HT Interview: Bill Gates: Improved seeds best way to offset climate-induced food crisis | Latest News India - Hindustan Times
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HT Interview: Bill Gates: Improved seeds best way to offset climate-induced food crisis

Sep 14, 2022 04:06 PM IST

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s report was released late on Monday India time, and showed that the pandemic has had an impact on progress towards the UN sustainable development goals, with almost all being off track. Ahead of the release, Bill Gates spoke to Hindustan Times on how he sees the response to these challenges evolving.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s report was released late on Monday India time, and showed that the pandemic has had an impact on progress towards the UN sustainable development goals, with almost all being off track. The report also touched upon the food crisis and the climate crisis, two issues that pose a significant challenge to policymakers. Ahead of the release, Bill Gates spoke to Hindustan Times on how he sees the response to these challenges evolving. Edited excerpts:

Bill Gates is co-chairman of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (AFP)
Bill Gates is co-chairman of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (AFP)

Do you think the pandemic has intensified the food crisis? That the disruptions caused, largely on account of the pandemic, make it difficult for countries that were not self-sufficient in terms of their own food production?

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Well, the number of people in hunger today – you know, this CARE report talked about it going up to 800 million, and they also highlighted that this was particularly acute for women, actually a pretty big imbalance where women and children are suffering the most. We’ve got a combination of things that have all been bad for food availability. We have climate change, which is hurting crop production, sooner than we expected. We have the Ukraine war that hurt food availability, but probably worse, it’s making the price of fertilizer be substantially higher, which means that the poorer farmers won’t have access, and so their yields in the years ahead will be dramatically less.

During the pandemic, grain prices went up. They went up more at the start of the Ukraine war, but they’ve come back down some. In the long run, unless we make better seeds, we have a real problem because you want to feed more people, you want richer diets, and climate change can cut productivity dramatically, so you know, the only thing that offsets that is improved seeds. So you know, it’s what the Green Revolution did, but this time, it’s understanding the environmental constraints and tuning the new crops so that they can work even under these much hotter and higher drought conditions that are coming faster than most predicted.

One of the things that’s becoming clear is that, given what’s happening with the climate crisis, there has to be a change in how people farm. It’s becoming clear that the primary focus has to be on science, right? I mean, we need to find climate-resistant seeds, we need to find techniques to offset the impact in some way. How far down that road do you think we are?

Well, the system that creates new seeds, public domain seeds is called the CG system (the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research) and sadly, we’ve gotten complacent about food availability, and so the world has been underfunding that CG system. Now we’re trying to get that increased, particularly as people realize the climate-induced challenges.

In India, you have Department of Biotechnology, and Department of Agriculture that’s helping look at seed innovation, making sure that we do the right things for Indian farmers even in the face of climate change. And monsoon variability sadly, is going up quite a bit.

We also need better advice to farmers. The foundation helped fund a Digital Green effort, where you use digital platforms to have farmers share advice with each other, and that’s been quite successful to scale up new practices, because as you said, if you just stick with the traditional way you’ve done farming, where farmers are conservative, that’s very common, and they won’t be adapted to the changes they need to make.

And so, although it starts with seeds, the advice system and the credit system all need to get engaged so that, ideally, India stays self-sufficient in food, and Africa is a huge net food importer, which is kind of tragic. They should actually be a net food exporter if they’d get modern seeds and good advice.

Some scientists have always been saying this, but I think there has been greater realization among many others who are not in climate science, that whatever our models predicted, the change is coming faster, which probably means that we have underestimated this problem of the climate crisis to a very, very significant extent. Do you think we are doing enough? What are the one or two things you’d like to see countries change in how they approach this?

Well, with climate, we have climate adaptation, and the key thing there is investing in these seed and livestock systems. And so, I’d put top of the list that we’re underinvesting in that. We need to use all the innovation possible, and we need to invest more in it. For climate mitigation, that’s going to take decades, of course, to get the emissions to zero. And the realization that the closer you are to the equator, the more of these absolute temperatures are going to make farm productivity and outdoor work more difficult, that’s clear with these various heat waves that we’ve seen.

And so, the voice of India and other countries that are near the equator in the climate discussion, I think, is increasingly important. A lot of the climate activism comes from temperate regions, which will also suffer, but not as much. And so, you get the irony that the emissions are mostly from the richer, temperate zone countries, and yet the early suffering is very heavily in the more tropical countries that are not as responsible for the emissions. And so, India and Africa do face these challenges, and they need the world to cooperate with them and help drive those innovations, as well as go as fast as we can on the emissions reduction, which is called climate mitigation.

The big complaint that developing countries, including India, have is of course regarding climate finance. Do you think there will be a resolution on that front?

Well, the budgets of all countries are particularly under stress because they spent a lot of money during the pandemic, domestically, and now, with Ukraine war, the cost of electricity and food, fertilizer, and the need to have defense budgets and refugee costs. So, it’s a very difficult time. Overall, if you look at this sustainable development goals, when those were set, we didn’t anticipate the pandemic or the Ukrainian war. And so, we’re behind on all of those.

And so, yes, my call is for the rich countries to be more generous, but the complex tradeoffs they’re having to make with these multiple crises, it’s not clear that either climate finance or just basic aid will stay even as generous as it was before the pandemic. Calling out how far behind we are and even that we’ve gone backwards on some things, like the number of kids being vaccinated, I think, using this General Assembly week where we can say, okay, we’re halfway through the period till 2030, and here we find ourselves behind, it’s really a call to make sure those investments don’t get cut, which that is a serious risk with all those other priorities because of the pandemic and the war.

Do you think that when it comes to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that progress has slowed, or do you think there’s an actual risk of regression?

Well, from the year 2000 until the start of the pandemic, it’s a very, very positive story – childhood deaths cut in half, all the major diseases, global fund that works on HIV, malaria, TB, saving over 44 million lives. So, it was incredible.

When the pandemic came, we did go backwards. Almost every indicator, we went backwards. Now, there’s a few things like digital bank accounts and women’s access to digital bank accounts went forward. And countries like India use that tool very effectively during the pandemic, but most of the indicators went backwards.

So now, as the worst of the pandemic is ending, we say let’s get caught up and get back on that very positive track we were on. Now with the Ukraine war coming, that’s going to be far more difficult than we expected it would be. And so, reminding people that these things really count, and they shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that we’re behind on these things, that’s super important.

The reason I remain optimistic is that I know the innovation pipeline, whether it’s vaccines or drugs or seeds, for all of these areas, I know there’s a lot of innovation coming that will help us solve these problems. But I do worry, the next five years, if we don’t keep a very high priority on these things, we won’t catch up and get back to where we were before the pandemic and get on that positive track. Although I’m an optimist about these things, I’d say the realities are tougher in the near term than at any time in the history of the foundation.

Moving track completely, do you think the pandemic is mostly over? Do you think we’re all right now?

Well, there’s still people dying, but the chance of a really bad variant that would push the death rate back up, fortunately, we think is quite low, but we don’t absolutely know that for sure. There were a lot of miraculous things, like India got out over two billion vaccines and your vaccine coverage of adults is actually one of the more impressive in the world. And our partners, Ministry of Health, DBT, the president’s science advisor, there was a lot of good work done during the pandemic. India focused on health and I hope that focus on health continues.

Although the pandemic was a tragedy, I think we learned a lot of lessons during that. And I don’t think we’ll have another acute phase, but there’s always a risk. And then someday, there will be another pandemic. And so, we can’t be complacent about how we invent tools and how we do surveillance. People now know to add that to the risks, right up there with war and drought, earthquakes and other things. The dialogue about making sure we finish this one off well and that, at a global level, we’re ready for the next one, there’s still a fair bit of work to do there.

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