Global food security panel encourages greater collaboration

A panel of six Purdue University College of Agriculture faculty members joined former US Senator Richard Lugar for a roundtable discussion on global food security, calling for more education and collaboration into the issue.

Lugar, who serves as president of non-profit food security organisation The Lugar Center, in Washington DC, US, emphasised the role of collaborative research and education in fighting global hunger.

Lugar said: “We really have to support universities in about every country in the world. They will share our research, and we will learn from them. There has to be some basis on which countries gain the knowledge that is required to have some hope for food sufficiency.”

Other panellists included Purdue agronomy professor Sylvie Brouder, Purdue Center for Global Food Security managing director Gary Burniske, and 2009 World Food Prize laureate Gebisa Ejeta. The Interim dean of the College of Agriculture Karen Plaut hosted the panel.

The panellists discussed the challenges of food security, as well as the economic, political, geographic and cultural factors relating to insecurity.

Plaut commented: “We’ve talked about water quality, we’ve talked about soil health, we’ve talked about mechanisation, we’ve talked about global to local, we’ve talked about the role of universities and extension research and education in making this happen. It’s all of us that will make the difference in the long term.”

Ejeta added that around 800 million people worldwide, many of whom are children, experience food insecurity, and that the issue must be addressed across all disciplines.

“There is not a better model for the trans-disciplinary approaches than the land-grant university model of education, research and extension,” he said.

Brouder added that merely developing new technologies is an incomplete solution, those technologies have to be practical and useful for global producers.

She noted that developing new technologies is not enough, saying: “Part of our role as a land-grant university is to identify the technologies that can be adopted and show how they should be adopted.”