Alerted by a colleague I listened to a little bit of a long radio programme featuring Susan Dworkin, author of The Viking in the Wheat Field, and assorted luminaries. The Viking in question was Sir Bent Skovmand, a plant breeder extraordinaire, and what I heard of the programme indicated that there is still profound ignorance out there about plant breeding, about agriculture, about genebanks, about GMOs, about the Global Crop Diversity Trust, about just about everything.
Of course, I have no idea what to do about any of that (other than to keep plugging away). I did like one metaphor that Per Pinstrup Anderson, former director general of IFPRI used when asked about the “problem of hunger”. Imagine yourself in a room of seventy people, he said. Ten of those won’t have enough to eat today. That’s pretty good. To which I’d add that another 10 are obese or overweight. And 20 suffer the hidden hunger of missing micronutrients.