Friday 21 August 2009

Tackling hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa

Professor Sir Gordon Conway talks about his work and global efforts to tackle chronic hunger across the world in Imperial College’s podcast. You can access the podcast and the transcript of the interview at: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/media/podcasts

The Dutch, are very good on water control and irrigation systems. We've got some very good plant breeding in Britain at various institutions. In France they've got a lot of experience of working on farmer organisations. (...) And the British and some other countries working in Anglophone Africa have got also their own experiences and successes. But they don't talk to each other very much yet. August 2009 podcast transcript Sir Gordon Conway on efforts to tackle chronic hunger across the world

Gordon Conway at the Centre for Environmental Policy in Imperial College London, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is leading a small team to explore the potential for new European partnerships to support agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The team will assess and make recommendations as to how governments, think tanks, NGOs, the research community and the private sector and donors might work in partnership to use their combined expertise and influence to create a more coherent and focused approach to agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The job is to establish who's doing what across Europe in terms of agriculture in development and to find out from Africa what it wants from Europe. It's all about attacking food poverty in Africa and improving agriculture in the region in the face of challenges like climate change, disease and conflict.