(Persian) Hi, I'm glad to have this opportunity
to talk about a subject which I'm in love with, in Iran,
and since my Persian doesn't allow to speak freely,
with your permission I'll talk in English.
These few word that I said, I practiced them before.
(Applause)
Well, let's start.
Three years ago I was at a crossroad
I wanted to bridge two domains, two areas
that I have always been passionate about
International relations and politics, on the one hand
and business and commerce on the other.
And so I thought about what was the best way to reconcile both.
There are obviously many options.
One sensible chose which some of you might suggest
especially given where we are today, could be oil.
Oil is bringing together business and international politics and affairs.
But oil as an industry, is only a hundred years old as we saw earlier today.
And there is no indication that it will be with us in hundred years.
I ended up going for something more fundamental,
that's always been a common denominator.
Nutrients: cereals, weath, barly, rice, corn, soya beans.
We have always and will always need to eat,
and nutrients are an essential source of energy for human beings.
What I want to achieve in the next minutes
is to show you how nutrients are storytellers of civilization,
how they embody one of the most critical challenges of the century,
and finally how nutrients or in fact agriculture
is the new holy grail for innovators.
So let us start with nutrients and civilization.
It's no surprise that the people
who introduced and taught agriculture in our world
are remembered as heroes or legends until today.
This man, emperor Shennong, 5000 years ago in China
is believed to have introduced plowing.
And agriculture to his countryman.
He is remembered today as the god of the five cereals.
Which were held as sacred.
Closer to Iran, the Near east, the Middle east, the Fertile Crescent
is known as the cradle of civilization.
And it was precisely agriculture that enabled civilization
to develop and blossom in this region.
Two great rivers, favorable weather, irrigation technics,
enabled tribal groups, nomadic tribes
to form the first farming settlements and develop agrarian societies.
The rest is history.
You see our world has evolved a lot in the past 200 years
becoming increasingly global.
And looking at this story of globalization through nutrients,
contains fascinating insights.
So let's quickly revisit globalization through nutrients.
This map shows you roughly speaking, the trade flows,
the sea born trade flows of grains in 1880.
Behind this map, behind these arrows are fascinating insights.
You can see that most of the grain surpluses
of the time were heading toward England.
Why was that?
Well, England was the first country to industrialize.
With hundreds of thousands leaving their farms
to go and work in manufacturing jobs.
And this triggered for the demand in grains to produce bread
to feed these people.
This period of time is also very interesting.
1880 that time captured the rise of modern grain trade.
For the first time an international market
connecting remotely producers with consumers of food
throughout the world for new high speed communication,
information, technologies.
And a last it was around food that the first futures markets developed.
Fast forwarding 130 years
- and this is a picture of Liverpool at the time -
Fast forwarding 130 years, we see a very different picture
of international trade flows.
This tells us another important unfolding story.
The story of the east rising, the story of China
and other countries in the matter of decades going through
a second industrial revolution,
bigger in scale, in faster time than ever previously.
This has had profound consequences on staple markets,
increasing the demands for proteins and other products
that are essential to human beings to be fed.
And as incomes have been rising in China,
higher incomes have triggered higher demand
for protein products, meat, poultry, pork.
This demand has a knock on effect
on feed greens because, take an example
in feed lock environment, to produce one kilo of meat
you need eight kilograms of grains.
So you can see that nutrients
offer us a perfect way to see globalization.
We saw earlier that in 1880 it was England that was industrializing,
at the time a farmer in 1880 who was located in Australia,
he was concerned with the price paid for wheat in Liverpool,
and with China rising in the space of a few decades,
and modernizing today's producers of soy beans in Argentina,
crunch constantly for information about Chinese soy bean demand
and see what import will take place.
The agriculture industry has evolved in the past decades
to become a complex one.
Binding many different industries, people and skill sets together.
In fact if you want to analyze a country and gather insight,
agriculture is a very good proxy.
Because it brings virtually so many things together.
You have to ask yourself questions such as weather conditions,
what percentage of the population is involved in agriculture?
What are the policies like?
Does the government subsidize farming?
Does it control price?
Where is the demand coming from?
Is it from the food sector, the feed sector, the energy sector?
What types of infrastructure are there?
For export, is the country connected to the sea?
Is there an in land transportation system?
And finally, what are the consumer preferences like?
This is what I find very interesting working in the sector,
because it enables me and everyone to see and gather a lot of insight.
This is for past and now I want to turn to the future
and discuss agriculture and nutrients
as capturing one of the most important challenges that we are facing.
Namely, the growth of the global population
that is set to reach nine billion in 2050.
This is already a very challenging situation.
To add to the challenge, an important part of this increase
is going to happen around cities: urbanization.
For the first time several years ago, more people in the world
live in cities than outside.
This is going to create massive pressure on food markets.
And if this wasn't enough,
we live in a world that's becoming richer,
a growing middle class in countries from Brazil, India, China, Russia
that's going to consume more protein rich food.
Essentially, this is a major challenge and to answer it
we are going to have to produce more.
This is not the only solution, but it starts with the higher production.
Together with other solutions we are going to have to produce more,
store more, transform more, but we have to first produce more.
And we can break down the problem of higher production into two parts.
Countries which have modern agriculture infrastructure,
which have already been through technological disruptions
in the past decades, have been able to consistently increase
their agricultural production yield.
They need to continue to do it, but, in a sustainable fashion.
Without damaging the soil, without damaging water supplies,
without damaging communities.
That is one part of the challenge.
The second part of the challenge,
concerns countries which have fertile ground for production
but which haven't seen this increase in yield.
Ultimately production needs to grow in these areas
and we need to see a convergence.
Thats what needs to happen if we want to feed 9 billion people in 2050.
And the solutions that are going to need to be implemented are very varied.
I want to tell you about one area which I find very exciting
and which I am involved in.
Which revolves around the information economy.
Which I think is going to have a huge impact on agriculture.
Because agriculture, traditionally speaking
has been underserved by software and information technologies.
I want to tell you a little bit about what I find interesting in this area.
Namely, in the challenge I discussed with you before,
we saw that countries, which have not seen increasing yields
are going to need to increase the production.
Mobile phone penetration in developing countries is massive.
There are more mobile phones today in the African continent that in Europe.
And these mobile phones today are being used to help farmers.
One of the key questions or challenges that farmers face in these countries,
pertains to information.
What prices are their products going to trade for?
Should they go to a market that's 10 km east or 20 km west?
What prices will they find in these different markets?
Today they are not informed.
The mobile phones are changing this.
We see more and more and these are some companies
which are changing the reality,
which are enabling farmers to get better access
to information on market prices,
aggregating farmers together around groups
to buy inputs, to sell their outputs together.
Essentially building cooperatives from the ground up.
And enabling farmers to share knowledge.
Farmers in an area face one type of issue,
if they solve it, the solutions apply to many others
and mobile phones are increasingly being used for that purpose,
and I think that is part of the solution
that it's going to enable us to increase production in those countries.
In more sophisticated markets,
think of the challenge in the following way:
a farm is an environment that is rich in data.
A farm contains data on many things.
It contains data on soil, on production, weather, livestock, operations, expenses.
This data has value if it can be collected,
if it can be syndicated and delivered in a way that make sense
to the actual decision maker.
And to be able to enable a sustainable growth
in developed farming countries,
we are seeing applications that are delivering
real time analytical capabilities to farmers.
In essence a free flow of information between the farmers,
the equipment, through sensors and databases.
And all this is going to enable us to allocate resources efficiently.
We saw before that agriculture is the major consumer
of our water resources.
If we're able to measure what precise area of a field has low moisture
and we are able to answer that in precision,
this is going to benefit a producing country
in drought circumstances.
So I see agriculture as becoming increasingly data driven,
and software and cloud computing which have already disrupted
various industries are entering agriculture.
And this is going to have a huge impact.
I've told you about agriculture as a storyteller of civilization,
I've told you about agriculture as symbolizing a key challenge
that we face in the future,
and as a field for innovators to find solutions in.
It's not the first time that we face a major challenge to increase production.
In fact towards the end of the 1960s, a book called "The Population Bomb"
warned us that hundreds of millions of people were going to die
because we were not going to be able to feed them.
Ultimately this prediction was proven wrong
because technology innovation around seeds, fertilizers
agriculture management technics
enabled us to drastically increase the production.
The current challenge will be solved in part by this information economy
and I'm not here to offer you precise solution,
but rather to invite you as innovators to take a look at agriculture
and at this precise challenge,
the stakes are immense and so are the opportunities.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)