FEEDING THE WORLD IN A SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT
Friday, October 17, 2003
Speaker:  Judith Symonds

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Introduction:  Judith Pim

            Your moderator for this panel is Judith Symonds. She’s executive director of Future Harvest Foundation, and most recently she was president of the Foundation for the Development of Polish Agriculture in Warsaw. She’s a specialist in strategic planning, communication, public affairs and fund-raising for international institutions.

            Judith has recently brought together a coalition of hunger-fighting organizations called the Monterrey Bridge Coalition, and she might tell us a little bit more about that as she chairs this panel. So let’s welcome Judith and her panel.

Session Chair:
MS. JUDITH SYMONDS
Executive Director, Future Harvest Foundation
Chair-Director, The Monterrey Bridge Coalition 

            Thank you, Judith. Well, I know we want to get to the real source, so I’m not going to tell you too much about the Monterrey Bridge Coalition. It’s a great privilege and pleasure to chair this distinguished panel on a vital topic:  “Feeding the World in a Sustainable Environment.” It sounds like a good idea, but really doing it, as those of us who are involved, is about as difficult as reaching any one of the goals in the hunger, Millennium Development goal compendium.

            We’ve heard mentioned repeatedly the last two days these goals – having hunger and poverty by 2015 and their related and environmental and natural resource goals covered by the work of the Environmental Sustainability and Water and Sanitation Task Forces, which our panelists, Jeff McNeely and Roberto Lenton, represent.

            But just think of this interconnectivity, and some of it was mentioned this morning. Food insecurity threatens incomes and biodiversity, and I’d like to add world security. And I think it’s Richard Beahrs who said that you cannot be a conservationist on an empty stomach.

            Poverty threatens food security and biodiversity and, again, world security. Poor water and sanitation services and a contaminated or depleted water supply deepen poverty, imperil food security, threaten health, and speed environmental degradation. And the world’s political systems do not encourage either the resolution of the conflicts between environment, agriculture and human development, or the potential for really exciting and significant synergies (you heard that word from our last panelist) between them.

            Resolution of these issues and reaping the benefits of their harmonization is the mission of the Monterrey Bridge Coalition and I hope of everybody. And we look forward to our panelists to suggest how the world should be changed to make this happen.

            So before we start, let me introduce all of our panelists and then ask them to make their presentations before opening up to about 20 minutes of questions and answers.

            Our first panelist is Roberto Lenton, an Argentinean by birth but who has lived all over the world and is not only distinguished in his field and an international authority on water resources management, but he has multiple responsibilities in this regard. And I think you’ll see that we’re all multi-taskers here.

            He’s chair of the Technical Committee of the Global Water Partnership, which is hosted by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is co-chair of the Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation, and he’s a senior advisor for International Development at the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction, which is also at Columbia University. He has a civil engineering degree from the University of Buenos Aires and a Masters and Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

            Jeff McNeely, in addition to his worldwide recognition – and he’s a friend, so he’ll let me say that – as an innovative thinker in the environmental field, is a prolific technical and popular author whose publications promote understanding of the issues he works to support. And very significantly and relevant to today’s topic is one of his latest publications, Ecoagriculture, Strategies to Feed the World and Preserve Wide Biodiversity, which he wrote with Sara Scherr whom you heard from in the last panel.

            His current responsibilities include being chief scientist at the World Conversation Union, IUCN, which is the largest environmental NGO in the world. He is co-chair of the Environmental Task Force of the Global Governments Initiative of the World Economic Forum. And he is a member of the Millennium Project Environmental Sustainability Task Force.

            Jeroen Bordewijk, who represents another sector we’re integrating into development, is responsible for Unilever’s Global Food Division. Unilever has consistently demonstrated its commitment to alleviate hunger and to developing world investment.