The Human Right to Food and Livelihoods: The Role of Global Wheat Research

Distinguished hosts, colleagues, Crawford Fund Chairman Tim Fischer, Professor Derek Tribe, and Tim Besley, President of ATSE, I am honored to speak with you today on the occasion of receiving the first Derek Tribe Award from the Crawford Fund. My own institution, CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), and the farmers for whom CIMMYT works, are greatly indebted to Professor Tribe and to the Crawford Fund for consistently raising awareness of the importance of international agricultural research. On a more personal note, I would like to emphasize how rewarding it is for me to receive this recognition in Australia. I arrived in this country in the mid-1960s as a Narrabri Rotary Club scholarship student from India. It was here that I received my doctorate in wheat genetics, and it was here that I was directed towards my life’s work at CIMMYT.