January 2010 Archives
Recently, I participated in a meeting to invigorate and encourage brainstorm around the issue of food security. The meeting was co-hosted by Meridian Institute, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, The World Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. The objectives for the gathering were to:
1. Share information about key institutional food security priorities and activities and identify an efficient mechanism(s) for sustained, on-going information sharing.
2. Identify how the respective strengths of the participating institutions can be leveraged to take innovative concepts to scale in support of food security.
3. Explore how participating institutions could support the development of food security indicators for monitoring and evaluation purposes.
4. Explore how participating institutions could support efforts that better enable tracking of pledges vis-à-vis actual food security investments.
At the Global Harvest Initiative, the collective "we" are always thinking about and rethinking the way forward in our quest to close the global productivity gap by 2050. In that sense, on Monday I attended the Farm Credit Council's Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., where many in the agricultural industry and others, including U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., gathered to offer their views on the way forward.
While each of the speakers offered interesting thoughts about agriculture's mission, I thought Monsanto's Executive Vice President, Sustainability & Corporate Affairs and GHI Board Member
Jerry Steiner's remarks were particularly enlightening in offering a prescription for the way forward for GHI's mission. In part, Steiner said:GHI's success will depend on bringing together a diverse group of experts to develop, share [ideas]... and jointly advocate for policies that address six specific actions.
Soybean and other legumes play a critical role in global food security and human health and are used in a wide range of products, from tofu, soy flour, meat substitutes and soy milk to soy oil-based printing ink and biodiesel, said Molly Jahn, USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics. This new information about soybean's genetic makeup could lead to plants that produce more beans that contain more protein and oil, better adapt to adverse environmental conditions, or are more resistant to diseases.