Sonny Perdue, 31st U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and Qu Dongyu, 9th FAO Director-General

Focusing on the Past Will Not Feed the Future

By U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue

World Food Day is about more than the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, but about the biotechnology advancements in agriculture and the milestones reached over the last 70 years. 

Our motto at USDA in a few simple words pushes us to address the challenge of a growing world population, “Do Right and Feed Everyone.”  Whether acting locally or internationally, the United States is committed to efforts to combat food insecurity as well as to promote healthy diets through science-based technologies and innovations. Dr. Norman Borlaug, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal embodied USDA’s motto and culture through his accomplishments and is credited with saving more than a billion people.

While we are grateful to live in a food secure country, it is our goal to live in a food secure world based on technology and innovation. Our desire is to help the world in the spirit of Borlaug.

Every day we see amazing breakthroughs in science and food production — sensors, optics and measurements — I call it the digitization of agriculture. Also, crop and livestock breeders, both public and private, increasingly utilize innovative breeding techniques. Plant scientists can now create new plant varieties that are indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods. These new approaches to plant breeding include methods like genome editing for developing traits that can protect crops against threats like drought and diseases, add nutritional value or eliminate allergens. But our abundance of food is only helpful if it’s accepted. We need to help the world population better understand that innovation and digitization is not scary, but rather based on sound science. It’s the only way we will ever reach the goal of eradicating world hunger.

I grew up on what was a successful 1950’s farming operation where my father used practices considered sustainable at the time, but unfortunately those practices would not keep up with the demand today. And I think that’s what much of our world is still living on, romanticism of the past instead of the present. More than 70 years ago, Dr. Borlaug realized that something had to change, and he worked to do it himself through selective breeding of wheat varieties and the documentation of double-cropping benefits. His hypotheses seemed barbaric to his colleagues but quickly validated themselves when his wheat yields grew almost exponentially, his varieties made Mexico self-sufficient in wheat production and transformed them into a net exporter.  

The science-based guidelines and standards set by the FAO and its network of regulatory organizations promote the quality and safety of our food systems and facilitate international trade. It is critical that these organizations do not forget their mission of reducing food insecurity, but also that they do not let their infatuation with how things were done in the past inadvertently take away our ability to solve problems in the future and to follow in Dr. Borlaug’s footsteps by embracing innovation.

On this World Food Day, I congratulate FAO on its anniversary and its work to strengthen global food security and combat poverty. Together we can “Do Right and Feed Everyone.” 

Learn more about USDA: https://www.usda.gov/

Learn more about World Food Day: http://www.fao.org/world-food-day