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SESSION ONE: Looking Back, Looking Forward Sir Gordon Conway 2006 Norman E. Borlaug/World Food Prize International Symposium The Green Revolution Redux: Can We Replicate the Single Greatest Period of Food Production in All Human History? October 19-20, 2006 - Des Moines, Iowa SESSION ONE: Looking Back, Looking Forward October 19, 2006 - 8:15 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Roger Thurow Sir Gordon Conway Our next speaker really is representing two people, Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, who are on the platform today. They are not people who are as much in the limelight as Ismail Serageldin and M.S. Swaminathan. They are really the people who in some ways create the limelight. For those of you who read The Wall Street Journal, anything that you read about development or agriculture or food security is likely to be written by them. And last year FAO recognized them jointly with the A.H. Boerma Award for raising public awareness of agriculture, trade and food policy – making explicit the fact that they write about these topics in a way that is captivating and not dull. They’re both graduates from the University of Iowa, so they’ve come home, which is rather nice. I’m going to ask… I think Roger is going to speak and Scott is going to answer all the questions – is that right? _________________ From Food Production to Hunger Reduction: In Search of the Missing Link Roger Thurow Senior Writer The Wall Street Journal Scott will answer the questions, but behind every reporter stands a brilliant editor – or they think they’re brilliant. Scott is. He’ll also correct any mistakes I made and clear up any confusion that I sow, which is probably likely. We thank you very much for the honor of being invited to attend this symposium and to be on this very distinguished and prestigious platform and podium. But to tell you the truth, we feel like wedding crashers up here today. Gathered all around us are very distinguished humanitarians and scientists, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, World Food Prize laureates, and a whole entire roomful of brilliant and brave warriors in the war on hunger. And then there’s us two. We’re just a couple of newspaper reporters. THUROWandQandA - 1 When Ambassador Quinn invited us to speak here, we were flattered but utterly baffled. We figured, what could we contribute to a symposium on the Green Revolution? We could list the things we have in common with Dr. Borlaug on two fingers. One – Scott, like Dr. Borlaug, is a son of Iowa. Two, I, like Dr. Borlaug, grew up wanting to play baseball for the Chicago Cubs, second base, I think, right, or shortstop? Somewhere in the infield. You know, it still might not be too late for us; given the wretched season of last year, I think they can still use us. I’m waiting for Lou Piniella, the new manager to call. I’ll give him your phone number when he does. But here we are in any case, improbably, on this podium. We stand here as observers of the original Green Revolution and the Green Revolution that is yet to come. With our reporting and writing, as was said, we can cast a spotlight on you all. We amplify your accomplishments, your ambitions and your dreams, and also your frustrations and disappointments. Most crucial, we can extend your reach to form the broad constituency that will be necessary to achieve a second Green Revolution. As we look back, we can stir outrage that the Green Revolution wasn’t carried over to Africa and it slowed down in other parts of the world. How dare we have brought hunger with us into the 21st century. You showed the world, you showed all of us, the way to boost food production and end hunger. But the world didn’t follow through. We got busy and distracted with other things, by the pursuit of other holy grails. The same generation that has given us the Internet, an amazing communications technology and capability, has failed to feed all of its people. How preposterous that the roll call of the hungry is rising again at the same time that food production is greater than ever before. As we look forward, we can proclaim the promise and the hope of the coming second Green Revolution. Journalists by nature are cynics, and Scott and I are cynics, Scott and I are no different than this. But as we survey the horizon, we see the various forces coming together that can fulfill the dreams, and your dreams, of a Green Revolution in Africa. Unlike the daunting challenges that face us on other fronts – eliminating AIDS, finding a vaccine for malaria, curing cancer – when it comes to boosting agriculture production, the scientific breakthroughs have already been achieved. We know what to do and how to do it. Now we only need the will, both popular and political, and the moral imperative to do it. So here is our role. We and other journalists can help create this constituency by uniting the momentum that we now see building behind a second Green Revolution. We see it among the churches, the preachers and their congregants who are rising out of the pulpits and the pews to resurrect the central mission of all religions – feed the hungry – and place it at the top rung of moral values, where it belongs. We see it among the universities, once again seeking to spread their energy and intelligence to the rest of the world by enlisting their students and their professors in the Green Revolution and the work and promise of the second Green Revolution. We see it among business leaders and corporations and philanthropists who are searching for ways to do some lasting good with their wealth and expertise and are discovering that the new Green Revolution is within reach. We see it among economists and development experts THUROWandQandA - 2 who may have once looked agriculture development with disdain and who are now rediscovering that the 70% of Africans who live in rural areas and who depend on farming must be the engines of economic growth and wealth building and poverty reduction on that great continent. When a scientist shows a farmer how to increase production by 5 or 10%, that’s wealth creation. We see it among policymakers who intuitively know that the war on terror needs to include a war on poverty and hunger. We see it among the many ordinary people out there who believe that overwhelming problems can be solved and are being empowered by the notion that individuals can make a difference, that buying a cow for somebody in Africa or helping with the harvest or buying malaria bed nets are simple acts that can make a difference. If only we can enlighten and motivate all these constituents the same way that you have enlightened and motivated us – Scott and myself. We’ve had the privilege of speaking with many of you over the past several years, and your words have truly shaped our reporting and fueled our passion that hopefully we bring to our writing. Dr. Swaminathan welcomed me to his foundation in India, where, over a bowl of soup (I think it was tomato soup; they have an outstanding kitchen at his foundation), he told me, “We have conquered the famine of food. Now we must conquer a famine of jobs.” In that simple logic, I saw that in ending hunger, being able to afford food was as important as the ability to grow it. Pedro Sanchez, in Kampala, helped us pull back the curtain on hidden hunger – the chronic, everyday hunger of poverty that never attracts the cameras. “Make markets work for the poor,” he said, “stimulate the farmers, stimulate their purchasing power.” From the World Food Programme, we have heard the awful statistics: 25,000 deaths every day from hunger and malnutrition and related diseases – that includes six million children a year, six million. And from the World Food Programme we’ve also been shown the awful evidence on the ground. Before my first trip to the famine zones of Ethiopia in 2003, Volli Carucci, who’s a World Food Programme staffer, and a water environmental expert in Addis. He told me, “Starvation is an ancient emotion. It is something people in Europe have forgotten about.” And then he said, “Looking into the eyes of someone dying of hunger is a disease of the soul.” That, I think, has propelled us in a lot of our reporting and writing, to invade this ancient emotion, to make it a reality, and to bring our readers into the eyes of the people dying of hunger. And of course we’ve learned so much from Dr. Borlaug. One of our great epiphanies came when we plunged into the archives and read some of Dr. Borlaug’s speeches, of which there are legion. In his Nobel lecture in 1970, there was this haunting prophecy. “Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past. We will be guilty of criminal negligence without extenuation if we permit future famines. Humanity cannot tolerate that guilt.” We read that, and that was our ‘eureka’ moment in a sense. You know – Aha, we thought – there it is. We’re crime reporters. In writing about hunger, we are writing about the greatest crime of all. This has inspired our writing for The Wall Street Journal, and it’s also inspiring us now to pursue a book on global hunger.
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