On 16th October, 2013, Farming First co-hosted a farmer roundtable event at the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa. (Read our commentary from the event and interview with the farmers here.)
The event featured five farmers from around the world (Africa, Europe, South Asia and South America), who shared their thoughts on the on-farm impact of climate change and discussed how new agricultural technologies and farm management practices were helping to improve the resilience and reliability of their farms in the future.
The event was moderated by Julie Borlaug, granddaughter of Norman Borlaug and Assistant Director of Partnerships for the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M University. It was co-hosted alongside the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA-FAS), the U.S. Department of State, Truth about Trade and Technology (TATT) and CropLife International (CLI).
The farmer panelists included:
- Gilbert Arap Bor, small-scale maize farmer and professor at Catholic University of East Africa
- Gabriela Cruz, fourth-generation farmer growing biotech maize and president of the Portuguese Association of Conservation Agriculture
- V.K. Ravichandran, Indian rice, sugarcane and cotton farmer, Secretary of the Sugarcane Growers Association and Founder of united Progressive Farmers Forum
- Santiago Del Solar, agronomist, biotech soybean farmer and president of the Argentine Association for Maize and Sorghum
- Dyborn Chibonga, farmer and CEO, National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi
Watch the full video of the event here: