Webinar with Dr. Roger Leakey on The Global Food Crisis

2 September 2015. This Webinar Series of Foodtank featured Dr. Roger Leakey, a crop physiologist and tree biologist who has worked in forestry and agroforestry aimed to reverse deforestation and desertification in the tropics.

The Global Food Crisis: can we heal an ailing and divided world? The answer is ‘yes’ but it will require a different mindset if we are to have the ‘political will’ to scale up existing, unconventional approaches based on the ideas of poor smallholder farmers in Africa: ones that are being highly successful after 12 years on a scale of 500 villages.

• Roger first examined the production and associated social, economic and environmental issues driving a downward spiral that results in hunger, malnutrition and environmental degradation. 
• He then presented a simple, bottom-up, 3-step approach to reversing this downward spiral, before looking at some of the outcomes to date and the potential impacts.

More about the speaker:
Dr. Roger Leakey is a crop physiologist / tree biologist who has worked in forestry and agroforestry aimed at helping to reverse deforestation and desertification in the tropics. Perhaps even more importantly, however, his pioneering work over the last twenty years has also been dedicated to the alleviation of poverty, malnutrition and hunger in developing countries, especially in Africa and Oceania. In recent years the fruits of his labours (literally – the numerous virtually unknown, traditionally and culturally important indigenous fruits and nuts of many tropical countries) have started to come to maturity. Dr. Leakey is the former Director of Research at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry.