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August 2003
Issue 7/2003
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Editorial

Pre-GFAR 2003 CSO Workshop

Keynote Addresses

From Dresden to Dakar

Roundtable Discussions

Poster Session

Side Events

Sub-plenary Session on GPPs

Stakeholder Consultations

GFAR 2003 Conference Evaluation

 

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List of Acronyms 

 

Keynote Addresses

Outcomes of the Summits and their Implication for Agriculture

Let me open my address, Madam Chair, by saying that I am delighted to be here in Senegal. This is also my first GFAR meeting and one that I am looking forward to enormously. I would like to thank GFAR and Mohammad Roozitalab for the invitation and congratulate Mohammad on his chairmanship of GFAR, noting also that he plays a very positive and helpful role in the CGIAR for which I am deeply grateful. And of course let me also thank the government of Senegal for so generously hosting this meeting. I think that it is very important that this meeting is in a developing country, and it is also very important that this meeting is here in Africa.

The theme of my talk today will be the role that international summits have played in helping shape agendas and of providing the space for articulating our concerns. I want to try to tie these in with the relevance of the issues of agricultural research that you will be debating over the next three days. However, in doing so you will realize that I recognize the link between agriculture per se and agricultural research. Putting agricultural research on the agenda means that we must also place agriculture firmly on the agenda.

Let me start off by saying that in the last ten years or so we have seen an enormous growth of international treaties of one kind or another. Some are of direct consequence to agriculture, others of indirect, but all of them have a bearing on what you do in GFAR, and what do we together. If I look at the last few years we of course have the Johannesburg Summit, the Doha Round on Trade and the International Treaty on Plant Genetics, which clearly all have direct concern to agriculture. But we have also seen the Millennium Summit and the Millennium Development Goals, which were announced a few years ago. We have seen the global environmental conventions on climate change and their associated protocols: the Kyoto Protocol in the case of climate change, treaties on biological diversity, and recently the Kyoto Water Summit, which was an out-of-government summit but which nevertheless had the characteristics of a summit, but did not have a treaty at the end of it. All of these are of indirect but nevertheless have important relevance for agriculture. And today what I am going to try to do is make the case to you that these meetings, while they can be lengthy and bureaucratic, also help shape big ideas of great moment to our future. Sometimes, because they seek out consensus, their solutions tend to be drawn down to the lowest common denominator, so it is very easy to be cynical about such summits and treaties. However, as I have said, I want to make the case that they can help shape big ideas, and in shaping big ideas, they can and do influence the way that we do our business in development, and the way we in GFAR do our business in agricultural research and development.

And what I am going to do is suggest that these treaties provide a canvas, but they do not provide the paint and they do not provide the artist; their work is left for us to fill in. However, they do set a framework, and they do set the terms of reference for strategic engagement on key issues. In my view there have been five big ideas that have been promoted at Johannesburg, and these issues also emerge from some of the other conventions and treaties. These five ideas are: poverty reduction, the need for a new institutional framework, the importance of the long-term agenda, the WEHAB acronym and the need for special attention to Africa. I am going to briefly discuss some of these ideas and then talk about one more idea, in my view a big idea that did not emerge as a key issue from these summits and treaties, and has unfortunately been somewhat overlooked. However, it is of profound importance, and that is the transformational role that science and technology can play in society.

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Let me now return to my five points emerging from these treaties, particularly the Johannesburg Summit, which is the most recent and perhaps the most important in many respects. I think that the first notion that the climate change debate and others have put on the table is that poverty and poverty reduction is a global moral issue whose time has come. And it must be attacked and it must be attacked as quickly as we can. To leave the number of poor people alone and to have that number increase over the next 10 to 40 years is not only an untenable economic issue, it is also an untenable moral issue. Now we are at a point where the debate and the discourse about poverty is an engagement strategy, which is not just about development aid, but is also about bringing in all stakeholders to believe that reducing poverty will produce a sustainable and survivable planet for us all.

In that regard we have seen the emergence of the Millennium Development Goals which focused on key aspects of poverty on water and sanitation, where a billion people today do not have decent water and two billion people do not have decent sanitation. We have seen the emphasis on income and the need to reduce the number of people in absolute poverty, the 2 billion people who earn less than two dollars a day, and 1 billion who earn less than one dollar a day. Therefore wealth creation in the poor countries is a central and pivotal part of our common future. It is critical to the discussions in the MDGs on gender and gender issues, on health issues, on nutritional issues, and to the 800 million people who go to bed hungry every evening. I think that helped shape and propel the issue of poverty, and it was interesting to listen to Mr. Chirac on the television yesterday talking about the forthcoming G8 Evian meeting, in which poverty is very central to the proposed G8 debate. I do not recall when last that was the case. So I think that we are seeing the implications of the debate on poverty extend far beyond the development community and the UN.

Even regarding climate change, vulnerable, poor countries and poor people are adversely affected. The Doha Round is about equality. Surely if the Doha Round on Trade does anything it will not only put agriculture on the map, it will say the playing field is not level for developing countries and it needs to be. The Johannesburg Summit really pulled it all together and talked about poverty reduction being at the heart of sustainability and planetary survivability and we will not have either if we do not reduce poverty.

And so we have to say, what does this mean for us? What does this mean for agriculture? We have to recognize that 70% of the poor in this world live in rural areas. Many are poor farmers, a disproportionate amount are women, and for their benefit we know that agriculture can have a profound effect on achieving the MDGs. And I preach this over and over again, even within my own organization, that agriculture is at the heart of addressing the Millennium Development Goals. We simply will not get economic growth in poorer countries if we do not get agriculture moving. There is no doubt about that. And, if we do not get economic growth going, we will not meet the first MDG of alleviating the low income dimension of poverty. The evidence that agricultural productivity has a profound impact on poverty is overwhelming. I remember reading an article by Peter Timmer, who was a former professor of mine, and I think a very sound and very good agricultural economist. He did a survey, if I recall, of 35 low-income countries, which estimated that every 1% increase in agricultural productivity gave a 1.6% increase in income in the lowest quintile of the population. Agriculture is central to the MDGs, whether on food security, income, health or gender issues. And I think that we need to keep that at the forefront of our minds.

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The second big issue that I think Johannesburg teased out, and in some sense this meeting is symptomatic of that, is that there is a search for new institutions, as there is a realization that the institutions we have today are not doing the job we need. Here I do not mean just organizations; I mean the relationships between stakeholders, shareholders, between people and organizations. We are struggling with finding a new definition of the institutional framework to meet this new age, which is a new age of transparency, a new age of inclusion. The question that I think we will have to ask ourselves (and I ask it all the time in what we do in our policy work at the World Bank, or what we do in the CGIAR or what you are doing here in GFAR) is how can we move in a way that is both fully inclusive on the one hand, and efficient on the other? How do we marry efficiency and inclusion? How do we ensure multi-sectoral approaches and multi-disciplinarity are brought to bear? How do we ensure increasing levels of accountability to the general public and civil society, increasing levels of transparency? How do we experiment with third party validation and social responsibility? And in a world that is globally interconnected, how do we differentiate between local, regional and global institutions? I think that these are going to be some of the great challenges of the next decade and your business in GFAR is right at the heart of many of them. The potential for global interconnectivity means where you are matters less than what you do. The issues of participatory research mean that who you engage and how you engage them in decision-making and in shaping your agenda are profoundly important. So I think that this GFAR meeting in its design in bringing stakeholders from developed and developing countries, from universities, from national and international agricultural systems, civil society and NGOs, the private sector and Farmers' Organizations together to debate and discourse on these issues is extremely important.

When we think about these summits and the influence they have on institutions, I am reminded that when the Stockholm conference on environment was put together a little over 30 years ago, there was not a single ministry of environment in existence. However, it was the ability of that summit to propel forward the issue of the environment and the need for institutions that would care for the environment, so that within ten years or so, virtually every country had a ministry of environment. Today it is hard to conceive of a country that does not have a ministry of environment! You can trace that momentum to Stockholm and that conference. It is my belief that one of the lasting achievements of the Johannesburg Summit will be that it will likewise propel us to develop a new set of institutions and a new set of institutional relationships. I also think that our activities in GFAR together with those of the CGIAR in promoting broader partnerships and through increasing accountability will be very much a part of these new institutional relationships. This will be a lasting legacy of the Johannesburg Summit.

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The third issue that I would draw your attention to is what I think summits do very well, and Johannesburg did extremely well: they put the long-term on the agenda. It is very easy for many organizations - my own, the World Bank, included - to become increasingly tied into the five-year cycle. However to resolve our CGIAR issues, your GFAR issues, issues of climate change, issues of sustainable development, five years is far too short a time horizon. Fifty years is more appropriate, 100 years if referring to climate change. But in any event, whatever time horizon we choose we have to recognize that the long-term is very important. Furthermore the returns from our work are not measured in months or even in five-year periods, they are measured in much longer-terms. It was a useful exercise in Johannesburg to focus on the long-term. As we talk about our children's future, we begin to see new issues emerging such as issues of migration or natural resource degradation. As we look at the longer-term, we can examine what it might mean for economic growth and what it might mean for the kind of economic structure the planet will need in 20 to 40 years. To give you an example of this, if we look at meeting the MDGs, developing countries will have to grow at an average rate of about 3.3% per capita per annum, and that is for the next 15 years, which will get us, if we are lucky, to the position where the job is still only half done. So it is not unreasonable to think about a 3% growth rate to the middle of the century, by when we will have conquered the issues of absolute poverty, if not sooner. If we then extrapolate that to the middle of the century, we will add in broad orders of magnitude 100 trillion dollars to what is today a 37.5 trillion dollar economy globally. So we will increase by 100 trillion over and above the current 37.5 trillion. How will we manage that? What is the breakdown between developed and developing countries at the moment? At the moment it is a woeful 20% holding 80% of the world's income; that surely must be unsustainable. If that is the same in 2050, with an economy that has added another 100 trillion to the present 37.5 trillion, we are going to be in deep trouble. Our children are going to be in deep trouble wherever they live. So equality is going to have to be a guiding principle, production and consumption patterns will have to be carefully reviewed. A long-term perspective is needed to provide us with the answers.

Let us now just look at the issue of the long-term for the agriculture sector and for your work in GFAR. We have, today, aggregate food security. It does not mean that everybody is food-secure, in fact 800 million people are food-insecure. While in aggregate terms we are a relatively food-secure planet, distribution is our problem. However, if we look 40 to 50 years ahead, the estimates suggest that food demand will double. It will double partly because of per capita income changes of the kind I just spoke of, which switches into higher-value food, and partly because we will have added 2 billion people to planet Earth during that time. We will have to imagine a world where doubling of food demand will have implications on livestock management, the environment and public policy choices. Where we move in that direction will, I think, be very important. So when taking the longer-term view, it means that the food issue and food security are very central issues to GFAR's business. Agriculture land use and population will clearly put pressure on our natural ecosystems, which even today are in a fragile state. We have 1.4% of the land mass of the world supporting about 60% of the terrestrial species and much of that is under threat. Agriculture is going to be central to wealth creation in poorer countries on the one hand, but it is also going to be central to ecological management on the other. In that period when we have a global economy 100 trillion dollars larger, one can only imagine the pressures on our fragile world. Agriculture will either be the problem or the solution. Of course every person in this room wants it to be the solution to the long-term sustainability of our natural ecosystems.

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There is also the question of the provision of the goods and services that agriculture must provide to drive the economic growth that will be necessary. So we are going to enter a world where agricultural productivity is going to be central to sustainability. There are some who believe that agricultural productivity has not needed to be as prominent in the last few years as it was perhaps 30 years ago. But it is my view that, quite the reverse, we need a major increase in agricultural productivity. This has to be a new kind of productivity: productivity that is environmentally and socially responsible and contributes to responsible growth. A growth that is more equal, of higher quality, addresses the issues of poverty, and can contribute to this 3% per capita growth that I mentioned earlier. Agriculture, it seems to me, is incontrovertibly central to achieving our goals.

The next issue I would like to suggest is that Johannesburg in particular gave us impetus and focus on some critical issues. The Secretary General spoke of an acronym, WEHAB, on which I have a reservation, as I think it is missing one 'E'. However, I do not think that we could have called it WE�E�HAB, to accommodate the 'E' that in my judgment is missing, which stands for education. However the five issues rightly focus on water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity. As you examine every one of these issues, and I do not need to spend much time on this because you know this far better than I do, you will find that your business in GFAR is at the core of virtually all of these. The case for water is quite clear, as 70% of the world's water is used in agriculture. If we look to the projections of the future and the demand for drinking water and industrial water, and of course the demand for water for agriculture, there is no doubt we must become more efficient. Research will help us define that efficiency gain; there is no doubt about that. There will be huge returns to agricultural research in water use in the future. Energy invokes the link with fuel wood and its use by many poor people who have no choice but to go into forests and use fuel wood, sometimes inefficiently, for their heating and cooking energy needs. So the issue of forest management will lie at the heart of energy. Indeed agriculture may very well provide some, but not all, of the solutions in terms of biomass for energy. Health is another obvious issue, with nutrition and food security at the heart of good health. Equally what lies at the heart of good health is having a decent household income, and that is going to be driven by economic growth, which is going to continue to be driven in many countries by agriculture. Agriculture is already on the map, so I am delighted that the United Nations put agriculture as one of the five pillars of WEHAB. Finally, biodiversity: whether it is the impact of domesticated or wild biodiversity, whether it is the issues of ecological landscape management and their coexistence with agriculture, the issue of biodiversity is certainly on the map, as are forestry and fisheries. So in other words, I think that the WEHAB concept has actually given us an awful lot of impetus and direction that we can build on in terms of our work plans in the post-Johannesburg period.

The final big issue for me, and it is one that I know you will listen to in a moment from my distinguished colleague from South Africa, is that Africa was put on the map in Johannesburg. The fact that the meeting took place in Africa was so important for our common future and is echoed by your having your GFAR meeting here in Senegal. NEPAD - the New Program for African Development - has emerged with great promise and great hope for a new beginning. NEPAD heralds a new journey for Africa towards wealth creation, towards poverty reduction, towards better natural resource management and towards reducing the detrimental health impacts that besiege us. To me this was a very important and profound statement of global significance. I will not say more than that because I know that you will be next hearing from my distinguished colleague, Wiseman Nkulhu, on this subject.

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However, I think that there was one critical issue that was missed in all these summit meetings and treaties, and I think that we have to revisit it. This is the role of science and technology, but let me focus particularly on science. Science can play a central role in shaping and defining our common future. The history of science and scientific innovation surely points to this. Even in the recent past we have seen the transformational powers of science. Thirty-five years ago there was huge talk of famine. India would never feed itself. I read some interesting documents that Professor Swaminathan once showed me, which showed some of the editorial articles of the time, 30 to 40 years ago, when India was held up as a complete basket case that could never feed itself. Today India has a problem, but the problem is that it does not have enough warehouses to store the food it is producing. The whole situation has turned around, and India is self-sufficient and could export. There may be other reasons why it is not exporting, but it could do so. This has all been largely transformational because of a combination of increased investment in science, the green revolution, and enlightened public policy. In the last ten years we have all seen the electronic and communications revolution. It still amazes me that I can pick up a little piece of plastic and call Washington and have a conversation. Could you imagine doing that 20 years ago? None of us can, yet all of us do it today. Such scientific and technological progress has completely transformed the economies of some countries such as Finland, Ireland and southern parts of India for example. Science can indeed be transformational, which I do not believe is well understood in many quarters. It is, of course, well understood by every person in this room. However, we must encourage Ministers of Finance to see science as transformational. We must encourage the general public to see science as transformational, and not regard it as a threat but rather see it as an opportunity.

Moreover I think one of the big issues we have to tackle is to assess the role that science and technology can really play in a new responsible growth era. In this regard, the World Bank, working closely with FAO, is undertaking an international assessment of science and technology in agriculture. We are promoting this idea because we believe, just as happened with the deliberations of the international panel on climate change, that placing scientific issues in the public domain for discourse and discussion can in fact increase opportunity and lower distrust. I think that we must recognize that in many quarters there is distrust of science, so I am convinced that one of our main challenges in GFAR and the CGIAR is how to turn that around. So any role that GFAR and you as individuals can play in helping engineer the needed transformation, for civil society and policy-makers to trust science and scientists, will be welcome, and indeed is vital. In my own country, England, for the last decade it has become evident that many people do not trust the scientific community, particularly the scientific community within the government. Building trust for what science can offer is going to have a tremendous impact. Furthermore we have to move to a new age of science that is scientifically sound, environmentally responsible and socially accountable. I think that if we do so we will make the case, which is the centerpiece of my concluding comments, and that is the case for emphasizing the critical transformational role of science and technology in agriculture, and in securing poverty alleviation and a sustainable future.

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There is a strong case for the advancement of science and technology in research and development, and I believe that the case is even greater today than it was 30 years ago. I also think that we have to see how we leverage and how we move our agenda up the public policy ladder. Yet the enabling environment has shifted, and therefore the case for more funding for research in agriculture, and in my view significantly more funding, is really compelling. Yet, paradoxically it is the hardest sell. It is hard to sell it to people who write the cheques - not the many donors in this room, who have been great supporters of national, regional and international research - but when you go to ministries of finance or to treasuries to try to get money it is very hard. I think that what we have to do, and I leave these thoughts with you, is we really have to put agriculture high on the agenda, and it is happening; I am delighted to see that it is starting to happen. When we put agriculture firmly on the agenda, we will clearly see the case for agricultural research because the returns to agriculture research are enormous. I remember that the International Food Policy Research Institute did some research on this some years ago, and if I am not mistaken I think the rates of return were 70 or 80%. We must make the case that the scientific divide is as big as the digital divide and it is as important as the digital divide. Everywhere you go people will casually talk about the digital divide; they also have to start talking about the science divide and the promise that science can bring. We have to reshape our agenda, we have to retell our story, we have to gloss it up. We have to really reshape our agenda in a way that appeals to those who finance us: ministries of finance, the donors, treasuries, foundations, etc.

There is also an increasing emphasis on results and one has to respect that this can be very difficult to clearly document in research. Some research produces huge returns, other research inevitably will not. So how do we make the case on the basis of results? I think the issues of programmatic coherence are becoming more and more important and by that I mean the value chain of research. Not just research itself, but the link between the laboratory, farmers and markets at the field, national, regional and global levels and back again. I think we have to make that value chain while focusing on the issues that are of importance to us, recognizing the programmatic context. Then there is the call for new institutions that I mentioned earlier, and this will rest on varying forms of partnerships, which have always been a key concern of GFAR. This involves engagement of the public and private sectors, international and national, government and non-government, of institutions and academia. This GFAR forum is a very good forum for discussing such issues. We will also have to look at leverage. Where do we use leverage? Are there new instrumentalities? Are there new innovations in the way we do research? We are trying in the CGIAR to develop Challenge Programs, paralleled by your GFAR Global Partnership Programmes, which we hope can be portrayed as something new and innovative, capturing not only new money but new partnerships. It will involve new knowledge and new money coming in to upgrade and increase the overall impact. We also have to look at transparency and accountability mechanisms including participatory research. Here I would ask that you think about participatory research, and not only its opportunities, which are manifold, but also its limitations. We also have to think about openness on issues such as intellectual property rights when we deal with the private sector.

So in conclusion I think the case for promoting science and technology is greater than ever. I think GFAR can play a key role in helping shape our common agenda. It can help the NARS, in both developed and developing countries, and together with the international efforts such as those of the CGIAR, jointly shape our common agenda and demonstrate that we are part of one big jigsaw puzzle. However, we need one another to fit so that we can perform much better collectively than by our own individual efforts. So I think that you in this audience can stress the centrality of agricultural research to the future of agriculture, and in doing so to helping sustain our common future on this planet. I think that if we can make this case well, we will have made a very useful effort to putting agriculture on the agenda. So, Madam Chair, Mister Chair of GFAR, I wish you very well in your deliberations.

Thank you very much.

Ian Johnson
Vice President of the Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development (ESSD) network, World Bank

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