USA
November 2, 2017
Congratulations to 2017 World Food Prize laureate, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina
This month at the 2017 Borlaug Dialogue and World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa, political, corporate and academic leaders came together to celebrate Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, 2017 World Food Prize laureate. Over twenty years of visionary leadership, Dr. Adesina has galvanized political support to transform food production across the continent. In prominent roles as Nigerian Minister for Agriculture and Vice President at AGRA, Adesina's initiatives have boosted agricultural production, tackled corruption in the fertilizer industry and vastly expanded credit availability for smallholder farmers.
In his current role as President of the African Development Bank, Dr. Adesina launched the $24 billion Feed Africa initiative in 2016, a ten year program to build food self sufficiency across the continent. At the World Food Prize, he announced a bold new vision to transform 16 million of Africa's 400 million hectares of savanna into productive agricultural regions for corn, soybean, and livestock, based on the successful transformation of the Brazilian Cerrado into fertile agricultural land. This aligns well with our own ambitions to deliver disease resistant soybean for Africa which will draw on our work developing rust resistant varieties for Brazil.
The unifying theme of the symposium was how technological transformation in agriculture can provide a 'Road out of Poverty' for many in low income countries. Seed companies are embracing gene editing to accelerate this process, and executives from Monsanto, Bayer, and DowDupont presented their hope that this modern breeding tool can create an easier path to market in relation to regulatory approvals. 2Blades has been involved applications of gene editing since acquisition of the TAL Code rights in 2009. A combination of editing approaches and 'conventional' transgenic techniques for stacking multiple genes together in crops, still a critical tool in the crop improvement tool box, could rapidly improve varieties with disease resistance and achieve other outcomes not possible by editing alone. However, while some regulatory doors are open for gene editing, we should ensure that roads are not blocked for transgenic techniques that can introduce genes and stacks of genes not yet possible with editing.
If agriculture is to provide a road out of poverty for smallholder farmers, they will need access to all appropriate tools that can ensure resilient agricultural production. Recent advances in passing biosafety laws in Uganda are an important step, and we hope that once farmers begin to benefit from transgenic and gene edited crops, other countries will follow their lead. We are heartened to see an increased emphasis on translating the best technologies to agriculture around the globe, and remain committed to delivering improved varieties to smallholder farmers at no charge, helping to pave the road.
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