WORLD FOOD FORUM 2025 SCIENCE AND INNOVATION FORUMHigh-Level Opening Session Opening Remarks

Your Royal Highness

Excellencies,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

We gather here in our Organization’s 80th year under a simple and urgent promise: Better Together for Better Foods and a Better Future. 

This is not a slogan.

It is our responsibility.

It is an urgent call to action.

It is an obligation to each other, and, above all, to the youth who will inherit the choices we make this decade.

Across our regions, we must stop to look at the faces of the people behind our agrifood systems who battle daily to ensure we have food on our plates.

They include:

• Farmers rebuilding after floods;
• Young entrepreneurs wiring connectivity into remote villages;
• Scientists testing drought-resistant or resilient varieties; or

Indigenous leaders renewing practices that have safeguarded landscapes for generations.

Science and innovation are not abstract ideas - they are concrete actions.

In China, I had coined the slogan “science and technology make your life more beautiful” – this is why science attracted so many young people.

They are seeds, satellites, sensors and trustworthy AI;

They are knowledge and courage put to work.

The world is facing many complex and often overlapping challenges – the climate crisis, conflict, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, to name a few.

The burden is heavy.

Yet, there is a clear way forward – attitude!

Attitude changes your mind set, and attitude is what allows you to take the first step to move forward.

There is data-based evidence we can trust, creativity we can mobilize, and partnerships we can forge.

Partnerships are a group of partners – if you lose some partners along the way, you will still have a group of partners to build on.

After five years of this World Food Forum, we have created so many new partners and friendships that are now, five years later, most of them are participating at their own expense because they value this Organization.

Challenges waiting to become opportunities.

Science offers clarity – it provides a wonderful noise in the real world.

Science tells us what is possible, and what is just an opinion.

There are so many opinions, but you have to analyze them, digest them and then decide which one suits you best to move on.

It reveals risks early on, and helps us choose what works best for us.

Innovation brings possibilities.

Innovation in our way of thinking, innovation in our way of life.

New ideas, new tools, new models, new coalitions, so that solutions travel further and faster than the problems we face.

Problems will always be there. If you don’t solve them fast they will continue to follow you. Don’t let problems stop you!

By being Better Together, we can turn fear into foresight and ideas into impact.

But knowledge that is not accessible cannot help us.

Too often, the best solutions are out of reach for those who need them most.Our task is to close that distance: to make the right option visible, affordable, adaptable, and owned by the communities themselves.

At the FAO Science and Innovation Forum diversity is not a challenge, but a measure of our collective success.

The diversity of our ecosystems and our cultures is a source of resilience, not a complexity to be overcome.

No one institution can carry this alone.

Real progress is made among us:

• when Ministries meet markets;
• when public research meets private ingenuity;
• when global standards meet local wisdom;

when we can anchor trust in trade and safety.

And more importantly, when we build good relations they become friendships, and friends will always challenge each other in a positive manner.

When I was the Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), I learned and understood the individualism and uniqueness of scientists – because the scientist community is one of the most diverse.

FAO’s role is to provide a professional platform for convening across disciplines; to make it easier to work with each other – better together.

This commitment lies at the foundation of the FAO Strategic Framework

2022-31 and our Science and Innovation Strategy.

We are embedding science, evidence, and innovation across our programmes, keeping people at the centre, and strengthening capacity that lasts longer than projects.

Throughout this week, you will see that spirit in action through:

• breakthrough research,
• digital public goods,
• farmer-led innovation, and
• new ideas that match ambition with available means.

Dear Colleagues,

Let us leave the 2025 Science and Innovation Forum with three shared commitments:

First: Put evidence to work.

Let’s base decisions on the best available science; blending modern tools with Indigenous knowledge; and measure what is proven and tangible so that it can be repeated.

Second: Close the Science, Technology and Innovation gap.

Let’s build capacity and invest in public goods so that solutions are available, accessible and affordable to all.

And Third: Partner for scale.

Align policy, finance, and markets; de-risk innovation responsibly; and support communities as co-creators, not just end-users.

This is a participatory approach, which leads to ownership.

I wish you a productive Science and Innovation Forum 2025!

And let’s make science and technology really sexy!

Thank you.