustainability and feeding the world.”
西蒙斯在他的获奖感言中回应了这一观点，他解释说，食品诚信中心对全球专家（包括小农户和立法决策者）的一项调查表示，他们认为解决全球饥饿的办法在于使目前存在的技术得以发布和实施世界各地。
为了帮助解决这些问题，Simmons 表示他希望将 2014 年世界粮食奖期间的以下工作作为他的使命和与会者的使命：
- 有 10,000 人注册将食品安全作为他们的事业
- 每周收到 100 万条关于食品安全的正面印象
- 确定并支持创新，以使用更少的资源养活 10 亿人