Driving Food Security Through Ag Innovation, Says CropLife Head

Agricultural innovation will drive solutions for our future food security needs with new value-chain cooperation, says CropLife International CEO

Brussels, 11 June 2025: Addressing the International Grains Council conference in London today, CropLife International President and CEO Emily Rees called for global value-chain cooperation in the face of geopolitical volatility, focusing on the core role of plant-science technology as the driver to meeting future food productivity needs.

Speaking to the audience of government and intergovernmental policy makers and agri-business leaders, Rees applauded the ongoing partnership between grain trade associations and the plant science sector to date but cautioned that existing models will need to adapt in the face of geopolitical volatility and climate crisis. She called for an increased emphasis on shared goals and cooperative approaches, with new plant science technologies in seed and crop protection as the bedrock and facilitator for productivity which will safeguard climate and sustainability challenges.

“By working with historical and new coalitions of like-minded stakeholders, we can and we will make positive breakthroughs, for example around long-standing issues like asynchronous approvals and low-level presence, as well as emerging opportunities like consistent policy around genome editing in plants” she said.

Referring to recent upheavals in trade relations, Rees emphasized that trade will continue between nations around the world, despite the current context. Safeguarding and enhancing the rules-based trading system and reference bodies will support agricultural innovation and get new technologies into the hands of farmers. So collaboration along the value chain to ensure that fit-for-purpose international systems are upheld must be a central goal moving forwards.

Rees also called on governments to ensure that relevant standard setting bodies such as Codex Alimentarius are adequately and sustainably resourced, and the centrality of science- and risk-based assessments be strengthened as the basis for sanitary and phytosanitary measures. “We must safeguard and enhance the multilateral rules-based trading system and reference bodies in ways that support research and development of agricultural innovation and – crucially – give farmers access to these new technologies” she said.

Concluding her remarks, she set out three “fundamental building blocks” of sustainable food security:

Resilience, including the crucial resilience needed in local productivity which will take centre-stage in the G20 later this year and is so critical to regions of the Global South. Advanced plant-breeding techniques will be breakthrough in meeting the unique challenges in these regions.

Productivity, driven by the agricultural innovation which delivers techniques and technologies such as precision agriculture and AI-driven farming, optimising the use of finite resources and increasing yields whilst minimising waste.

Open, rules-based, and predictable trade, which must not be governed in such a way as to limit access to innovations through the creation of unilateral trade measures. Non-tariff trade barriers neglect local production needs and remove valuable tools from farmers.