By Ponsi Trivisvavet, President of Syngenta Seeds, LLC
It’s an important dialogue in which
the ag community must engage, as water is the biggest single factor limiting
the world’s ability to feed a growing population. For farmers, it may be the
most crucial – and unpredictable – variable.
Because it takes roughly one liter
of water to produce a single calorie of food, feeding a growing population
requires that we rethink strategies around water. This week’s global gathering
provided a platform to do that while sharing the ideas essential to helping
farmers grow more food with less water.
Managing
water more effectively requires an unwavering commitment from the agriculture
industry – from breeding crops that convert water to grain more effectively to
leveraging data and technology to informing more strategic and precise uses of
irrigation methods. Corn hybrids that optimize the
conversion of water to grain, for example, represent an important opportunity
for agriculture, especially given that weather variability affects all farmers,
to some degree, every year. Irrigation management presents another such
opportunity, especially in the West, where we’ve seen how the successful
production of numerous types of crops is simply not possible without adequate water.
The water challenge CAN be met, but
it will require that all sectors work together – private industry, government,
NGOs, academia and public research institutions – in order to implement a broad
spectrum of strategic solutions.
Such
a focused action plan should include:
·
Access to Technology: ensuring that farmers have the best
tools available, including improved plant varieties, seed treatments, crop protection
and modern irrigation methods.
·
Knowledge Sharing: providing farmers the most
up-to-date agronomic knowledge and methods, specifically tailored to their
local conditions.
·
Partnerships: creating collaborations among farmers,
governments, businesses, NGOs, schools and public research institutions to
create new efficiencies in production.
·
Access to Finance: expanding access to insurance and
finance, and sharing risk throughout the food distribution and supply chain, so
that farming remains a profitable and sustainable business.
·
Infrastructure: improving traditional infrastructure
(roads, rail, water works, manufacturing plants) to give farmers secure access
to markets, and developing new high-tech infrastructure (telecom, research
stations) to give farmers access to up-to-date information and the latest
agronomic knowledge.
·
Constant Innovation: continually improving plant
technologies to help growers produce increased yields with less water; and creating
protections for intellectual property to encourage investment in plant
innovation.
·
Regulatory Action: helping regulators understand
and advocate for the importance of agricultural technologies – crop protection
products, growth regulators and specially developed crop varieties – that
address the global food security challenge.
· An Inclusive Dialogue: reaching beyond agriculture to bring all stakeholders together to identify ways to save water, including collaboration among industrial, agricultural and domestic users of water, and adjustments to government pricing policies to encourage the efficient use of water.
Also this
week, Syngenta provided a progress report on The Good Growth Plan, a global
Syngenta initiative introduced in 2013. Among the commitments comprising the
plan, Syngenta promised to increase the average productivity of the world’s
major crops by 20 percent without using more land, water or inputs. To date,
more than 3,600 farmers and many organizations are working with us to
demonstrate and measure what is possible for 21 crops, the environment and the
people in 42 countries.
No government or industry alone can
tackle the monumental task of managing our water resources constraints. But
farmers, private industry, governments and other stakeholders can do it
together. There is no silver bullet – no one answer to the global water
challenge – but a concerted effort by all stakeholders to address the most
serious challenges and seize our key opportunities CAN enable us to meet the
global water challenge.
#30
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