Wageningen, The Netherlands
July 21, 2011
Heads of six leading universities and research organisations in food and agriculture from all over the world met in Wageningen, the Netherlands, on 14 and 15 July to discuss a cooperative effort on food and agricultural research. The goal is to join forces on the development of sound and reliable methods for food production in order to successfully deal with the challenges facing us in this area in the coming decades. Not only will world food production have to be drastically increased, the production methods will also have to become cleaner and more sustainable and the available foods need to be adequately translated into healthy diets.
Over the coming decades, the world's population will increase from the current seven billion to eight billion in 2025 and nine billion in 2050. In combination with increasing prosperity, this will lead to a doubling of the global demand for food in the coming decades and a shift in the composition of the foods being eaten to include a higher percentage of animal proteins. In addition, the demand for vegetables will increase drastically. All six organisations are convinced that successfully dealing with these challenges will require breakthroughs in knowledge and technology.
The participants are all leading institutions from the most important food producing countries in the world: Embrapa from Brazil, the University of California (UC) Davis from the US, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) from China, INRA from France, Massey University from New Zealand and Wageningen UR (University & Research centre) from the Netherlands. Most of these organisations have already bilateral cooperation among each other.
This new initiative will build further on this, is action oriented, will ensure that the group as a whole aligns its research priorities and activities more effectively and intends to launch new initiatives that are beyond the reach of each individually. This will improve the quality of the outcome and speed up the rate at which progress is being made in developing and transferring the necessary knowledge and innovations. In this way the group expects to add value and to be an interesting partner to both public bodies and private industry.
This first meeting was successful in structuring the initiative and identifying the most promising actions to start with. These will be worked out in further detail in the coming period.
The initiative will officially be launched later this year.
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