← Der Große Neustart
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- [00:01]
Sibylla Barten
So nature, it's beautiful and nature, it's so sustainable, and nature, it's so capable of regrowing and healing itself if we let it alone, if we let an ecosystem alone. Welcome to this special English edition of Der Grosse Neustadt, a German podcast series by Sibylla Barten, in which she talks to pioneering leaders who, inspired by the World Economic Forum's Great Reset Initiative, are committed to making our world smarter, greener and fairer.
- [00:43]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
Today we welcome Dr. Ismahane Eluafi, Executive Managing Director of CGIR, the world's largest agricultural research network, leading 9,000 scientists across 1889 countries. For over 50 years, the organization has shaped how the world grows food. Its research powers 60% of the world's wheat and 50% of its rice, securing not only our food systems, but also lifting millions out of poverty. Dr. Eluafi has shaped agriculture policies as chief scientist of the fao, held key roles at the UN and top research institutes, and is a leading voice in climate resilient agriculture. She has been recognized with prestigious awards, including the National Award Medal by King Mohammed of Morocco, the Excellence in Science Award from the Global Thinkers Forum, the Arab Woman of the Year Award, and was named by the New York Times as one of 10 Women Redefining Leadership. Why does this conversation matter? One third of the world's land is degraded. Food demand will rise by 60% by 2050, and 75% of what we eat comes from just five crops, leaving our food systems dangerously fragile. Dr. Eluafi, we are very happy to have you with us today. Good morning.
- [02:09]
Sibylla Barten
Good morning, Sibyl. How are you?
- [02:12]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
I'm all right. Hearing those numbers and statistics, are we facing the perfect storm?
- [02:19]
Sibylla Barten
Yes, definitely yes. Sibyl, we are at a cross. We are at the eye of the storm, I would say, because the numbers you mentioned are scary. Sometimes we don't really feel them because we have been maybe telling those numbers too many times without really making the connection between them and people. But for me, as I have, I had the privilege of living in so many countries, visiting many countries, and many of them in the least income countries. So when I say that there is 800 million people that suffer from hunger or 350 million that are affected by extreme hunger, I have images in my mind, images that I have seen. And what extreme hunger means is that these people could die from hunger. That's what it means, extreme hunger, by definition. So it's really very bad times where the increase of extreme hunger people, the increasing number of degradation of land, the increasing impact of climate change and the variability that we see are we from east, west, north, south, we feel it every day. We feel that really the weather, it's almost impedictable and changing. All of this makes it. And with the geopolitic, if we add on it what's happening globally, geopolitically, we are definitely in the perfect storm and we are at the eye of the storm and we need new solutions. We can't keep repeating what we have done in the past. We have new solutions that are more drastic, that are more bold, and that brings everybody together. One of the numbers that really shocked me in 2024 was that the climatologist said that all the models we have do not work anymore because basically we have been tracking climate for the last 180 years or so. And what we have seen in that 180 years, we used to use it to get a prediction of what could happen in the future. So last year data showed that what we have seen in the past is not what we're going to see in the future. So we can't use anymore the data we have to predict tomorrow or to predict the weather of the future. The other number that shocked me really was that with plus 2 degrees, we're going to have 189 million people more that going to face hunger. With plus 4 degrees we're going to have almost 2 billion more that's going to be faintly in anger. So the urgency of acting right now can't be stated strongly. It's really very urgent to reverse the impact we have on the planet in terms of particularly changing the weather on the planet. But also it's very, very urgent for us to address malnutrition, anger, poverty in a much more bold way. Because the number accumulates very, very quickly. And unless we address it now that we have the number we have, we're going to find ourselves in an impossible situation in a very short time. So the window of opportunity for us to act now and act on those very important priorities that doesn't touch one country only or one community, it touch everybody. So unless we tackle it now, we're going to find ourselves in a really very bad situation that will make it even much more costlier to address it. The other number that also I need to share with you is a number that came from a publication in 2023 by Dr. Joaquin Van Braun and few colleagues. And basically the numbers say they were modeling how much it's going to cost to really curb the malnutrition numbers. And they were saying that they did the study in 2021 and the number came about $12 billion. So basically what it says in only four years, the cost of addressing hunger particularly, and we're talking about malnutrition particularly, is doubled by three times within four years. So what it says, it says that the more we wait to address the issues of malnutrition, the costlier it is. And that number, it's doubling every two years or so. So we need to do it now and we cannot postpone it and say that we have highest priorities than hunger and malnutrition globally.
- [07:12]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
I'm grateful that you gave us this very big picture. And when you say we are in the eye of the storm and we have all the knowledge, you are the scientists and you are in your leading organization, what is it that you are doing to help solving some of the problems?
- [07:38]
Sibylla Barten
So from the agriculture sector, there's a lot that could be done. I think agriculture sector or food, land and water systems have been undermined or underestimated in terms of what they can do. And I think really that's the voice that we are bringing to the table. We are saying that agriculture as a sector or food, land and water as systems are the solution. Why are they the solution? We tend to look at them only from the negative side. That they are using 70% of water, that they are responsible for deforestation and so on and so forth. That they are part 33% emission of greenhouse gas. But we underplay their role in tackling these issues. One, agriculture employ about 3 billion people. The food system at large employ 3 billion people. So we are part and parcel of livelihood of those 3 billion people. Of course, agriculture particularly is to produce food for everybody. So that's the primary role. But in the same time, when we think about it, the only place where you could sequester carbon, it's soils. Soils have a huge capacity of covers the restoration, it's plants and that's chlorophyll. So that's how we Exchange Oxygen and CO2. That's the chlorophylla capacity of plant kingdom and in oceans. So when we talk about food, land and water system, then we realize that we are the only one that could clean up the air. But how could we do that? The the only way to do it is to bring science understand the capacity of carbon sequestration and increase that capacity. And there are practice inland and water and food system that will allow us to do that. But to do that we need to cost it, we need to incentivize it and we need to help the farmers to move to that sustainable food, agri food systems that we are talking about for the last four or five years. So the solution, it's within the ag sector and that's really, that's what it is undermined. And if I compare ag and energy, you will find that the energy has been always very well organized as a sector. And when we start talking about climate change and the issues around climate finance, they were the first one really to be ready with a solution which is renewable energy. And because they are organized, they have received most of the funding to allow that just transition from fuel based energy to renewable energy in the agriculture. We need to do the same. And we need to do it very quickly because unless we don't do it very quickly, it will be very difficult to produce what we are producing right now with the bill that we are paying for it right now from natural resources, be it water, be it land, and be it other natural resources. So we need to really position agriculture as already very important because we can't live without food. And we have a huge malnutrition issue globally and we need to tackle it, but also use agriculture as source of solution to increase carbon and clean up our air. And science today is allowing us to do that. That's the beauty of the science and the knowledge, it's that it grows as you share it. So in the last few years, the breakthroughs that we came through, be it in the genetic field, be it in nanotechnology, be it in computing, quantum computing, be it in digital, be it in understanding the different microorganisms through microbiomes of animals or soils or animals, all of this knowledge has allowed us to understand better the food that we are eating, how we are consuming them and what's best for each individual. So this bulk of science should be deployed and should be deployed in the least income countries as much as is dependent deployed in the high income countries. We should democratize science and democratize innovation and make sure that that innovation is in the hand of those that need it the most. And Those are the 500 million small scale producers that are mostly they are in the high income country, but they are mostly in the low income country and low middle income country. And they are producing more than a third of our food. We need to provide them with that, know how, we need to provide them with those innovations so they can produce more with less resources. Because by the end we have to increase the unit productivity in terms of nutrition, in terms of productivity per se, both calories and nutrition, but also Per unit of land and per unit of water. Those two are very important parts.
- [12:56]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
You said. Now so many important things which I would like to go in. The one thing I hadn't heard before was democratize science. Can you go a little deeper in that?
- [13:07]
Sibylla Barten
Sure, Sibyl. So I have the feeling, and I think the numbers are backing it up, not only feeling that when we have a new technology, it always benefits the countries that can afford to use that technology. And most of the time we have a huge issue of the cost of those innovations. So then by the end they are more affordable to the Northern hemisphere than the Southern hemisphere. But also sometimes other than the cost, it's the infrastructure, it's the human capacity, the resource, the human resources around it. So by democratizing, what I mean is that we need to make sure that the knowledge is available to us. Let me give you an example of a technology, gene editing technology. It's a new technology that own a Nobel Prize for two scientists, two women scientists in 2020, I think it was 2020. And the gene editing technology, it's a technology that could hopefully solve the issue that we have with GMOs completely. So it's a technology that allows you to go directly in the species you are working and make changes in the amino acid which change the gene, which change the character that you are looking for. So it's not anymore taking a portion from a species to a species. It's very much doing your work directly in the species that you are working with. Which will stop the GMO debate. Once we understand it fully what happens when gene editing came, when gene editing came to be known and many labs were working on it and it was a proven technology to really do a much more quicker breeding of species, be it animal, be it fish, be it plant, be it any species. What happened? Is the debate start is it a GMO technology or not? So some countries were very fast in declaring it non GMOs because they look at the technology and they have their own internal reviews. One of them was Japan that declared it non GMOs. The other one was the US and few other. But in the same time, what happened? The European Commission said it's a gmo. The court went and said it is a gmo. What happens in that time? So these high income countries, be it Japan, be it us, be it Europe, as through the European Commission are all high income countries. So what they did, it's the fact that African commission said it's a gmo. It stopped completely the use of gene editing in Most of the African countries what's happening in Europe, most universities are using it. Gene editing technology is used in the laboratories for research purposes. So while the debate is happening, the laboratories is using it and they're finding, they are developing it further. They are finding the right genes that they need to work on and so on and so forth. The countries in the south, particularly in Africa, because they don't have their own capacity and because their market is mostly Europe, they completely stop using gene editing. It took two, three years of debate. As a chief scientist myself, I championed the paper on it because I thought it's a breakthrough technologies that everybody should have access to. And we brought in a number of scientists to analyze it. People that are for people that are against. And the paper finally said that the gene editing per se, it's a non gmo. And when you go into the technology, how you use it, there is three technologies or three DSN, 1, N2, N3, the 1 and 2, it's 100%. There is no. There is zero risk of any extra genus DNA in the number three could have 10, a minimal risk. So if anything could be should be regulated, it's the methodology, the GS entry. But by the time UK in the meanwhile did their analysis and declare it as well, non GMOs what happens in that time? Who is the loser? The loser is the least income countries because they don't have the capacity, they blocked everything. The winners are the high income countries. Either they declare it GMOs or not. They have been using it including in Europe. Including in Europe that declared a GMO very quickly and now they are in reviewing it again. They haven't stopped research, they haven't stopped their scientists using it. And that's what I mean by democratization. Sometimes it's regulation, sometimes it's access to knowledge, sometimes it's infrastructure and human resources. It's a number of components that we need to really tackle to make sure that we create environment and we provide opportunities for the sub to come with innovations as well. Using the latest technology in any field, be it geometry or be it geology or be it food or any other, any disciplines in science. I hope the example explains it to you. CB yeah.
- [18:25]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
What do you think is in the short term and in the longer term.
- [18:29]
Sibylla Barten
A way out in the long term? Let me start with the long term. I think in the long term I think we have to revisit our understanding of ownership, partnership. How do we work together? What's the connection between us all as human on this planet? I think really Geopolitically we have to do a lot of rearrangement and lots of leveling of levels. So right now we have stratas everywhere and we are all human on this planet and we share it. So I think geopolitically we need to review completely the values around which we are gathering as human being and our responsibility as human being for the planet itself. Because we are the most intelligent species, we're the only one that can speak. And hence with that we have a responsibility to really protect the planet and protect the people, the species on this planet as well. In the short term, I think we need to act very, very quickly, very quickly to really tackle issues that are extremely important. One of them, it's definitely malnutrition. And we need to really to provide the means and the tools to the countries in the south to produce their own food. We have a huge yield gap in most of the least income countries whereby they are producing 10% of the potential of where they are producing. And we can definitely multiply easily their productivity by 5, 6, 7 times with very little tools and little solutions. That requires investment. We need to tackle inequalities by the end. Inequalities, it's really at the heart of everything, so be it. Inequalities at the global level, regional level, national level, community level, we need to tackle it and we need to recognize that. And I think we need to invest more in science, technology and innovation. We need the solutions to become innovation in the hand of the farmers. And we can do it if we keep science being a little bit elitist or a little bit only for some of us. We need really to open up and I'm very proud of being part and parcel of the CGR or even before that, FAO and ICBA and other organization. Because we are for a public good. We are doing science that is fully open for everybody. And we are pushing more and more for open access to, to knowledge, to innovation and to new ideas that can allow us to produce more with less. Because I do believe we can do it with science and with what we know right now, let alone what we're going to be discovering in the next few years.
- [21:21]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
From what you were saying, it sounded almost like the key motivations behind CGIS creation when 50 years ago it had been founded to prevent global hunger, among other things. So your organization has today 9,000 scientists. Fifty years later, how successful have you been?
- [21:51]
Sibylla Barten
I think we have been very successful. As you said, Bill, TVR started before just the famine of the 70s, the 60s and 70s. So it was at A time where we needed to produce more calories. And it all started with actually one discovery, which is what we call the Nunism gene. A gene that will make your plant, Instead of being one meter and a half, it is about 70 centimeter. And that gene was discovered by a Japanese scientist in the 1930s. And he discovered, he developed varieties of wheat that were registered in Japan and used in Japan. So what he took, he took that a person like Borlaug, who is a Nobel Prize winner, he took that gene and he put it in many varieties. And he saw the importance of having an anism in wheat, in maize, in many crops. And that's what started the green revolution. The green revolution was producing more seeds than the vegetative part of the plant through the nanism gene to make the plant much shorter. And that's really averted what we say now, we averted more than 1 billion people from malnutrition. Our work also shows that we are averting every year between anywhere between 3 to 6 million deaths of young people, of children because of providing them with the right composition in vitamin A, zinc and iron, which is very important to keep really kids alive in their first thousand days. So there is a number of impact areas that we have done. We were behind almost 60% of all, all wheat varieties in the world, behind almost 50% of all rice varieties in the world. Rice alone is providing about $11 billion per year, $11 billion per year in terms of return and so on and so forth. So there is a number of great impact. But I think today what CGR needs to do, it's quite different. CGR now 50 years later has to do much more impact around those five impact areas that we are really very proud of. One of them it's really on climate adaptation and mitigation. How could we transform our food, land and water system in this crisis mode? How could we make sure that we have proper mitigation and adaptation with co benefit of mitigation in the ag sectors? And that's really sustainability in our woodland and water system management. The second one, it's definitely poverty reduction and livelihood and jobs, particularly for those 500 million small scale producers in the Global South. The third impact area, it's focusing more what we have done. Very good on nutrition, but do it much more. There's a lot of question now on what's a healthy diet and what is needed for different communities. So more work on healthy diet and nutrition. The fourth one, it's environmental health and biodiversity and that's mostly in land and water System management whereby we need to really. We can't keep destroying the biodiversity, biodiversity and synergies between species. And we see the best example in the soils but also in any habitat. It's a wonderful thing to maintain and we need to be intentional about maintaining it while producing food. And the fifth impact area, it's gender equality, youth and social inclusion, whereby our work on the policy side, our work on understanding communities and focusing on gender, on equality between women and men in the AK sector, particularly at the production level, but across the system, but also on how could we attract youth back to agriculture as we are seeing a huge aging problem in the sector.
- [26:02]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
If I hear all that, what you're doing and coming back to what you said at the beginning, that the old models won't do it anymore and we got all this new data. So it seems that we have, we, you have, you, the scientists have all the necessary knowledge and data and probably quite a substantial amount of finance. And yet is it the knowledge, is it the lack of doing? What is it that we don't know? What is it that we don't do as a global society?
- [26:47]
Sibylla Barten
I think it's all of the above, Sibyl. I think we need to recognize the problems we have. We need to recognize the inequalities, for example, and tackle them. Say how could we really stop this inequality and gap between the poor and rich growing or between the north and the south? And to solve those issues I think we have to recognize our interconnectedness. And I think really many of the crises in the past have shown it very well. Be it on floods in Pakistan to floods in Spain. It shows how climate change is affecting all of us. Or drought in Canada, whereas we never had drought before in the prairies versus drought in Chad and so on and so forth. So that climate impact has brought us together. Pandemic like Covid again showed us how interconnected we are. And we tend to disconnect those things. If we continue a global warming on planet Earth virus is going to move in a completely different way. Insects are going to move in a completely different ways and they don't need passport, they don't need visa, they're going to just move very quickly. So we need to accept that reality of interconnectedness and that we are all under the same seat. The other thing we have to recognize is that development, international development, it's in the benefit for everybody. It's not benefiting only least income countries and those communities that are malnourished. It is also benefiting high income country because most of the migration, most of the issues with displacement is related to that malnutrition, be it due to a natural disaster or a human made disaster, like conflict. So both of them. So I think if we came to that understanding, then we cannot tackle international development in a different way. The other point that I think it's very important, it's really also recognizing that it's different from place to place. Many of the studies that come have mostly northern lenses to it. When we talk about livestock, for example, and we have the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya and Addis Ababa and in Ethiopia. So if you look at it, the average American consumes about 128 kilos of meat per year. The average Nigerian eats only 7 kilos. The average Indian will eat less than 1 kilo per year. So when we talk about reducing livestock, we are always pushing it to all. We're not saying that hey Americans, you cannot eat 128 kilos. Maybe you need to eat less, but maybe in India or in Nigeria we need more. Because we have 165 million children under five that suffer from devastating effect of stunting, which is the low height of age. And 45 million that are wasted, which is that they are too thin for their height. And both of these requires animal proteins to help them. And unless we give them those protein that they need, they will never attain their full potential height or their cognitive potential. So in this for those children, be it in India, be it in Niger, be it in Burkina or other places, they do require to have access to animal source food. But we should look at the northern countries and say the analysis that comes from your lenses applies to those communities that eat 128 kilo per year, not to those that have hardly a kilo per year. And that's really this differentiation of what is needed in different places. It's very important. It applies also to ecosystem. I like to use the example is that you can't ask the kidney to make the function of the heart or the heart to take the function of a liver. Every organ has a role. Every ecosystem has a role. What you can produce in an ecosystem in Colombia is completely different than what you can produce in an ecosystem in southern Morocco, for example, or in Tanzania or other places. So if every, every ecosystem, it's better used for certain species. With the monoculture and with reducing the diversification of our plate, basically we have focused only on few species. But now, given what we know, given the science that allows us to do much more things at a lower cost, we should diversify our, our agri food system. We should diversify our diet. And we need to bring those neglected, ended utilized species that our ancestors have survived on over so many centuries. We need to bring them back because not only they are more adaptable to climate change, but also they are more nutritious. And most of the time they're more synergetic with the ecosystem where they grow, be it with the microorganisms in the soil or with the species, the other species around them in those ecosystems.
- [32:20]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
We also need to definitely renew our understanding of nature. And I remember that you were sitting at Davos, the World Economic Forum's annual meeting this year, and you emphasize the importance of soil and saying, and I quote you because I really fell in love with that. You said nature is beautiful but needs to be understood. What do we not understand about soil?
- [32:51]
Sibylla Barten
I think we understand about all nature. We understand less than 1% of nature. We're very proud of ourselves and we think we understand well. But most of these species, I'll give you an example. Before getting to soil, we did a project called ptfi, which is Periodic Table of Food Initiative. And basically what it is, it's creating a periodic table like what we have, periodic table for chemistry, that explain every food, what it is and what they did. They took a thousand, we took a thousand food. An apple or a tagine or a couscous or a ginseng or a juice, different food. And we look at the biomolecules that comes out of it through an ms, which is a mass spectro tool. And what did we find? We find that out of almost 22,000 biomolecules we could understand or we could identify only about 300. So almost 15% known biomolecules and the remaining are unknown. And what it says, it goes back to what I said about nature. We understand very little of nature. We have been very proud as human to say we know this pathway and that pathway, but most of the time we know one pathway of one parthein, but we don't know the interactions with the others. So nature, it's beautiful and nature, it's so sustainable and nature, it's so capable of regrowing and healing itself. If we let it alone, if we let an ecosystem alone and we stop disturbing the ecosystem, they will heal themselves and they will grow again and create a balance. So nature is definitely so beautiful and we see it in the soil. The soil. We always, we talk soil. It's a dead matter. It's not a dead matter, it's a Very alive matter. And I always say it. I lived in the UAE for many years and I never before beauty for me was green. But then when I get to see the desert and see the desert in different times, I could see desert with different eyes. The color is different from different times. And when there is a bit few drops of rain, the desert blooms. Because microorganisms live in that sand as well. Because seeds survive for millions of years in that sand. So for me we need to be more humble, recognize that we know very little of nature, do more investment to understand nature and try to mimic nature in our production systems. Because nature produce what everybody needs, but still it's a healthy and balanced ecosystem. And I think really we need to learn more from it. And the only way to do it is to invest more in science. It's to invest more in discovering what's in it, what are the different pathways? How could we be as smart as nature and produce our food while still preserving the biodiversity, while still producing our soil and keeping them healthy while using less water than we are using right now. So it's a wonderful journey that I'm sure all scientists are, are so delighted to be part of it. Today we have tools that allows us to understand much more, much more. But even with those tools, we recognize more and more that we know very little. But if we continue investing, if we make it a global movement to understand better nature, if we invest all and we share knowledge, we share information, I'm sure in 20, 30, 50 years we'll understand better and hopefully we will find a better sustainable food, land and water systems that will allow people to grow and go to their full potential. Particularly when we think about kids in those camps, or kids that are displaced either internally or externally, or farmers that are trying to get their livelihood, but also their nutrition from a small piece of land with very little technology, we can do that. We really all invest in it and we all share it with each other. And we put first public good before any other aspects in our economy or in our thinking and in our actions. So if we put public good first and understanding first and then sharing and allowing those in the least income countries, in the low middle income countries to produce better and produce more smartly with the right tools, I think we'd be in a different world. It's doable. I don't see it so difficult to be tackled. It's about willingness and particularly political willingness that we are not seeing enough of.
- [38:13]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
Willingness, quite right. I think this is pretty much the key willingness. How do we change the but this is more broader question. I mean maybe you have some thoughts about it. How do we change the narrative about raising the understanding and changing the will of doing less monoculture, more sharing, more collaboration, more public private partnerships and so on.
- [38:45]
Sibylla Barten
It will take a lot of awareness. It will take awareness in terms the importance of that move towards a more sustainable agri food system. It will take holding hands of smallholder farmers and helping them and it will take most importantly helping them financially. Because right now when I go back to the analogy with energy, the just transition in energy made that most countries supported very, very strongly, very, very strongly just transition. So we had subsidies for renewable energy, we have subsidies for private sector to develop the different tools from electric car to others. And that is not happening in the agriculture right now we are asking the farmers to move to sustainability with no hand. And unless we find a way to support small scale farmers, but also the medium and the large one to move to a sustainable food system and have that transition over six, seven years. Because in the sustainable systems you will get through a decrease in yield, more investment and decrease of a year for at least five years, minimum five years before your yield come up. Because nature needs time, because ecosystem and synergies of different species needs time that you can do it in a microwave, you can bust it by using anything. So hence we need a just transition plan to allow the communities, particularly the small scale producers and the low income small scale producers to really move towards sustainability. And for that you need the right policies, the right markets, you need the investment. And it is a pity to know that although agriculture has a huge potential, we are getting less than 3% of the finance of the climate finance. The small scale producer are getting 0.5% of of that climate finance globally. So there is a lot of things, I don't think it's a lack of funding but it's repurposing the funding to really provide that just transition to agri food systems as well. The way we did it in energy, which was very successful.
- [41:16]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
That's a very interesting number. The 3% you were saying. Because my previous guest was Ibrahim. So the UNCCD Secretary General who you know and share the panel. Anyway he was, he was mentioning that nature provides for 50% of the global GDP and yet you tell me that the number for agriculture investment is 3%.
- [41:49]
Sibylla Barten
Yes, from the climate finance you bill with agriculture is getting maximum 3%. It's even less than 3% of the climate finance. And that's really. It's not correct because if we looked at the Greenhouse gas we are emitting 33%. So if we want to really tackle the emitters, we need to provide them also with the tool to move to that sustainable practices and sustainable practices and climate smart agriculture systems. So by providing 3% it wouldn't allow us to curb that 33%. So it's not proportional at all. And I'm happy that really the Secretary General of UNCCD mentioned the 50% of GDP. So most of what we are reading about economy, it's coming from the biology in nature or the resources in nature. And that's where I like very much the definition of bioeconomy and the push for a bioeconomy in Germany and many other countries. Because that will means we have to understand nature better and we have to produce in a more bio way using biological knowledge, using nature pathways and nature ways of doing things. That's how I like to define it myself and seeing a push for it. It's very important because if you want to do it, the only way to do it is that you move to a life cycle analysis whereby you don't proclaim this is better unless you have a proper accounting for the whole life cycle and you subsidize you support financially and non financially only those system that you know that their life cycle makes it lower carbon emission and also better. Better nutrition for example, or other criterias that we need to add to the equation.
- [43:54]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
You create all these crops and you support the farmers. You know exactly what's going on, what's needed. And at the same time, as we said at the beginning, 75% of the world's food comes just from five crops, which is basically as far as I.
- [44:17]
Sibylla Barten
Remember now, rice, wheat, maize, potatoes. Yeah, and we're missing one. Yeah.
- [44:25]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
What are the major obstacles here?
- [44:30]
Sibylla Barten
And you know Tibill, those five crops provide now about I think 60% of our calorie intake. And if you look at animal species, you're going to find again three species or less providing 70% of our protein intake and sauna in fish the same way. So we have been really minimalistic in the way we have been looking at nature. And that's one of the problems is that we haven't really deployed all the richness of nature to enrich our diet and to enrich our intake of nutrient that we need. And that will require really a completely different shift. However, because of the importance of those five commodities for calorie intake and the malnutrition issue, we have one of the programs that we started at CGI almost 25 years ago. It's called biofortification. So biofortification, it's increasing some micronutrient in those crops. And the reason behind is that some people, the only thing they eat, some families, some human and people maybe the only thing they eat all day, it's a bowl of rice or everything they eat, it's a piece of bread. That's their daily, their daily intake. So one of the strategies was either you do fortification, and we have a number of countries that have fortified flour, for example, to make sure that it has certain micronutrient. But also biofortification is that you use genetics to get your beans, for example, with high iron, or to get your rice with more vitamin A or to get your maize, for example, with more vitamin A again. So we were looking mostly at vitamin A, iron and zinc. And we have some species with high zinc, including beans, but also barley and others. So the idea was that because people use those staple crops, we need to biofortify those staple crops, crops. And now, for example, the African Union had a declaration of a target of biofortification of all small cereals to make sure that they are helping in terms of cutting on malnutrition, particularly for small kids. The other things that we did at cgr, we streamlined biofortification. So in all our breeding programs, be it on beans, on cassava, on wheat and so on and so forth, we have those targeted three elements to be at the highest possible. For example, right now we are very proud to have a very high iron potato species, white potato species, that has been developed in Strip in Peru in our center there. And that potato with high iron, if it's consumed by the women in the Andes, will cut dramatically on anemia issues with women in the Andes. So there is, so there are, it's very important, the diversification. And there have been always a pro diversification person. So we need now to go and move from only 125 plant species on the market to 3,000, 5,000, 60,000. I mean, in, in the planet Earth we have half million species. So we need to increase diversification. But in the same time, till we have a full diversified agri food system, we need to continue the route of making the staple food more nutritious, particularly with those micronutrients that are very, very important for our kids. And that will make that a small baby grows to his or her full potential or do not grow to their full potential. So both agendas are very important. So we biofortify those staple crops so that we cut on hanger, but we invest Dramatically in the diversification of agri food systems across plant, animal, fisheries and so on and so forth.
- [48:52]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
What are the most important issues your organization focuses at the moment?
- [48:57]
Sibylla Barten
So we have a new portfolio that we launched this year and we got all approval and we developed it over a year in 2024. And in that portfolio what we are saying it's this, we have a huge program on healthy diet and nutrition whereby really we're looking at both, at both the, the scientific part of it, whereby through diversification and biofortification and other practices we can have more nutritious food. But also we are looking at the policy side. How do we incentivize a more healthy diet, how do we provide access to market, how do we put the right policies and regulation to make the value chain shorter and more nutritious and so on and so forth. We have also programs around climate adaptation, both adaptation and mitigation. How do we put in place an adaptation, a strong adaptation practices with co benefits on mitigation. We have strong programs as well. Because you are talking about really 9,000 employees across 89 countries. We are also tackling issues around animal source food, how do we use better our natural habitats and our animal kingdom as well both fisheries and livestock and poultry and other species, small ruminants and what have you. We have a huge program as well on the policy side because by the end in technological innovation alone would never make it. We need to combine it with policy innovation, with institutional innovation, with societal innovation, with the right environment that takes in concentration all of this from finance to investment to policies, regulation, communities involvement and policies and regulation. By the end they are so important and we need to align them to the agenda. Another program that I'm very proud of is that we are also tackling in how do we work also in conflict and post conflict zones. How could we help those people that are stuck in war, in the conflict, knowing that IMO says now that those camps or those temporary living areas for most of those displaced communities, be it in a country or between countries, it's about two years. That's the average, the average of anybody being in a camp, a refugee camp, it's about two years. So how could we work with them? And we had very good examples from our work in Syria during the war, in Sudan, over last year, in Yemen and DRC and many other places. So I'm very happy that within the new portfolio we are looking at conflict and post conflict and what CDR can do. And some of it it's really access to seeds, access to fertilizer access to input so they can produce their own food instead of waiting for humanitarian aid. The other program that we are really excited about is called Scaling for Impact. It's how do we take those innovations from the labs, from our experimental trials to the farmers. We are not seeing seen enough adoption, not enough, as much as we want, and that's really tempering the impact. So we are doing a new program and that's built on our experience over the last three years of development projects funded by the World bank called icra, another one funded by the US and other partners that shows that really if we work more with the last month as scientists, as cgr, we secure that those last mile scaling programs are using the best technology. Because by the as the technology it's not one of two things, it's a bundle. So what we are providing, it's a bundle of technologies that works better in context A or context B or in region A or region. So we are very happy that we can do more on scaling working with our local partners and with the partners on the ground to make sure that we get to millions of farmers, not only few thousands and many more on the portfolio. We can also provide you more information on the portfolio. I wanted just to give you a few examples.
- [53:35]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
If you had a free wish after everything you were describing, what you were doing, what is it you most need? What would make your life easier?
- [53:48]
Sibylla Barten
More finance. I would say more resources to be able really to do the work that we would like to do and that we are, that our mission and vision is guiding us to do. And more also partnership. So that's I think what we need. We need more partnership, be it from the science generator, be it from the universities, the academias, the private sector, but also more finance to be really able to put those wonderful programs in place. And that finance doesn't need to come only to cgr. It has to come really to all the partners, partners at academia, wherever they are, national systems, particularly in the Global South, NGOs in the South. So we need much more funding to be able really to get to cut in on hunger and malnutrition globally and reducing poverty to the extent possible.
- [54:54]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
Can I invite you because we are coming to the end. Can I invite you just. We talked about as many things as one can talk about in an hour. Is there one issue left which you think you want to address that because it's important to you?
- [55:11]
Sibylla Barten
I think maybe we didn't cover enough the gender components and particularly supporting women farmers. And I think we have really some wonderful let's see understanding better of how could we help women in rural areas, particularly in least income countries and how could we empower them? And that's again, it's another call for more investment in women, particularly in rural women, because data shows that once you invest in the woman, you have much more higher success rate of cutting malnutrition, for example, in children. So I think the gender component, we haven't maybe covered it enough. But again, it's one of our accelerators and we are delighted really that we are working closely with many localities and many communities to make sure that we are empowering women because we need that improvement to happen. And if you do it through a gender lens, our chances of success, it's multiplied by 100. So that component, maybe we didn't cover it enough. I want to make sure to build that we are clear on it and that we are very much supportive of women empowerment, particularly in rural areas as they are most of the farming is done by them as well.
- [56:36]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
So how do you empower them? Just let's expand it a little. How do we empower them? How do you do it?
- [56:44]
Sibylla Barten
So let me give you an example of explaining to them. For example, there is a program that we had in India that explains to the woman how do they really manage their money from their own cropping systems. So it's about really working with them to have a better plan where I'm planting my wheat, where I'm planting my tomatoes, where I'm putting my chickens, and then how do I diversify at the household level to sell them in different times and how I do manage my finance because most of the time the women would do the work and the men will sell and the money will disappear. So just providing them with capabilities to understand their finance and to manage their finance better can go a long way. In another example, for example, another example is in the chicken area, how do they maintain healthy chickens? So that's through technology and certain practices of disinfection and so on and so forth. So what we are seeing, be it in disinfection of chicken or maintaining healthy chicken or, or using your eggs or using or understanding your finance or diversifying your pot to get different things to get your beans and get your this and your tomatoes and this and that, all of this go a long way. Because what it does first it improves the nutrition in the household and then it affect those small kids, but also it affect the adults. And then if the money is in the hand of the woman, she going to use it to educate the kids, she going to use it to maybe get a lamp to get light in the house for her kids or they are studying. She can use it for having much more healthier or following with a doctor if there is any issue. So all of this, the ripple effect is amazing. So providing know how to women, empowering the woman to have the decision making in their hands as part and parcel of the household, allowing them to maybe increase their productivity or increase the nutritional value of their produce, all of this really have a huge benefit on the whole family and the community.
- [59:19]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
I'm glad we talked about that. That's a very, very important issue.
- [59:24]
Sibylla Barten
Yeah.
- [59:25]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
But we are coming now, really. I mean, the end has been 10 minutes ago, but it was absolutely, absolutely wonderful to talk to you and I'm glad you because I read that you were once on a track to become Morocco's first female fighter pilots. So I'm glad we have you in science.
- [59:46]
Sibylla Barten
Believe me, Sibyl, I'm so happy.
- [59:49]
Dr. Ismahane Eluafi
Yeah. And I wish you all the best and whatever I can do, please let me know. And I hope our listeners have a couple of ideas and yeah, maybe pick up the phone and call you and give you a billion dollars or so.
- [60:05]
Sibylla Barten
Thank you so much. Let's hope for it, Sibyl. Thank you so much, Geoff. You've been listening to a special English edition of Der Grosse Neustadt, a German podcast series by Sibylla Bark in which she talks to pioneering leaders who are committed to making our world smarter, greener and fairer. For more information, please visit www.sibyllabarden.com and the official site of the World Economic Forum.