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© A
g
C
areers
.
com
2017
The
SINGLE
greatest challenge
Excerpts from an interview with Keegan Kautzky, Director of National Education Programs and Partnerships of the World Food Prize Foundation
accessible, distributing them evenly throughout the
world, and making sure that every person on the planet
can afford healthy, nutritious food that will meet their
dietary needs. There has never been a more monumental
challenge than that.
There are other things we’re going to have to do to
make sure it’s possible to feed 9.5 billion people. We have
emerging plant and animal diseases that we’re facing.
We’re going to have limited resources; less available
clean water to work with. How do we do that with
increasingly erratic weather conditions and climate
change? All of these new problems that we’re going to
The single greatest
challenge we face is,
how will we feed 9.5
billion people within the
next 35 years? By the
year 2050, we will need
to be producing enough
in diverse foods but
also making them
face in the next 20-30 years, things we’re already facing
now, are going to make that that much harder. There’s
one grand challenge we have to face—feeding 9.5 billion
people—but there are all of these other problems and
threats. How do we solve them effectively?
There are 70 million high school students in America,
and most of them have no idea what they could do in
the world and how they can make a difference. When
we look at all students in the country, how is it that only
2-3% of them will participate in agricultural education
courses? Or FFA? Or 4-H? Or a science fair? There are so
many passionate, incredible young people in this country
who will never understand what agriculture is and why
the food system matters. They will never know all the
things they could do to make a difference in the world. If
a student is graduating high school today, they’re going
to be right in the middle of their professional career when
this challenge hits its summit. Everything we do should
be focused on preparing this generation of workers and
these young leaders to solve these problems and meet
this challenge.
Agricultural careers
are at the heart of
solving almost all of
these challenges.