By Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.
 
From Thomas Malthus in 1798 to Paul Ehrlich and the so-called Club of Rome in the 1960s and 70s, history is rife with doomsayers who falsely predicted mass starvation. Now, with the world’s population set to surpass 9 billion by 2050, some are once again wondering whether it’s time to panic.
 
To be clear, world hunger is still among the largest challenges we face. Providing safe and nutritious food for the growing population will become even more of a challenge in the decades ahead. I applaud the efforts of The Chicago Council and others to raise awareness and to organize a sophisticated response to the challenges ahead. As we move forward and before anyone panics, it’s worth pausing to ask, in the past, why were all the sages and their sophisticated models so wildly wrong? 
 
The most obvious answer is because they failed to imagine that human ingenuity, first and foremost scientific and technological ingenuity, creates enormous and often sudden discontinuities that demolish the old forecasts and reset in fundamental ways the path of human progress. In short, the sages were wrong because humans succeeded in advancing food security and in addressing the world’s grand challenges. 
 
I make no pretense to special foresight, and I don’t claim to know with certainty that humankind will yet again overcome the very real threats it faces. But I know this: we should never underestimate the potential of such ingenuity, so long as governments, industry, NGOs and universities remain engaged in the world’s most basic task — feeding the world. 
 
As president of Purdue University, I am privileged to represent a school that is highly engaged in the challenge. Home to two recent World Food Prize Laureates — Dr. Phil Nelson in 2007 and Dr. Gebisa Ejeta in 2009 — Purdue addresses global food security at nearly every stage of the food supply chain, from improving crop genetics for the world’s farmers to offering low-cost grain storage technology that reduces post-harvest food loss in developing countries. 
 
Consider a small sample of Purdue’s work to fight hunger:

• Perhaps most illustrative are the Purdue Improved Crop Storage (PICS) bags. What started as a simple realization by an entomology professor that without oxygen, crop-destroying insects couldn’t metabolize starch into water, has become an innovative crop storage solution that has already saved farmers in West and Central Africa millions of dollars in lost crops at a cost of less than 1 penny per pound of crop produced.

 

• Nine Purdue researchers are leading a $5 million, five-year effort funded by USAID to fight hunger through improved food drying and processing technologies.  The goal of the grant is to reduce food loss along the supply chain.  The research builds on Purdue’s long legacy of accomplishment in reducing food waste, from PICS to Dr. Phil Nelson’s success revolutionizing how food producers store and transport fresh fruit and vegetables throughout the world.

 

• Research by Dr. Gebisa Ejeta has fed millions of mouths and produced millions of acres of more productive and more resilient sorghum, one of the most important grains in the world, especially in Africa. 

 

• Each year, teams of graduate students from around the country gather at Purdue for the annual Borlaug Institute on Global Food Security, a two-week intensive “summer camp” for up-and-coming scholars to discuss global food security challenges and to collaborate on new ideas for food security interventions. 

 

• The Purdue Center for Global Food Security offers grants to teams of undergraduate students who are developing a new technology or program to combat food insecurity in developing countries.   For instance, one of our students studying agricultural and biological engineering received a grant to research water treatment techniques in the Mekong River Basin. 

 

• On a larger scale, Purdue has made investments in plant science research one of our top university priorities.  We are hiring at least ten new faculty; we started a new center for Molecular Agriculture; and we are developing high-tech phenotyping capabilities that merge our expertise in other STEM disciplines, such as aeronautics, with plant science. 

 
Purdue is proud to contribute to the global movement to develop new ideas in plant science and food storage and to move these innovations from lab to farm. Ultimately, the success of any strategy, policy, innovation or technology, at Purdue or otherwise, will depend on human creativity and ingenuity.  Research universities and their investments in students will be essential if the world can once again prove the doomsayers wrong. The ingenuity I’ve observed among Purdue students and faculty has only reinforced my belief that we will.

Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. is the 12th president of Purdue University, a post he assumed in January 2013 at the conclusion of his term as Governor of Indiana.