Most people haven't made a connection between climate change and the world's food supply, but the planet will face a growing food crisis in coming decades unless the world finds ways of producing more food under increasingly difficult conditions, AAAS President Nina Fedoroff, a noted plant biologist, said at the AAAS Annual Meeting.



"We will push past 9 billion people by mid-century, but there's no more land," Fedoroff warned in her address. "We need to develop crops that thrive in a hotter world on land we now consider unfarmable, using water we now consider unsuitable for agriculture."

Scientists are working on ways to double the global food supply by 2050, she said, but climate change has made the task more urgent. Deaths from the record-breaking 2003 European heat wave were covered widely in the media, she said, but missing from the stories "were the crop yields, which declined by a quarter to more than a third."

"Our major crops--corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans--were sculpted by people over tens of thousands of years in the moderate temperature range that started this century," Fedoroff said, "but yields decline by roughly 10% for each degree of warming."

Fedoroff received the 2006 National Medal of Science for her pioneering research in the fields of plant genetics, plant responses to environmental stress, and genetically modified crops.

In her wide-ranging talk, Fedoroff described some of the key moments from a life of science that put her on the frontiers of research, public engagement, and science diplomacy. Today, as she builds a new center for desert agriculture at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, the strands of her career have culminated in a project with global impact.

Science's role in ensuring a stable global food supply was a major focus of her tenure as science and technology adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State from 2007 to 2010, Fedoroff said. She recalled attending a 2009 conference on climate change and food security at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, when "the detailed analysis of climate impacts on agriculture were just beginning, and the results were chilling."

While public concerns about a global food crisis seemed to peak in 2008, food shortages returned in 2010 and showed no signs of abating in 2011, she said. The events of the Arab spring, she suggested to the audience, are "not just about freedom and democracy," but also about soaring prices for grain and food staples across the region.

Hunger and unrest are borderless challenges, Fedoroff said, and they will be solved only through stronger collaborations between the developed and developing world. In keeping with the meeting's theme of "Flattening the World," she described several efforts that are bringing together scientists in a global knowledge society.

Fedoroff described an organization she helped found called the Global Knowledge Initiative that brings together developed and developing world scientists. She described one project that is bringing experts to Rwanda to study an insect-borne fungus that is compromising the flavor of the nation's coffee beans.

"Such projects address local needs," she said, "and seek to introduce the latest science and technology through training programs."

Long before her appointment as science adviser, Fedoroff was fostering her own international outreach as an adviser to Moscow's Englehardt Institute of Molecular Biology, as a key player in the organization of the International Science Foundation after the fall of the Soviet Union, and as a mentor to international students in her lab.

Her experiences with GMOs--defending the technology as a safe and essential innovation--made her reconsider whether science is enough to convince the public and policymakers. "Belief systems, especially if they're tinged with fear, are not easily dismantled with facts. This isn't a new problem, but it's a growing problem."

She also recalled the ups and downs of her early education and research experiences, but "doing experiments got me hooked," she said. A chance meeting with Nobel Prize laureate Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1978 paved the way for her own groundbreaking work in plant molecular biology.

Fedoroff said she was "blown away" by McClintock's "clear, logical, and beautiful" discovery of transposition, the mechanism by which DNA sequences can be cut and pasted or copied and pasted within a cell's genome. "She'd given words a long time ago to things that no one was ready to see."

The work changed the way that genes and chromosomes were viewed in the mid-20th century, from static "beads on a string" to a dynamic system of genes mutating, duplicating, deleting, and mobilizing, Fedoroff said.  "Evolution is a much more boisterous affair than we ever imagined."

The AAAS Presidential Address is the traditional opening of the Annual Meeting. Fedoroff was preceded by the meeting's three local co-chairs: Andrew Petter, president and vice chancellor of Simon Fraser University; Stephen J. Toope, president and vice chancellor of the University of British Columbia; and Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. The evening began with a welcome and song from Gibby Jacobs, chief of the Squamish Nation, and Carla George, councilor of the Squamish Nation.

On 20 February, at the end of the 2012 meeting, Fedoroff will turn over duties to AAAS President-Elect William H. Press and begin a one-year term as chair of the AAAS Board of Directors. Press is a professor of computer science and integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a member of the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.