[NOISE] Hello, my name is Kari Wozniak and I'm an academic professional at the University of Illinois. I have worked at the ADM Institute for the Prevention of Postharvest Loss for over two years, where I currently serve as the program coordinator. So today we're going to talk about why people even care about postharvest loss. Why is it a new issue? Is it a new issue? Is postharvest loss a new problem is the key framing question for this lecture and the short answer is no, it's not a new problem. And you may have heard professors already in this course say that it's not new, it's something we've heard about as far back as Henry Kissinger, when he was Secretary of State back in the 1970s. And so that's true, Henry Kissinger did state in 1975 at a U.N. general assembly special congress on food security that we should strive to cut postharvest losses in half by 1985. So we don't know if we have or not. A major reason for that is, is that it's been too expensive to measure postharvest losses. We haven't known enough about it, we haven't had the right tools to actually measure it and find out if we've reduced it or not. To understand why postharvest loss is now an important issue, we have to understand how the food security issue has developed on an international level. And the story with this really starts with the Green Revolution. So the Green Revolution is an important agricultural event. And it basically was a series of research, technology, development, and transfer that just totally transformed agriculture around the world. It started around late 1940s and it really ramped up around the late 1960s and it increased agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world where we saw serious issues of scarcity, and starvation, and famine. And so like I said, it began most significantly in the 1960s. In a large way, it really solved a lot of the issues that the world was facing in terms of food security and hunger. So this led to a decline in research and development dollars for agriculture because for a lot of people, it seemed like we solved the issue. So what this graph is, is a depiction of official dollars or international assistance dollars that were going towards. So you can see a huge decline. This indicator is largely used as an indicator for international aid flow overall. So this is a good indication of how we saw the trends move. But of course, it just didn't decline in state official sectors. It also declined in non state sectors, so places like the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, they also significantly decreased their funding. In this example, we saw the World Bank decline from a peak around 400 million down to 100 million by 2007. So luckily, these funding is starting to increase again. And we'll talk about why that is in a minute, but it's really important to note that in that period there was not a lot of activity going on in terms of developing new ways to improve agriculture and the efficiency of agriculture. So in 2008, that's when we saw things change. The infamous bread rise is what we want to talk about in 2008. So basically what happened was there was huge price spikes in food. In many countries, it more than doubled. The cost of a loaf of bread doubled and for people who are all ready living on less than $1 a day and spending most of their income on food, that's a huge deal. So we might not have felt it so much in the United States, but around the world, it was a very significant issue. So there are still debates ongoing about why this happened. But some major arguments that people suggest as to why is that there was an increasing demand for food due to population growth. We know that the population of the world is rapidly increasing. We know that we need to feed 9 billion people by 2050 and this is causing a lot of demand for more food. As we saw, we had significant declines in agricultural investment. So at the same time we needed more food, there was less research and less dollars going towards making that happen. We saw more agricultural production devoted towards biofuels. So a lot of corn was being taken off the market to be made into ethanol. So that was food that people were not able to eat. And overall, we saw a decline in world food stockpiles. So countries were having less food on hand. So these caused the infamous bread riots, the toppled governments that shook up the world basically and people reacted. So this was a serious issue. People who don't have enough food, there's national security implications for this and obviously humanitarian. So the response was high level on a global scale, which is good, and a big point in this story is to talk about the L'Aquila summit. The L'Aquila summit is a time when global leaders come together, the GA is there, they talk about major global issues and how they're going to address them as a global community. And the L'Aquila's food security initiative produced these five sets of commitments and you can summarize them to say that they re-bolstered the commitment for food security. In decades before, nobody have really cared about it or a very few people cared about it in terms of how they spent their dollars and this was a recommitment of dollars. So they promised investment in country-led plans, countries are going to figure out their own ways to make food security an issue again. They were going to provide comprehensive support for not just producing more food but humanitarian assistance, working on nutrition, working on sustainable agriculture. They wanted a strategic coordination of assistance, so working together. And that involved the strong role for multilateral institutions, which are basically any organizations that work across regions involving multiple nations. So, something like the UN. Sustained commitment of financial resources of course was also committed so that we would see a renewed commitment of agricultural R and D. [SOUND]
