BA President accuses West of retarding African development
By Wendy Barnaby
Ahead of his Presidential Address tonight, BA President Sir David King criticised the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) as "shortsighted". The IAASTD is the agricultural equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IAASTD brought together over 400 scientists from governments, NGOs, the private sector and civil society. It was headed by Defra’s Science Adviser, Professor Bob Watson, and concluded last April that the benefits of modern agriculture have been “spread unevenly and have come at an increasingly intolerable price, paid by small-scale farmers, workers, rural communities and the environment.”
Sir David criticised this conclusion.
“Non-governmental organisations and international organisations have supported traditional agricultural techniques which will not deliver food for burgeoning African populations,” he said.
“Africa hasn’t joined Asia in the green revolution because of anti-science and anti-technology attitudes that lead to organic farming rather than GM.”
“Traditional agricultural techniques will not feed the burgeoning African population,” said Sir David. He wanted to see GM technology used for African crops, to deal with increased salinity in water, flooding for rice crops and drought resistance.
“I’m from Africa. I feel very strongly about this issue,” he said.
“Africa needs economic development in just the same way as our country had economic development. What we see there existed here hundreds of years ago. African development will depend, as ours did, on modern skills right across the board.”
“We have the technology to feed the population of the planet. The question is whether we have the ability to realise that we have it, and to deliver,” he said.
Securing food supplies was one challenge facing us in the twenty-first century, said Sir David. The biggest challenge, he said, was climate change.
Commenting on the current trial of Greenpeace protestors causing criminal damage to the Kingsnorth power station to draw attention to climate change, Sir David said, “I don’t think it’s wise for a new coal-fired power station to be constructed without carbon capture and storage.”
“Companies like Eon need to be disincentivised from going down the coal-fired power route by the price of the CO2 that emerges from the power station. We need a price on CO2 that would incentivise them to capture it.
“I believe this would be about €50 per ton. At the moment it’s trading at about €28 per ton,” he said.
Sir David called for more young people to take up science and technology to deal with current challenges, which he said were “unprecedented at least over the last 50 years”.
“It is really astonishing that we are better able to land a spacecraft on Mars, that we are better able to understand the function and properties of the Higgs boson, than we are able to deal with millions of deaths each year from HIV-AIDS, and malaria, and poor nutrition; or develop renewable, CO2-free, energy sources for all our economies.
“We need to pull people towards these bigger challenges where the outcome is really crucial,” he said.
Read more at the Independent, the Guardian and the Times.
Ahead of his Presidential Address tonight, BA President Sir David King criticised the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) as "shortsighted". The IAASTD is the agricultural equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IAASTD brought together over 400 scientists from governments, NGOs, the private sector and civil society. It was headed by Defra’s Science Adviser, Professor Bob Watson, and concluded last April that the benefits of modern agriculture have been “spread unevenly and have come at an increasingly intolerable price, paid by small-scale farmers, workers, rural communities and the environment.”
Sir David criticised this conclusion.
“Non-governmental organisations and international organisations have supported traditional agricultural techniques which will not deliver food for burgeoning African populations,” he said.
“Africa hasn’t joined Asia in the green revolution because of anti-science and anti-technology attitudes that lead to organic farming rather than GM.”
“Traditional agricultural techniques will not feed the burgeoning African population,” said Sir David. He wanted to see GM technology used for African crops, to deal with increased salinity in water, flooding for rice crops and drought resistance.
“I’m from Africa. I feel very strongly about this issue,” he said.
“Africa needs economic development in just the same way as our country had economic development. What we see there existed here hundreds of years ago. African development will depend, as ours did, on modern skills right across the board.”
“We have the technology to feed the population of the planet. The question is whether we have the ability to realise that we have it, and to deliver,” he said.
Securing food supplies was one challenge facing us in the twenty-first century, said Sir David. The biggest challenge, he said, was climate change.
Commenting on the current trial of Greenpeace protestors causing criminal damage to the Kingsnorth power station to draw attention to climate change, Sir David said, “I don’t think it’s wise for a new coal-fired power station to be constructed without carbon capture and storage.”
“Companies like Eon need to be disincentivised from going down the coal-fired power route by the price of the CO2 that emerges from the power station. We need a price on CO2 that would incentivise them to capture it.
“I believe this would be about €50 per ton. At the moment it’s trading at about €28 per ton,” he said.
Sir David called for more young people to take up science and technology to deal with current challenges, which he said were “unprecedented at least over the last 50 years”.
“It is really astonishing that we are better able to land a spacecraft on Mars, that we are better able to understand the function and properties of the Higgs boson, than we are able to deal with millions of deaths each year from HIV-AIDS, and malaria, and poor nutrition; or develop renewable, CO2-free, energy sources for all our economies.
“We need to pull people towards these bigger challenges where the outcome is really crucial,” he said.
Read more at the Independent, the Guardian and the Times.
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