A 'revolutionary' way to feed the world that is very old

“There are some interesting hints or nods in the right direction: the focus on crop diversity and nutrition, indigenous knowledge, a focus on neglected crops,” says Bill Moseley, a professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, who has worked on agricultural programs with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank. “What's really important is that you think about a poor farmer and what his limitations are and how you develop something that is really useful for him.”

Food has long been part of the US foreign policy arsenal.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the US-led Green Revolution focused on producing more food – especially more corn, wheat and rice – using fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seeds. For example, corn yields increased enormously thanks to investments in plant breeding. In much of southern and eastern Africa, maize became the most important food grain, while in some places cash crops for export, such as cotton and tobacco, predominated.

A handful of countries came to dominate grain production, while a handful of grains – wheat, rice and corn – came to dominate the global diet. Although the Green Revolution is credited with offering more calories, it has done little to ensure a varied, nutritious diet.

“Many countries, including many Sub-Saharan African countries, have become dependent on imports of this staple food over the past fifty years, which has changed people's eating habits and led to less attention given to traditional crops that are often better suited to local ecologies. says Jennifer Knapp, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, a non-profit organization.

Mr Fowler was critical of the expansion of hybrid seeds and the industrial farming system that came with it. Commercial hybrid seeds, he wrote in a book with Canadian environmentalist Pat Mooney, had changed traditional agricultural systems, and not for the better. During global negotiations, he pushed back against the US-led move to patent seeds. (A company that holds a patent on a particular seed makes money by selling those seeds year after year, upending the traditional system of farmers saving seeds from each year's harvest to sow the following year.)