Private firms defend role in ensuring global food security
Updated
Recent figures show the world will need to produce 70 per cent more food in the next 40 years, to feed a ballooning population. Food multinationals and a range of experts say only private-public partnerships and markets can provide the means. The view that research and development by private companies can deliver food security has broadly dominated the annual international conference in Canberra of The Crawford Fund, an Australian fund encouraging international agricultural research. But there is a dissenting opinion.
Presenter: Linda Mottram, Canberra correspondent
Speakers: Dr Marco Feroni, director, Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture; Dr Namanga Ngongi, president, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa; Dr Prabhu Pingali, deputy director of agricultural development, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Dr Dyno Keatinge, director general, World Vegetable Research and Development Centre
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MOTTRAM: They've been demonised in the popular debate about food security. The giant private firms that've hybridised, modified and patented and made food big business. The work of firms like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta have fuelled myriad concerns. Many speakers at the Crawford Fund conference though -- including representatives from the food multinationals -- have offered reassurance. The executive director of the Syngenta corporation's Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, Doctor Marco Feroni, told the conference private spending had stepped up where public spending globally had stagnated and while more needed to be done for the world's hundreds of millions of small farmers, it had been done before, successfully, in partnership with government.
FERRONI: This is how the Sahara and how Thailand's northeast developed, Thailand's northeast still being the domain of small holders to this day.
MOTTRAM: Doctor Ferroni says India's burgeoning seed market is an example of public private co-operation benefitting small farmers.
FERRONI: The seed business really took off in India with the advent of private seed companies, but private seed companies were able to emerge only because they could rely on two things: one, public germ plasma, two, a pro-active, pro- business attitude on the part of both the national agricultural research system and international partners.
MOTTRAM: Other successes in broadly similar terms are cited in the African states of Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania. Doctor Namanga Ngongi is a former senior U-N official who now heads the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
NGONGI: Those suspicions will always be there but you cannot stop the march of science and technology. I think that's the key, that we should get people geared up to understand that you do need to use the best of science.
MOTTRAM: Doctor Ngongi says government's alone cannot bring about the level of agricultural development required to feed the world. He also says the advantages brought by scientific innovation should change the perception of the private sector's role.
NGONGI: If you go from one tonne per hectare to four tonnes per hectare clearly you have gained three tonnes. The three tonnes you can sell to find the money to be able to buy the next seeds for the next year. Its an investment.
MOTTRAM: Governments should play an enabling role, he says, a view shared by the deputy director of agricultural development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Doctor Prabhu Pingali.
PINGALI: If you look at the emerging economies there's a long history of the private sector working with the public sector, both at the delivery of technologies at the farm level but also increasingly in the R and D area. But if you look at sub-Saharan Africa, there I think the connection is very poor and I think that's where we need to make a lot of effort to get the lessons we've learned in Asia and Latin America.
MOTTRAM: But a dissenting voice says the focus isn't right.
KEATINGE: Though I believe that the large scale private sector can feed the world it will not be able to nourish the world.
MOTTRAM: Agronomist Doctor Dyno Keatinge heads the World Vegetable Research and Development Centre in Taiwan. He says malnutrition, not hunger, is the worlds biggest food problem, making fruit and vegetables just as important as the staple crops the bulk of private money is devoted to. He says there's a risk those more minor crops will be marginalised by the focus on staples and the drive to hybridise .. with implications for the Pacific in particular.
KEATINGE: For broadacre agriculture, the private sector are obviously depending upon hybrid seeds. But for many of the crops that we're dealing with particular in lets say the Pacific islands, hybrids are not that appropriate. And if you want to enable small scale farmers to continue to use seed which you've given them year after year after year you have to go back to open pollinated and self-pollinated material.
MOTTRAM: Doctor Keatinge says the private sector has no interest in non-hybrids, which is where government's must step in on behalf of poor farmers. It is, Doctor Keatinge says, a heretical view in forums like the Crawford conference.
