Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 2, Episode 9: Glenn Denning, Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet

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Season 2, Episode 9: Glenn Denning, Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
0:01
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I will be speaking with Glenn Denning, Professor of Practice at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss his important book, Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: Professor Denning directs the Masters of Public Administration in Development Practice at Columbia.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: Denning has advised governments and international organizations on agriculture and food policy in more than 50 countries.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: In universal food security, Denning offers a wise and comprehensive approach to meeting the world's food needs in a sustainable and resilient manner with social justice.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: As we were chatting, Glenn said, well, a modest title, How to Ed Hunger, but if anyone knows how to do it, Glenn, that's you.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: You've been at this for decades, in fact, working on agriculture and hunger in all parts of the world.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: It's a wonderful book.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: It's very comprehensive.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: It tells also a lot of stories.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Why should we think about agriculture and protecting the planet together?
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Is agriculture dangerous for the planet?
1:25
SPEAKER_00: And in what way do these two themes go together?
1:28
SPEAKER_01: Well, indeed, agriculture is dangerous for the planet.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: Ever since we humans came onto the planet, we've been modifying it in order to feed ourselves.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: And particularly in the last 10,000 years or so, when agriculture was introduced, we've been expanding our footprint tremendously in so many ways.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: Through deforestation, through utilization of land resources and soil fertility by extracting water, and most recently, the impacts of the food system on climate change.
2:02
SPEAKER_01: So we cannot envisage sustainable food security without ensuring protection of the planet.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: That's why they have to go together.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: A factoid that I learned many years ago that I think is roughly a true factoid, which is that for a mammalian species of our size and build, if you look at other such species in nature, we normally might expect to have 25 or 50 million of us Homo sapiens wandering the planet.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: But in fact, as you know well, and as I think many people listening will know, we reached the 8 billionth person on the planet.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: So talk about footprint, that's 16 billion feet on the planet, roughly speaking, and that's a lot of organisms, and we do eat a lot.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: We do need to commandeer a lot of nature.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: I remember many years ago already, scholars uh calculated that we were taking maybe something up to 50% of all the net photosynthesis on the planet.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: So that footprint is huge.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: And Glenn, I think the reason why I so much admire the book and think it's so important for people to read is that this issue of how to feed the planet, how to end hunger, and at the same time do it sustainably is really complicated.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, you and I have been around the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to fight poverty, the UN goals between 2000 and 2015.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: Now we have the sustainable development goals, which still aim to end poverty, but also to bring in all of these critical environmental realities into the picture.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: I spend a lot of time on the energy system transformation because we know that to end the human-made climate change, we have to stop the burning of fossil fuels in the way we do it, because the carbon dioxide that results from that is warming the planet dangerously.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: And I think that that's pretty complicated.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: But when I think about the food part of that story, it's worse.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: It's more complicated.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: It's harder.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: Because with the energy system, there aren't that many ways to generate electricity.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: There aren't that many ways to transmit electricity, there aren't that many ways to drive vehicles or to actually engineer vehicles.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: But when it comes to the food system, it's an incredibly complex story.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Now, you've been all over the world.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: Tell us what you've seen.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: And am I right that it's complicated?
4:49
SPEAKER_00: Because it does seem that it's a different food system wherever you go, different culture, different climate, different soils, different needs, and you're trying to find solutions that somehow can reach everybody.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
5:03
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, really, that was the goal to really try to come up with more of a unifying framework for thinking about food security and then acting on food security.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: What you will find in the literature, literally over decades, are these ideas that there's some kind of a simple fix for solving agricultural problems.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: And I call it all we need to do is.
5:29
SPEAKER_01: And you just fill in the gap.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: All we need to do is uh stop using fertilizers, all we need to do is reduce our food waste, all we need to do is uh shift to plant-based diets.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: So it's this or this or this or that.
5:44
SPEAKER_01: But what I've tried to do in this book is such a complex problem needs a really holistic and very nuanced context-sensitive set of solutions.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: And that's where I ended up with those big five areas of intervention that depending on the setting, whether it's New York City or rural Malawi, you would need some different mix of technologies, policies, and institutional innovations to bring out the sort of transformation that we need in order to achieve food security.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: So I don't like to think of it as a kind of a blueprint.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: Rather, these are the types of interventions, broad sets of activities that when considering local circumstances, you could bring about positive transformations that would lead to both healthy diets and sustainable food systems.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: And that's why they need to be together.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: How does one even get into this area, this complicated area?
6:47
SPEAKER_00: How did you get started?
6:48
SPEAKER_01: My father was a farmer before he was married, and therefore he had a strong interest in plants, and somehow that got to me as well.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: He used to grow orchids and I used to grow vegetables and in the backyard of suburban Brisbane in Australia.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: And this sort of infatuation with plant growth, the outdoors, it really made me want to work in that area.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, well, look, agriculture is a very practical way of doing that, bringing all those ideas together.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: So I'll be perfectly honest, I didn't start off on this journey with some kind of a noble vision to end world hunger.
7:26
SPEAKER_01: It was because I was really interested in how things grow and how we might be able to apply that gainfully and in interesting ways.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, I took agriculture as an undergrad and master's degree as well.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: But the thing is, my first job was in an integrated rural development project in the Southern Philippines.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: And basically it was a road construction project.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so explain what that means, integrated rural development for people listening.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: Integrated rural development was the idea that you would invest in different sectors in order to bring some complementarities and result in better outcomes.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: So the idea in this case, it was a very simple form of integrated development.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: And the idea was we'll build roads in these areas that don't have roads.
8:15
SPEAKER_01: And the farmers in those areas will now have access to markets.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: And so I was brought in honestly as a kind of a token agriculturalist with all these engineers building the roads, and they said, see what you can do with these farmers, you know, if they can produce more.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: What years was that then?
8:31
SPEAKER_01: That was 77 to 80 in the southern Philippines.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: And it was during a period of conflict, but really underdeveloped but high potential agricultural areas.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: This stayed with me all my life, the importance of infrastructure and transport and the impact that that could just transform a village, suddenly being able to adopt technologies and generate surpluses and be able to sell them.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: And the school teachers would come in, the health workers would come in, all the sort of services would come as well.
9:04
SPEAKER_01: And that's why when 30 years later, and I'm working in the Millennium Villages project, it was sort of revisiting that original idea of the integrated development and the importance of complementary investments across different sectors.
9:19
SPEAKER_01: But in both settings, it was rural, and therefore agriculture and getting agriculture moving and more productive was a central part of my work.
9:30
SPEAKER_01: And was that already with the International Rights Research Institute?
9:34
SPEAKER_01: No, no.
9:35
SPEAKER_01: That was actually uh part of Australia's bilateral development assistance program in the Philippines.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: It was one of the first big rural development projects, sort of multi-million dollar multi-year programs in the 70s and went on into the 80s.
9:49
SPEAKER_01: So I joined Erie at the end of that.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: I sort of went straight from Mindanao to Los Baños in the northern part of the country to work for the International Rice Research Institute.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: So you stayed in the Philippines?
10:00
SPEAKER_01: I stayed, exactly.
10:01
SPEAKER_01: My last day in Mindanao was uh Friday, July the 4th, 1980.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: And I started at Erie on Monday, July the 7th, 1980.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: So I had the weekend off and went to a new job.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: And uh Erie is a famed institute that's a big part of what you were part of then, which was the famous Green Revolution that was underway at the time.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's really important for people to hear about that, what you saw.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: And I want to bring in the experience in Cambodia also, which is absolutely mind-blowing what happened and what agronomy was able to do there, actually.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: Right.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: Well, this interview isn't long enough, but that the story in a nutshell is something like this.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: So I joined Erie in 1980.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: One thing about sustainable agriculture I need to tell all listeners is that it's the world of acronyms.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: Actually, uh, Glenn's book, not to not to scare you off, starts out with five pages of acronyms, at least in the PDF version, meaning there are a lot of names and words that you have to learn.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: So ERI is International Rice Research Institute, which is, by the way, another acronym part of the CGIAR, the consultative group on International Agriculture Research, a phenomenal worldwide agriculture research network.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: And this one that Glenn is describing is the one in charge of RICE.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: So back to you, Glenn.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I cut a lot of the acronyms out to keep it like workable.
11:38
SPEAKER_01: But yes, the International Rice Research Institute, Erie, it was established in 1960 by the Rockefeller Foundation.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: It was part of really a movement that really began with Norman Borlog.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: And so we could possibly talk about that separately, but it was really work that started off in Mexico with high-yielding wheats.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: Norman Borlog, who ultimately won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and was a wonderful friend to us in our work.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: And we learned so much from him.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: Developing this sort of new plant architecture for high yields.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: And that led to eventually those wheat varieties reaching India and Pakistan and really having a huge impact at a time when there were very serious food shortages in that part of the world.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: Just to stop you for a moment, because so interesting, you know, if you're not a specialist in this, plant architecture.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: That sounds odd.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: Don't plants grow.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: But of course, uh, plant architecture actually was key.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: So can you just describe what you mean by plant architecture?
12:41
SPEAKER_00: Because it's not a normal idea, I would say, uh if you if you're not in the farm world.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's kind of how the biology of the plant is organized.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: And I'll use the case of rice as the example, and that is that the traditional rice varieties were very tall and spindly, with a relatively small number of stems, or we call them tillers, coming out from the seed that was planted, and often with a small number of heads of grain on the top of that.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: So there was what they call the harvest index, and that was the proportion of the grain as a percentage of the overall plant.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: So a lot of the plant was not what we would eat.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: A lot of the plant was stem, a relatively small amount was grain.
13:26
SPEAKER_01: So the key change in plant architecture with the rice crop was to make the rice crops shorter, stiffer stemmed, with a lot more grain and a much larger harvest index.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: So the harvest index went from 10 or 20 percent to 50%.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: So much of the energy that we were getting from the sun and from the nutrients, that could then be converted into grain.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: So that was something quite fundamental about how the rice crop looked.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: It was much shorter, it had stronger stems, it had multiple stems, multiple tillers coming out from the seed.
14:04
SPEAKER_01: And as a result, you were able to get a much higher level of production per hectare.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: So that was the key innovation.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: And shorter duration was another factor, shorter lifespan.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: And obviously, so central in this and uh a theme running throughout the book.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: How much knowledge went into that transformation?
14:23
SPEAKER_00: Because there was a great deal of experimentation, physiology, understanding the plant growth dynamics in order to be able to create this.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: But for a farmer, they would then take the improved seed and plant it according to a new system and get a lot more grain and be able to feed a lot more people.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: And you are there now in 1980.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: This so-called green revolution has started with Norman Borlaug.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: Now it's coming to Asia, and you're part of that drama.
14:54
SPEAKER_01: Right, absolutely.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: And as I said, I arrived in 1980, which was 20 years after the start of Erie, but 14 years after a very important milestone was reached, and that was the release of a variety called IR8.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: So again, acronym IR, short for ERI, and then the number 8.
15:14
SPEAKER_01: And that was the first Green Revolution rice variety that was released in 1966.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: It was a major event.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: President Marcos, Ferdinand Marcos, the father of the current president, he was the president of the time.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: He came out and saw this and he said, I want the seed.
15:31
SPEAKER_01: We need to spread this seed in this country.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: And Marcos ultimately, he had a political slogan, he called it the three R's.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: So it was rice, roads, and the third one was arithmetic.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: You needed an R, but it was really about schools.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: And so it was essentially rice, roads, and schools.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: And this became a very powerful, even political instrument back in the 60s, and not just in the Philippines, but in Indonesia and in other parts of Southeast Asia, because rice was so central to survival, to food security, to livelihoods, and even culturally, it was incredibly important as well.
16:09
SPEAKER_01: So even in that year, October of that year, in fact, it was on my birthday, the 26th of October, LBJ, uh Lyndon Baines Johnson came to Erie.
16:19
SPEAKER_01: He was in a three-day trip to the Philippines.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: He wanted to see the rice varieties at Erie.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: And of course, everybody had sort of lined up, and uh, there's a wonderful video of it, you can find it.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: And he was on his way to Vietnam.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: Amazing, yeah.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: And he wanted that seed.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: He said, basically, we can win the war in Vietnam if we can get this seed to the farmers.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: It was a very interesting sort of a side story on the history of the Vietnam War.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: Now we know the history, it didn't work, right?
16:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: It didn't win the war.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: But a good friend of mine, Tom Hargrove, he worked in the Mekong Delta spreading these seeds.
16:54
SPEAKER_01: And farmers absolutely loved it.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: The only problem was that the Viet Cong at some point said, well, actually, we were the ones who introduced these seeds.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: Claimed it.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: And so there was a situation.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: They won a lot of support for that.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: That's right, right, right.
17:06
SPEAKER_01: As I say in the book.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: Rice was a hot issue in the Cold War.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: So it reminded me, and it's actually stuck with me all through my career, the importance of food security in politics as well.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: And many leaders have risen and fallen in terms of their ability to be able to ensure food security.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to make one more biographical stop on the way to the present, and that is after your work introducing IR eight.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: It is, Jeff, but by the time I got there, there was a new variety in town, like the several generations, and by then it was IR-36.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: Oh, there you go.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: It was then the mega variety that was going out all over Asia, replacing IR-8.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: You ended up on an incredible assignment to Cambodia after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, which followed the horrors of the American bombing.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: You know, this was all part of the Southeast Asian disaster around the Vietnam War and the aftermath.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: But when the killing stopped, you showed up because this was a place in hunger and devastation.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: And it's remarkable to read how agronomic science was so central in getting Cambodia to stay alive and to move forward again.
18:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, absolutely.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: That was a life-changing assignment for me.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: And I'm forever grateful to Dr.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: M.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: S.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: Swami Nathan, who I didn't mention earlier, but he was the person on the other end of the Green Revolution making this all happen in India back in the 60s and 70s.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: One of the great heroes.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's another hero of ours and great friend of ours and mentors for both of us as well.
18:48
SPEAKER_01: Indeed.
18:48
SPEAKER_01: And he was a director general at that time.
18:51
SPEAKER_01: And he got a request from a small NGO working in Cambodia because then there was no bilateral aid, no UN agencies, nothing.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: This is post-war, but still nobody came in.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: You know, the superpowers, they were not interested, the West was not involved at all, the UN was not involved.
19:10
SPEAKER_01: But this NGO said, you know, the farmers have all been displaced as a result of the war.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: They basically either lost their seed or they had to eat their seed.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: And they were wondering whether Erie had any traditional rice varieties from Cambodia in its gene bank.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: And the wonderful story is that, yes, indeed, they did.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: They had 766 different distinct varieties, Cambodian rice varieties.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: Just explain what a gene bank is, because that's also so unusual and uh amazing, actually, that there's the foresight to make it.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: People talk about improving varieties, but the starting point of varietal improvement is genetic diversity.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: And in order to capture that genetic diversity, there's various ways you can do that.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: But one of the means, and really one of the most common means, is to actually collect the seeds and store them in these facilities, like the Erie Rice Germ Plasm Center, and to store them and then not just to leave them as you know museum pieces, but to actually then use them in plant breeding programs.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: And so what was very special about the Cambodia case was Cambodia is agriculturally, agroecologically extremely diverse, heterogeneous.
20:32
SPEAKER_01: So you had hundreds upon hundreds of varieties that had been naturally evolved, not naturally, but by humans, by farmers over time into these distinct types that were tolerant of floods and droughts and all kinds of other stresses that would occur, different soil types and the like.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: So it just so happened, you know, very cleverly before the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia, there had been a collection expedition at the end of '72, early 73, where varieties, traditional varieties, were collected in Cambodia, brought to the Philippines, and placed in the Germplasm Bank.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: And so when that NGO asked for the seed, the seed was available.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: And we were able, through a project that was funded by the Australian government under the radar, that's another story, because we couldn't officially say that Australia was supporting it, because the United States and others were basically saying there'll be no support there because the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge was essentially done by Vietnam.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: And Vietnam installed its own government, which the UN refused to accept because of the usual reasons.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: It was done by force and so on.
21:53
SPEAKER_01: Even if it meant the end of genocide, it still meant that it took about seven years before any.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Kinds of external assistance could start to flow.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus And in the meantime, people needed to eat and grow food and have livelihoods.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine this?
22:09
SPEAKER_01: Cambodia was actually exporting rice before the bombing started.
22:13
SPEAKER_01: Cambodia was exporting a significant amount of rice to other countries, including two African countries before the war.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: But it then went down to a level, and I'll just sort of put this into perspective, the country was producing in the last year of the occupation or the Khmer Rouge regime, they produced 540,000 tons of rice in the whole country.
22:38
SPEAKER_01: And there was widespread famine, starvation.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: There was genocide, but there was also starvation and disease, right?
22:45
SPEAKER_01: So the number is 1.7 million people died.
22:50
SPEAKER_01: It was more than 20% of the population perished during that three-year period of the Khmer Rouge, right?
22:57
SPEAKER_01: And everybody was displaced because the Khmer Rouge basically said we don't want people where they're from, we want to move them around.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: And they had some rather crazy ideas about how traditional systems needed to be replaced by some almost mythical irrigated system, which was a complete failure.
23:19
SPEAKER_01: So imagine half a million tons across the whole population.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: It was clearly not enough, people starved.
23:26
SPEAKER_01: We came in several years after, as a result of Dr.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: Swami Nathan's initiative and support from Australia.
23:33
SPEAKER_01: As I said, under the radar, we called it the Irindochina Project and kind of pretended that it was sort of mainly going into Vietnam and Laos, but in fact it was there for the purpose of supporting Cambodia.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: And within a few years, production had increased to two million tons.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: So from 540,000 to 2 million tons.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
23:54
SPEAKER_01: And four times.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: Last year, Cambodian rice production nationally is 11 million tons.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: Whoa.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: The country is a significant exporter of rice now.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: Production levels per hectare has gone up from one tonne per hectare to 3.8 tonnes per hectare.
24:10
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, when you're looking for some kind of an inspiration as to, you know, can we do something about food security, at least on the production side, I think we should really look not only to the broader green revolution, which certainly had huge impacts across Asia in both rice and wheat, but when we think, well, it's too difficult, like we say, it's too difficult in Africa, it's too difficult in these other more sort of harsher environments, take a look at Cambodia and see what was done there.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: It's really quite a remarkable story of genetic conservation, building human capacity was a key part of it.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: We trained thousands of Cambodians, everything from sort of short one-week courses to PhDs outside of the country.
24:56
SPEAKER_01: And the third part, which is something I certainly got from Dr.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: Swami Narthan, was the importance of building national institutions.
25:05
SPEAKER_01: And so we worked with the Cambodians to establish the Cambodian Agricultural Research and Development Institute, which was kind of a little eerie, if you like, for Cambodia.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: Run by Cambodians, you know, there was technical assistance in the early years, tremendous technical assistance coming from various sources.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: But now it's a national institution that can stand on its own, do its own research, and collaborate with scientists from all over the world.
25:33
SPEAKER_01: And when you think of what it was like with everything was basically destroyed at the end of the Khmer Rouge period, it gives you some sense of what might be possible.
25:43
SPEAKER_01: And I look around the world and I see Somalia and I see Afghanistan and South Sudan and these places, and we're thinking, hopeless, right?
25:52
SPEAKER_01: Haiti.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: Why can't we think more positively about what opportunities there are and use Cambodia not as a model but at least as an inspiration?
26:01
SPEAKER_01: And I think science and technology, human resources, and institution building, and with a decent dose of external assistance.
26:10
SPEAKER_01: There's no question about it.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: It took a long time before Cambodia could afford to put its own resources into this sort of development work.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: Well, I find it completely persuasive, and you go on to many other adventures working in other parts of this knowledge system, including the World Agroforestry Center, where we got to work together on many things.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: And it seems to me that one of the basic points of what you've just told us is when a farmer plants a seed, it's really planting knowledge.
26:42
SPEAKER_00: Knowledge that goes way back in first types of cultivation, scientific knowledge, lots of training.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing automatic about this process.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: This is an tremendous investment in knowledge and infrastructure to make all of this work.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, your book talks about this in the context of what I would say are three great challenges.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: You could define them as two, but I'd say three.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: One is to feed the planet with a healthy diet everywhere.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: The second is to reduce or end a lot of the destructive side of agriculture that comes with deforestation or depletion of groundwater or pollutants and so forth.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: And the third is resilience.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: So you talk about both the, we sometimes use the word mitigation to reduce the direct harms.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: And then the third problem is that whatever we do right now, there's still going to be a lot of climate change and a lot of stresses.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: So we need to have resilient agriculture that's going to be able to face higher temperatures and rainfall pattern changes and so forth.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot there, and you teach a whole semester course in it.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: So in our talk today, we can't get through this.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: Just to highlight for listeners, go read the book, you will learn about soils, water, seeds, climate change, nutrition systems.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: And I do want you to say a word about the final chapter of that knowledge section, if I could call it that, which is the food system.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: What does that mean, a food system?
28:25
SPEAKER_00: It means, in some sense, putting all these pieces together.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: But if you could say a word about that, I want us to turn to the solutions after you describe a food system and go to this big five idea, and we'll go through those, and everyone will be charged up to go and uh hunger and uh protect the planet.
28:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
28:44
SPEAKER_01: So the food system simply it recognizes the interconnectedness of all of the processes and all of the players that are involved in producing, distributing, and ultimately consuming and even disposing of food.
29:04
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's a total system in that the term value chain is often used or supply chains.
29:11
SPEAKER_01: But production is one part of it, which is clearly the part that I've spent most of my life working on.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: It's the production and the productivity side.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: But there's also distribution.
29:24
SPEAKER_01: How do we move it from farm to consumer?
29:29
SPEAKER_01: And then we have all the issues around how food is processed, consumed, and ultimately wasted and disposed of, which is a major problem that we talk about as one of the big five.
29:44
SPEAKER_01: But the food system is really looking beyond one single part of it.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: And and this is, I'd say this was really an important part of my education as an agriculturalist, was to understand the connections to nutrition, to understand the connections to infrastructure, physical infrastructure investments, to understand the connection to education, the whole idea of school meal programs, and how that could actually enhance educational outcomes.
30:17
SPEAKER_01: And of course, thinking of the food system with respect to climate change, as you mentioned.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: The food system really is very important to see it as, first of all, something that is impacted by climate change.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: Not just agriculture, but supply chains and distribution systems are being affected all the time, particularly by catastrophic events.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: But we know agriculture has always been subject to climate effects, right?
30:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, agriculture is the product of climatic adaptation.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
30:51
SPEAKER_01: So when the climate changes, then obviously agriculture has to change as well, or it's out of sync, right, with what the climate is.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: So that's one part of it.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: So that means agriculturalists at the moment, farmers and people concerned about the production end of it, are very sensitive to all of the changes that are occurring in terms of rainfall, in terms of flooding and drought susceptibility, in terms of temperature effects, in terms of sea level rise and salinity, snow melts, all of these affect the productivity side.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: But the other part of the story is an important part, and that is that one-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gases come from the food system.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not saying from agriculture per se.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: Let me just make sure that everybody follows anthropogenic, of course, means human-caused.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: And the greenhouse gases are the gases that warm the planet.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: Carbon dioxide is the one we hear most about, but there's also methane and nitrous oxide.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: And all three, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, are heavily implicated in agriculture.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: In other words, agricultural processes release emissions of all three of those major greenhouse gases from the burps of cows in methane release to nitrous oxide from fertilizers and so on.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: So, as you were just saying, and I think it's a shocking thing.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: I was shocked when I first heard it many years ago, that agriculture is actually the largest source of the greenhouse emissions, even more than cars, even more than the energy sector.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's a big story.
32:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: In this business, you chop it up in all sorts of different ways.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: But if we think of the food system, it's one-third.
32:41
SPEAKER_01: And Francisco Tubiello and uh Cynthia Rosenzweig and others have shown the most recent numbers, validate that it's about one-third.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: But within that one-third, 20% is land use change, deforestation, and the like.
32:57
SPEAKER_01: 44% is from the production itself.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: So that's the cow's burps and the nitrogen applications and even the energy use on farms.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: So the production part of it, that's 44%.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: And the remaining 36% relates to activities that are pre-production and post-production, including food waste, right?
33:19
SPEAKER_01: So you've got these different components, and what that gives you, of course, is an entry point to what we could do about it.
33:28
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, cutting back on deforestation could have quite a significant effect.
33:32
SPEAKER_01: If you're a rice farmer, if you can work with improving the efficiency of nitrogen fertilizer and reducing the amount of nitrous oxide that comes from fertilizer applications, you can contribute to mitigation.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: Likewise, all sorts of methods with respect to cattle and their digestion and so on.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: There's all kinds of innovations coming along there, including it can be driven by changes in diets as well.
34:00
SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot that can be done in terms of mitigation, but always remember that all this is not like controlled by some sort of puppeteer in national government.
34:13
SPEAKER_01: These are farmers, right?
34:14
SPEAKER_01: So if you want people to change, you have to create some kinds of incentive systems for them to be able to change.
34:21
SPEAKER_01: Right.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: These are farmers and, like all of us, consumers of food.
34:25
SPEAKER_01: Consumers, and absolutely.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: We have to change, and people will change.
34:29
SPEAKER_01: My sense is people will change when there's some kind of a viable like incentive.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: They're less likely to change, and certainly my experience with farmers is they're less likely to change for totally altruistic reasons that I want to help my future generations.
34:46
SPEAKER_01: They will first of all look for what can be done that can generate positive outcomes for me in terms of food security, in terms of my income.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: So that's why public policies are very important and technologies for sort of shifting the incentives towards acting in ways that are positive in terms of climate change mitigation.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: The book is filled with really a wonderful, very clear, detailed discussion of all of these different components, just to list the big five because time is so short.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: Sustainable intensification of agriculture, market infrastructure, which we've mentioned, post-harvest stewardship, don't waste what you've produced and don't lose it, healthy diets, eating better, and social protection.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: So all of this is part of that system.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: I want to ask you in the short period that we have about what is a very technical and important side, crucial in this story, though they all are, the sustainable intensification.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
35:49
SPEAKER_00: Because, as you mentioned, land use change and deforestation is a big part of the story, and one of the approaches is to try to actually achieve more output sustainably on a given amount of land rather than expanding, expanding, expanding, and taking up more and more of the Earth's surface and the habitats of other species.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: Right.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: I won't go into it in detail, but you and other viewers and listeners would realize that Malthus, his ideas were based on extensification, right?
36:24
SPEAKER_01: The concern that he had in terms of population and ability to grow food was all based on how much can we physically expand our agriculture.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: Again, for listeners, Malthus, Thomas Robert Malthus was really the father of economics as the dismal science because he wrote in 1798 that we'd never really be able to stay ahead of population growth.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: Right.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: If I could simplify it.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: And the idea that he had was we would have to just expand the amount of land coverage and it would go to worse and worse lands and so forth.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: And you're saying, no, that's actually not even the right way to think about this.
37:01
SPEAKER_01: No.
37:02
SPEAKER_01: So I think the way to look at it is this way.
37:04
SPEAKER_01: And I know some people, when they hear the word sustainable intensification, they immediately think oxymoron here.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: How can you intensify and be sustainable?
37:14
SPEAKER_01: Because there is certainly a lot of rhetoric around green revolution and other intensification approaches.
37:21
SPEAKER_01: Intensification meaning getting more out of the effort and the land area that we have.
37:28
SPEAKER_01: So the general idea is to argue that much of the way in which we farm is relatively inefficient, and there are lots of efficiencies that can be gained at all levels.
37:39
SPEAKER_01: And now, it doesn't always mean putting more inputs on.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: It could mean using your existing input levels, could be fertilizer, could be water, but actually producing more by being much more precise about how you apply those inputs.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: For example, a lot of the fertilizer just runs off or gets into the groundwater.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
38:06
SPEAKER_01: A lot of it is run off.
38:07
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's applied when it's not needed.
38:09
SPEAKER_01: We often have packaged fertilizers, NPK, when maybe we only need N and P or just N and K.
38:17
SPEAKER_01: Nitrogen and potassium and phosphorus, the three big ones.
38:20
SPEAKER_01: Nitrogen, sorry, I'm I'm using my acronyms too liberally here, but I think the point is farmers in rich industrialized settings are doing this already.
38:30
SPEAKER_01: They're much more precise about how they apply their inputs.
38:34
SPEAKER_01: Why?
38:34
SPEAKER_01: Because it's more profitable, right?
38:36
SPEAKER_01: Now that needs to be extended to all food systems.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: We have to be much more careful about how we use our nutrients and our water and our land and our energy as well.
38:48
SPEAKER_01: So all of these are critical inputs to the food system.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: In some places, I'm saying we probably need to get out of agriculture altogether.
38:56
SPEAKER_01: It's just inefficient.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we're better off going back to forestry or even grazing lands, horticulture of some kind.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: The point is to be able to do this, you really need what I think about is a kind of a portfolio.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: For me, sustainable intensification should be viewed in aggregate.
39:17
SPEAKER_01: In aggregate, what I mean is we're going to intensify some areas, like look at sub-Saharan Africa.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: Average yields of maize, typically one to in some cases that have progressed relatively well, two tons per hectare.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: In Iowa, farmers get 11 tons per hectare.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not saying we go to 11, but can we surely go to three or four or maybe five?
39:43
SPEAKER_01: Double the food production per hectare.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: Easily.
39:46
SPEAKER_01: Easily.
39:47
SPEAKER_01: You could throw a dart onto a map of Africa, and most places I reckon you can double production.
39:54
SPEAKER_01: It's technically possible, but you need the inputs, you need the finance, you need the policies, you need the roads, you need to be able to support that.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: But it's entirely possible.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: So sustainable intensification, we immediately think of these very intensive systems.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about just getting a bag of fertilizer to somebody who's essentially mining the soil.
40:17
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing sustainable about mining the soil, just growing crops and putting nothing back in again.
40:23
SPEAKER_01: As I said, some areas could go out of production, and I think ultimately you can save land.
40:28
SPEAKER_01: The key point that some folks will tell you is that we already produce enough food.
40:34
SPEAKER_01: We just need to be able to redistribute it better.
40:37
SPEAKER_01: I think every sensible evidence-based piece of research that I've looked at has come to the conclusion that we are now 8 billion people, we will move to 10 billion people probably by 2050.
40:50
SPEAKER_01: There is no sensible conclusion that we don't need more food.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: We do need more food.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: So we've got to produce it either through this intensification process, but do it in a sustainable scientific way, or we continue to move the land frontier, which is adversely affecting obviously the climate, loss of biodiversity, and the like.
41:14
SPEAKER_01: So I think that's entirely possible, but again, it needs to be very nuanced.
41:20
SPEAKER_01: And I'm saying some parts of the world can cut back on their input use.
41:24
SPEAKER_01: Other parts should just improve their efficiency, other parts should probably go out of agriculture and shouldn't be encouraged to be growing crops in any case.
41:35
SPEAKER_01: So these are the sort of things that I would say, and then combine it with policies and incentives not to go into deforestation, not to simply cut forests down or cut mangroves down and the like.
41:47
SPEAKER_00: Glenn, you go through in all of those knowledge chapters the fact that we have a lot of know-how, we have a lot of accumulated uh technologies, we have a lot of potential high return investments.
42:01
SPEAKER_00: Then you turn on the basis of all of this at the beginning, setting up the problem, your own experience and seeing a country, Cambodia, go from 500,000 tons for the whole country to 11 million, as you said, so that it can be done, showing the range of solutions.
42:19
SPEAKER_00: The last part of the book is how are we going to get this done?
42:23
SPEAKER_00: To make sure that agriculture is sustainable, resilient, healthy diets for all.
42:29
SPEAKER_00: You talk about leadership at the core.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: Can we close with your thoughts about what you call do how, which is how are we actually going to do this?
42:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
42:41
SPEAKER_01: That was the toughest part of the book, actually, as everybody warned me about.
42:46
SPEAKER_01: It's not just about the what, it's about how do you actually bring this about.
42:50
SPEAKER_01: And full credit to again, MS Swaminathan, for coming up with this.
42:55
SPEAKER_01: We need the know-how and the do how.
42:58
SPEAKER_01: We need both of them together, right?
43:00
SPEAKER_01: So, absolutely the do how.
43:02
SPEAKER_01: I think what I've learned over time is that there are some key elements to succeeding.
43:09
SPEAKER_01: One is this notion that we need a multi-pronged approach.
43:15
SPEAKER_01: So the idea that we don't go for all we need to do is cut our food waste or change our diets.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: We need to bring all of these areas together and be sensitive to local circumstances and local opportunities.
43:29
SPEAKER_01: I think something that I mention in the book is the idea that it really requires a sort of a whole of government and even a whole of society approach.
43:39
SPEAKER_01: Again, it's not something that can be uniquely solved by the public sector.
43:43
SPEAKER_01: It also requires the private sector, it requires individuals, it requires non profit third sector organizations, requires universities.
43:54
SPEAKER_01: And that's where I started to come down to yes, yes, I know it requires all these things.
43:59
SPEAKER_01: It needs to Be done at the international level, the national level, the local level.
44:03
SPEAKER_01: So it's multi-tiered.
44:05
SPEAKER_01: It's not just bottom-up.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: And it's certainly not just top-down, right?
44:09
SPEAKER_01: You need to meet in the middle as well.
44:11
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of it can be done at the national level, by the way.
44:14
SPEAKER_01: Something I have learned over the years is the importance of national level policies and plans and actions.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: But when it finally comes down to it, it's behavior of individuals.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: It's knowledge and behavior of individuals.
44:29
SPEAKER_01: And that's why I really came down to that last chapter about the importance of leadership.
44:35
SPEAKER_01: The ability to understand complexity and be able to work in complex settings, to be able to bridge complex institutional arrangements.
44:49
SPEAKER_01: The idea that we learn in food systems is nobody's in charge.
44:54
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's in charge.
44:56
SPEAKER_01: Governments aren't in charge.
44:57
SPEAKER_01: The only people that are somewhat in charge of their own little world might be the farmers.
45:01
SPEAKER_01: But honestly, when we try to make these transformations, we've got to recognize you need all kinds of partnerships and you need to be able to negotiate and persuade different behaviors.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: We need finance, obviously, and there's plenty of finance out there, but it's just not being used.
45:18
SPEAKER_01: You talked about these international research centers, right?
45:22
SPEAKER_01: The CGIAR.
45:23
SPEAKER_01: There's 15 centers.
45:24
SPEAKER_01: You know the annual budget?
45:26
SPEAKER_01: The last time I looked, it was 2020.
45:29
SPEAKER_01: The annual budget of the whole CGIR system,$737 million.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: Less than a billion, right?
45:36
SPEAKER_00: Shame, shame, shame.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: I used to advocate 20 years ago, at least get it up to a billion dollars because we know the returns to RD.
45:45
SPEAKER_01: You know, Pepsi and Coke spend$8 billion a year on marketing and advertising.
45:52
SPEAKER_01: If we can't find the same amount to achieve a food-secure world, there's something wrong with our priorities as humanity, you know?
46:01
SPEAKER_01: So in the end, who's going to make those decisions?
46:04
SPEAKER_01: I think it's going to be informed, motivated leaders.
46:08
SPEAKER_01: I call them practitioner leaders.
46:11
SPEAKER_01: I have this sort of theory of change and very much inspired by my own experience at Columbia, at CEPA with the Master's Program in Development Practice, to see what individuals can do, not just in their own backyard, but working in all kinds of organizations in this huge ecosystem that works on food systems.
46:35
SPEAKER_01: Everyone from the World Bank and the UN and private sector and social entrepreneurships and all kinds of institutional arrangements, and they can be leaders and they can bring about the change.
46:47
SPEAKER_01: I see no other way.
46:48
SPEAKER_01: I think we just can't sit and wait for it to happen.
46:51
SPEAKER_01: I think we've been doing that for too long, and we haven't really moved forward all that well.
46:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we have lots of good conferences, and as the Secretary General said in 2021, said, we have all the goals we need.
47:06
SPEAKER_01: You know, SDG2, the sustainable development goals, we don't need any more goals.
47:10
SPEAKER_01: We just need to do what we said we would do.
47:14
SPEAKER_01: And that's why, for me, starting with this vision of universal food security, the notion that every person on this planet should have a healthy diet, and that healthy diet should be derived from sustainable food systems.
47:29
SPEAKER_01: To me, if we all just embrace that and worked out what we can individually do with our colleagues and with the institutions that we're working with, I think we really could make progress on that.
47:41
SPEAKER_01: So as I say in the book, I'm a pragmatic optimist.
47:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a crazy optimist.
47:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm an optimist based on the joy and privilege I've had to, as I say, like Sir Isaac Newton, to stand on the shoulders of giants and to be able to see things that are possible.
47:58
SPEAKER_01: To me, that has been crucially important in terms of motivating me to do what I do.
48:04
SPEAKER_00: Well, the book conveys that beautifully.
48:07
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned what we need.
48:09
SPEAKER_00: First is the commitment and the goals, but also how to navigate complexity, institutions, finance, and you said that requires informed leaders and fundamentally knowledge.
48:22
SPEAKER_00: And Glenn, you've made a major contribution to that, not only in your lifelong work, but in your new book.
48:29
SPEAKER_00: We've been speaking about a fantastic book.
48:32
SPEAKER_00: I really urge everyone to read it.
48:34
SPEAKER_00: You'll learn a tremendous amount.
48:37
SPEAKER_00: Universal Food Security, How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet.
48:43
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for writing this book, sharing your remarkable experience and knowledge, and thank you so much for being on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
48:53
SPEAKER_01: My pleasure.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Jeff.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
48:56
SPEAKER_00: Next time, I will be speaking with Chris Coyne, professor of economics at George Mason University and the Associate Director of the Friedrich Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center to discuss his important book, In Search of Monsters to Destroy, The Folly of American Empire, and the Paths to Peace.
49:19
SPEAKER_00: Together we will discuss the anatomy of the American warfare state, examine the costs and failures of U.S.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: military interventions, and discuss Professor Coyne's powerful indictment of American imperialism and his thought provoking case for a new approach to national and international security.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
49:44
SPEAKER_00: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.