3rd Amilcar Herrera Public Lecture in Technology and Development, 7th April 2004
The Role of New Technologies in Achieving the UN Millenium Development Goals

By Professor M.S. Swaminathan

The UNU-INTECH Amilcar Herrera Lecture Series was established in 2002 in honour of the Argentinean scientist and social activist. The third lecture was given by Prof. M.S. Swaminathan, the Indian scientist renowned for his contribution to that country's agricultural renaissance. Prof. Swaminathan is UNESCO Chair in Ecotechnology and President of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Chennai, India.

Prof. Swaminathan provided a comprehensive analysis of on-going efforts to tackle the most basic of these goals, relating to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing child mortality and ensuring environmental sustainability. Referring to statistics that show half of the child population in countries such as Bangladesh, India and Ethiopia as being underweight, while half of the adult population in the US, Russian Federation, the UK and Germany is overweight, Prof. Swaminathan stressed that bridging the global nutritional divide is a key imperative for achieving these goals. He proposed a food based approach to achieving nutrition security that enhances food availability through five 'revolutions' in the areas of productivity, food quality, income and employment, small farm management and 'enlarging the food basket' through reversing the modern trend of over-reliance on a few staple foods. The technologies to support this should harness knowledge more intensively and be based on precision farming focusing on plant scale, rather than 'field scale husbandry', he argued. Prof. Swaminathan presented his vision of sustainable community nutrition security systems that would contribute to achieving this through keeping governments accountable and creating efficiencies in food distribution at the local level. At the international level, he stressed the key role of on-going negotiations relating to biodiversity and biotechnology and the ethics and equity principles contained in the Convention on Biological Diversity, Climate Change and other processes.

Prof. Swaminathan is founder of the MS Swaminthan Research Foundation , which works with the rural poor, and particularly women, to harness science and technology for environmentally sustainable and socially equitable development in India.