The AAAS Charles Valentine Riley Memorial Lecture

“...to promote a broader and more complete understanding of agriculture as the most basic human endeavor and... to enhance agriculture through increased scientific knowledge.”

Charles Valentine Riley Memorial Foundation

2013 AAAS Riley Lecture

Food, Feed and Fuel from Crops under Global Atmospheric Change:
Could we have it all in 2030?

 
Lecturer

Dr. Stephen P. Long
Gutgesell Endowed University Professor of Plant Biology
and Crop Sciences,
University of Illinois

Panel Discussion with Dr. Long

Dr. Per Pinstrup-Andersen
H. E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy;
J. Thomas Clark Professor of Entrepreneurship,
Cornell University (Moderator)

Dr. Richard Bonanno
President, Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation

Pam Johnson
President, National Corn Growers Association

Dr. Sonny Ramaswamy
Director, National Institute of Food and Agriculture

Lecture Information

25 June 2013
AAAS Auditorium (1200 New York Ave NW, Washington, D.C. 20005)

3:30 p.m. – Registration Opens
4:00 p.m. – Keynote Lecture
4:45 p.m. – Panel
5:30 p.m. – Reception

Full program and registration information to come

Abstract

Demand for our major crops is expected to rise 50 percent by 2030, while we look increasingly to croplands for energy as well as food and feed. This is at a time when the increases in yield seen over the past 60 years are stagnating and global change poses a further risk to production. New biotechnological approaches are providing opportunities to overcome these limitations, while new sustainable energy crops could be produced at scale using land unsuited to food crops. Yet societal and policy acceptance of these opportunities is likely our greatest barrier to having it all in 2030.

Speaker Biographies

Dr. Stephen P. Long

Dr. Long's research has concerned maximizing crop photosynthetic productivity from the molecular to the field level, both via theoretical modeling and field scale experimental manipulations. His group has developed dynamic and steady-state models for analyzing and guiding improvement of crop photosynthetic efficiency. He has identified the most productive plants so far known from the wild and much of his work has focused on identifying the attributes that set these plants apart. With over 12,600 citations of his publications Long was recognized by Thomson-ISI as one of the 250 most cited authors in Animal & Plant Biology, and one of the 20 most cited on Global Climate Change. He is Chief and Founding Editor of Global Change Biology which is now ranked as the most cited journal on global change, after Nature and Science. He has provided briefings on opportunities for increasing food and fuel crop productivity through engineering photosynthetic efficiency to the White House, the Vatican, and the Gates Foundation. He serves on the Federal Bioenergy Technical Advisory Board, reporting to the Secretaries of Agriculture and of Energy, he is an External Advisor to the Wheat Yield Consortium, CIMMYT/USAID, and he is an elected advisor for BBSRC UK, Joint Programming Initiative of the European Commission on "Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change" reporting to the EU Commissioner for Agriculture in Brussels, Belgium. He directs a multi-national Gates Foundation supported project to increase the photosynthetic productivity of rice and cassava.

He obtained his B.S. in Agricultural Botany at the University of Reading, UK and his Ph.D. in Plant Environmental Physiology from the University of Leeds, also in the UK. He received the 2012 Marsh Award for Climate Change Research from the British Ecological Society and the 2012 Kettering Award for Excellence in Photosynthesis Research from the American Society of Plant Biologists. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Dr. Per Pinstrup-Andersen

Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen is the H. E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy, the J. Thomas Clark Professor of Entrepreneurship, and Professor of Applied Economics at Cornell University and Adjunct Professor, Copenhagen University. He is past Chairman of the Science Council of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and Past President of the American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA). He served 10 years as the International Food Policy Research Institute's Director General and seven years as department head; seven years as an economist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Colombia; and six years as a distinguished professor at Wageningen University. He is the 2001 World Food Prize Laureate and the recipient of several awards for his teaching, research and communication. His recent publications include "The African Food System and its Interaction with Human Health and Nutrition" (Cornell University Press 2010) and "Food Policy for Developing Countries" (Cornell University Press 2011) coauthored with Derrill Watson. He has a B.S. from the Danish Agricultural University, a M.S. and Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University and honorary doctoral degrees from universities in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Switzerland, and India. He is a fellow of the AAAS and the American Agricultural Economics Association.

Dr. Richard Bonanno

Dr. Bonanno is the President of the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation where he leads their efforts to advocate for agriculture, aquaculture, and forestry interests before the Massachusetts legislature and executive agencies, while assisting members with municipal issues. He is the owner and operator of Pleasant Valley Gardens in Methuen, MA where he raises 1 acre of greenhouse potted flowering plants, bedding plants, and vegetable transplants; 5 acres of hardy mums, and fifty acres of fresh market vegetables. Dr. Bonanno is involved with many organizations including: Past President, New England Vegetable & Berry Grower; Past President, New England Council for Plant Protection; Past President, Northeastern Weed Science Society; Chair, Weed Science Society of America Science Policy Committee; Public Member, Massachusetts Pesticide Board; Member EPA Farm, Ranch, and Rural Communities Committee. Prior to returning to the family farm in 1989, he was Associate Professor at North Carolina State University. He is a Senior Extension Specialist at the University of Massachusetts responsible for vegetable and small fruit weed management. His responsibilities also include on-farm food safety. He holds multiple scholarly and professional memberships and honors, including membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in Plant Physiology from Oregon State University.

Pam Johnson

Ms. Johnson serves as president of the Corn Board of the National Corn Growers Association, a farmer-led trade association with offices in St. Louis and Washington. She also is a member of the Agri-Industry Council Executive Committee and represents NCGA with the National Coalition for Food and Agriculture Research and the National Corn-to-Ethanol Research Center. She is a delegate to the U.S. Grains Council. Previously, Johnson chaired NCGA's Research and Business Development Action Team and its Bylaws Committee. She also served as the board liaison to the NCGA Grower Services Action Team and the organizational liaison to the National Pork Producers Council. In her home state, she is a director of the Iowa Corn Growers Association and former chairwoman of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board. She also serves as president of Iowa Corn Opportunities and is a former member of the U.S. Grains Council Biotech and Trade Policy A-Teams. She is a sixth generation farmer who raises corn and soybeans with her husband, two sons and their young families. They also manage a seed business and are member investors in ethanol and biodiesel plants.

Dr. Sonny Ramaswamy

Dr. Ramaswamy was appointed to serve as director of the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) in 2012. As part of USDA's Research, Education, and Extension mission, he oversees NIFA awards funds for a wide range of extramural research, education, and extension projects that address the needs of farmers, ranchers, and agricultural producers. Prior to joining NIFA, Dr. Ramaswamy served as dean of Oregon State University's College of Agricultural Sciences and director of the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station. He provided overall leadership for the college's academic programs at the Corvallis campus and OSU programs at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, for-credit extended education, informal education through the Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources Extension Program, and research at OSU's main campus and 11 branch experiment stations throughout the state. Previously, he was associate dean of the Purdue University College of Agriculture and directed the university's agricultural research programs from 2006 to 2009. He received a Bachelor of Science in agriculture and a Master of Science in entomology from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, India, and his doctorate in entomology from Rutgers University. He is also a graduate of the University of Nebraska's New Academic Chair's Program and Harvard University's Management Development Program.

Sponsors

Principal Sponsors
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Charles Valentine Riley Memorial Foundation

Principal Collaborator
World Food Prize Foundation

Supporting Sponsors
U. S. Department of Agriculture: Agricultural Research Service, Economic Research Service, Forest Service, National Institute of Food and Agriculture; Case IH; DuPont; Mars Incorporated

For more information, please contact Anne Moraske at amoraske@aaas.org or 202-326-6759.

Information and recordings of past lectures are available online.

Background on the Lecture

In 2008, the Charles Valentine Riley Memorial Foundation (RMF) made a gift to AAAS to endow a Charles Valentine Riley Memorial Lecture at AAAS in honor of Professor Riley's legacy as a "whole picture" person with a vision for enhancing agriculture through scientific knowledge.

Working in collaboration with the RMF and the World Food Prize Foundation (WFPF), an organization whose fundamental goal is to support efforts toward an adequate supply and availability of nutritious food for the burgeoning world population in the 21st century, the AAAS Riley Lecture is a special opportunity to highlight the important role of research and innovation in agriculture, the most basic human endeavor.

Past lecturers include Dr. Roger Beachy, then Director of the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture; Dr. Pamela C. Ronald, Professor of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis; and Dr. Robert Horsch, Deputy Director for Research & Development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

About Charles Valentine Riley

Charles Valentine Riley was a prominent 19th century entomologist. In 1878, he was appointed to the post of Entomologist to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was chosen to be the first Curator of Insects for the Smithsonian Institution in 1885. Professor Riley became a member of AAAS in 1868, was elected a Fellow in 1874, and then went on to be the Vice President for the biology section in 1888.

The impact of his work of more than a century ago is still being felt today, not only in the fields of entomology and agriculture but also in other natural sciences. Professor Riley's vision and ability to see the role of agriculture in the productive use of the landscape, as an artistry upon which all society depends, is perhaps his greatest legacy.