On Thursday, September 28th, I had the chance to have dinner with Ruth Magreta, a PhD student from Malawi that is currently a STAARS (Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces) fellow visiting Cornell to establish a network that will be used to foster future collaboration. Ruth is particularly interested in addressing climate change with regards to agriculture and food security in her native country of Malawi as she has seen and felt the effects firsthand in a region where many people suffer harshly from the effects of a changing climate without ever realizing what the causative factors are. It comes down to a season by season hope for many that the rains will come, and as Ruth poignantly stated, if they do not, people will not eat. When the rains do arrive, people are equally leery that they will not fall with such force to cause rivers to erupt within minutes and cause untold destruction. Often, harsh rains far upstream will catch villagers off-guard in lower lands, sweeping people away never to be seen again. Over the past few decades, abnormal weather conditions have increased in prevalence and severity, leaving many wary of what is yet to come in a nation already burdened in its efforts to industrialize.

Of particular interest to Ruth was our opinions on climate change and of the United States as a whole. The stability of the food system within the United States and other industrialized nations has had a numbing effect on the opinions of many with regards to the extent or even existence of climate change. After all, someone in the US expects all staple foodstuffs to be available every day of the year without exception, regardless of potential crop failures. If a crop fails in one region, we expect it to still be on the shelves in equal quantity, imported from some distant place that often is never considered by the consumer. If climate change does not personally threaten something so fundamental as food security in a Western nation, how can people truly ever understand the potential implications of such a threat? The people of Malawi do not have that luxury. If a crop fails, there will be no food of that type for the year. If that crop is a staple, people will starve; people will die, and this is a reality that Malawians and many others in developing nations will have to increasingly confront as weather patterns continue to intensify in severity.

For me as someone studying plant breeding and genetics with an emphasis on global food security, this dinner was an incredible opportunity to speak to someone with such a valuable perspective. There are not many people in the United States that can truly tell you what it is like to live through a famine or to feel the effects of climate change ravaging your village. Talks like these affirm how critical it is to address global food security and to actually speak and listen to people personally effected to gain their invaluable perspective that will be needed as we work together to confront this issue on a global scale.