Attendees at this workshop had the chance to listen to ten specialists on diverse areas related to food security issues. The presentations covered a great variety of topics, ranging from hunger to the affect of climate change on food production, including nutrition, crop diseases, infectious diseases in the food chain and genetics.

In session one, John Barrett, head of the Food Group at the UK Government Department for International Development (DFID) and Douglas Kell, Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), presented an overview on the topic of food security and food sustainability. 
In the face of a rising global population – from six to nine billion people by 2050 – and a greater demand for food, especially meat and dairy, the experts explored the challenges of increasing agricultural production, reducing crop losses (estimated to be in excess of 40%), using less water in agriculture, combating the spread of diseases that affect the food chain and minimizing hunger and poverty.

Barrett and Kell clarified how science is the only way to tackle these problems, through high quality, adequately resourced programmes for food security, agricultural and rural development. They also called for a greater perception of the food issue worldwide, stressing the fact that this is a global problem and that many participants including farmers, consumers, private sector, regional and continental organisations, development finance institutions, donors, scientists and policy researchers, from all countries, need to be engaged and committed.

In the second session, researchers from different institutions shared their attempts to increase primary crop productivity through scientific projects sponsored by BBSRC and DFID – the organisers of the workshop. Ian Crute, director of the Rothamsted Research opened the session exploring the grand challenge for agriculture of producing more crops but with less land, less water, less energy, less emissions and less waste. The technologies currently used are not sustainable, he said, so there is a need to develop new ways of producing efficiently without causing stress and damage to the environment. He mentioned the potential of genetics to help in the search for solutions and the necessity of a greater knowledge transfer through public-private partnerships and a stronger relationship between research and industry.

Mike Bevan, researcher at John Innes Centre, spoke about the relevance of genomics and its ability to accelerate plant breeding by doing faster and more precise selection of desired genetic combinations. “It would take many years to do it naturally. We need to make the process faster”, he said. He talked about his work with the wheat genome, which represents a big challenge for scientists due to its enormous size. He explained researchers are working with smaller genomes, in crops such as rice, trying to understand better the genetic characteristics of the wheat. “The comparison to other grass genomes is key to understand the wheat genome.” Bevan called for new alignments between the academy and the plant breeding industry in order to make ‘elite’ wheat lines available to farmers as soon as possible.

John Foulkes, from the University of Nottingham, presented the four-year project (2006-2010) developed by researchers in his institution, in collaboration with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), in Mexico. He explained in the UK wheat grain yield is generally limited by the number of grains per unit land area, a barrier his team is trying to overcome by combining Mexican wheat traits with elite UK varieties. They have tested 138 ‘combined’ lines in field tests in Cambridge and found that 31 of them are more productive and viable to be developed in the UK. 

Julie Scholes, a researcher at University of Sheffield, presented a three-year project called “Sustainable agriculture for international development”, aimed at defeating the witchweed famine threat in sub-Saharan Africa. Witcheed (Striga), she explained, is a root parasite that severely attacks cereal crops in Africa. This parasite steals nutrients and water from the crop plant and also injects toxic compounds of growth inhibitors into the crop, severely damaging it and affecting yield. According to her, it is very difficult to control it due to factors such as big variability and infestation – it is spread through 100 millions hectares of African land. Researchers from University of Sheffield, in partnership with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the Africa Rice Center WARDA/ADRAD and NIAB, a plant science research organisation, have screened 1000’s of varieties (and wild relatives) of rice, maize and sorghum to discover new sources of resistance to witchweed.

Completing the panel, Andrew Dorward, from the School of African and Oriental Studies, talked about the impacts of agriculture on climate change – 30% of 2004 human induced GHG emissions from agriculture and land use – and the impacts of climate change on agriculture – changes in average rainfall, temperature, crop pests, among others factors.  
On the final session, experts discussed the challenges of delivering enough safe, nutritious food for the growing world population. Brendan Wren, from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, talked about how pathogens pose threat to the food chain, urging the need for surveillance and new intervention strategies. “The real millennium bug are the bugs themselves”, he said. According to Wren, the problem with the pathogens is that they have very dynamic genomes with multiple mechanisms for change. He advocated the importance of basic research that can lead to conjugated vaccines aimed at animals, which he considers a good strategy to reduce human food borne diseases. He mentioned as an example the triple poultry vaccine, which protects poultry from Salmonella, Campylobacter and Clostridium perfringens.

Nick Mascie-Taylor, from the University of Cambridge, emphasised the need for social protection programmes to take into account the relationship between nutrition and disease, as inadequate dietary intake increases susceptibility to diseases and diseases lead to a worse nutritional status on the population. He mentioned a good example of combining social protection and health aid; the DFID funded Shiree project, aimed at bringing 1,000,000 people in Bangladesh out of poverty. The programme’s strategies include de-worming population on a regular basis, giving essential vitamins and minerals weekly for 3-12 months, providing flip-flops twice a year, promoting exclusive breastfeeding and regular hand washing. 
Jon West, from Rothamsted Research, the last expert to speak in the workshop, brought some controversy to the debate by defending the use of fungicides and stating that it is time to move away from the idea of going 100% organic. According to him, the more fungicide applied, the bigger the yield, with the impact on the environment being relatively low. The problem with organic farming, he argued, is the amount of land needed, which goes against the efforts directed to production efficiency and lower damage to the environment. When a journalist in the audience asked if he had to choose between organic and non-organic in the supermarket what he would do, he said he would go for the non-organic option.

Carla Almeida