Humanity currently stands at a defining paradox in global food production. While our accumulated scientific and technological knowledge gives us unprecedented capacity to grow food, the urgent need to reshape our agricultural systems is clearer than ever before.
The 20th century’s Green Revolution stands as one of modern history’s greatest public welfare achievements. By dramatically boosting global crop yields, the movement delivered on what was once thought impossible: it fed billions of people across the globe and prevented the mass famines that experts widely predicted would accompany mid-century population growth. Yet this historic success came with steep, long-term environmental costs. The push for intensive agricultural production accelerated soil degradation, drove unsustainable increases in water consumption and chemical input use, and created widespread harm to natural ecosystems across the world.
The core challenge for 21st-century agriculture is fundamentally different from that of the past. Today, our goal must be producing more food with far fewer resources: more nourishment for a growing global population on less land, higher productivity through more efficient water management, and shared prosperity for farming communities, alongside increased carbon sequestration in soils, expanded biodiversity, and more resilient, healthy ecosystems.
This urgent transformation must be the central priority for the next phase of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s work. Among all regions, Latin America and the Caribbean have an outsize role to play in this global effort. The region is already a foundational pillar of global food security, and it has emerged as a massive living laboratory for cutting-edge agricultural innovation.
Countries across the region, including agricultural powerhouses Argentina and Brazil, have already built advanced production systems that integrate modern science, technology, precision farming practices, no-till agriculture, genetic crop improvement, and regenerative natural resource management strategies.
The Brazilian Cerrado biome offers one of the most compelling examples of what this transformation can achieve. Decades of targeted scientific research and iterative innovation turned a region once widely written off as having little to no agricultural potential into one of the world’s most productive and critical food-producing hubs.
The key takeaway from this success is not that the Cerrado model should be copied and pasted into other regions without adaptation. Instead, the core lesson is that intentional investment in science can turn long-held assumptions about natural constraints into new opportunities for inclusive development.
Today, the African continent needs its own context-specific agricultural revolution. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that works for every region, but there is one universal guiding principle: all agricultural policy and practice must be rooted in scientific evidence.
Throughout my decades-long scientific career, I have worked to demonstrate that soil health is inextricably connected to the health of plants, livestock, human communities, entire ecosystems, and the future of the planet itself. Long-term, global food security is impossible to achieve when we continue to rely on degraded, overexploited soils.
It is for this reason that I see the “Living Soils of the Americas” initiative as such a critical model for global action. Developed in partnership with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) during the tenure of Argentine leader Manuel Otero, the initiative brings together a diverse coalition of stakeholders: scientific researchers, national governments, working farmers, private sector businesses, and civil society organizations, all united around a shared core idea: expanding agricultural production and protecting the natural environment are not opposing goals.
Healthy, managed soils can simultaneously deliver multiple public and private benefits: they store atmospheric carbon, preserve freshwater reserves, support greater biodiversity, boost agricultural resilience to climate shocks, and maintain consistent, high levels of crop productivity.
The successful framework developed across the Americas has already begun to spread to the African continent. Decades of innovation in regions like Brazil’s Cerrado offer invaluable actionable insights for sustainable agricultural development across Africa’s savanna biomes. This cross-regional exchange embodies the standard that modern international cooperation should live up to: it focuses on sharing evidence-based knowledge and co-creating locally adapted solutions, rather than imposing pre-built, one-size-fits-all models on developing regions.
The FAO already holds a unique and powerful combination of assets: unmatched technical expertise, a widespread global footprint, and a proven ability to convene stakeholders from across sectors and borders. But international institutions only fulfill their core mandate when this institutional capital is translated into tangible, on-the-ground benefits for member nations and the communities they serve. For the agricultural sector, this means centering the needs of working food producers in every initiative.
The FAO of the future must position itself closer to farmers, scientific researchers, private sector partners, academic institutions, and national policy-makers. It must identify proven, workable solutions, connect those solutions to the communities and regions that need them most, and support local adaptation and scaled adoption of successful practices. Above all, we must close the persistent gap between scientific knowledge and on-the-ground agricultural practice.
Throughout my years of collaboration with IICA, I worked closely with Manuel Otero and witnessed firsthand his results-focused approach to international agricultural cooperation. Otero prioritized building cross-sector partnerships between scientists, producers, governments, and private industry, and advocated for a model of international cooperation that delivers measurable, concrete outcomes. Our shared work confirmed that well-led international organizations can serve as an effective bridge between scientific innovation and public policy, and facilitate the transfer of context-appropriate knowledge between regions.
This proven model is particularly relevant today, as the FAO confronts a new set of interconnected global challenges. The organization needs to deepen its collaborative ties with member states, put working farmers at the center of all its strategic priorities, strengthen partnerships with the global scientific community and private sector, and more effectively disseminate proven best practices across borders.
Otero’s track record offers a clear, actionable blueprint for how the FAO can pursue this necessary transformation. His potential candidacy for FAO Director-General brings a comprehensive, experience-tested set of solutions to the pressing challenges the organization currently faces.
Yet the stakes of this moment extend far beyond any single individual. At its core, what we are debating is what kind of FAO the world needs to meet 21st-century challenges.
We need an FAO capable of leading a new, sustainable global agricultural revolution: one rooted in scientific evidence, that enables us to produce more food with fewer resources, that restores degraded soils rather than depleting them, and that generates inclusive prosperity for farming communities and food systems worldwide. The knowledge to achieve this already exists, and so do proven, successful examples. What we need now is the collective will and institutional capacity to turn that knowledge into global action.
