welcome to the westminster town hall forum where for thirty three years we have engaged the public in reflection and dialogue on the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective we invite those of you who are listening on minnesota public radio to visit us in person all forums are free and open to the public and information on upcoming forums can be found online at westminster forum dot org you can like us on facebook and follow us on twitter as well my name is tim hart anderson i'm the senior minister at westminster presbyterian church located on nicollet mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and moderator of the forum it's my pleasure to introduce our guests for tonight's forum conversation on world hunger and agricultural sustainability howard g buffett is the chairman and c e o of the howard g buffett foundation a private family foundation working to eradicate food insecurity and improve the standard of living for the world's most impoverished and marginalized populations yes traveled to one hundred thirty countries to document the challenges of meeting the food needs of our global population while preserving the world's the world's biodiversity he actively farms fifteen hundred acres in central illinois and oversees three foundation operated research farms located in arizona illinois and south africa is book forty chances finding hope in a hungry world chronicles the people places and experiences that have shaped his view of the role of philanthropy and relieving the persistent challenge of global hunger his son and co author howard w buffett is a lecturer in international and affairs at columbia university where he teaches management techniques who are improving the effectiveness of foreign aid and global philanthropy he's a trustee of the howard g buffett foundation and previously served as it executive director he has worked in the u s department of defense overseeing agriculture based economic redevelopment programs in iraq and afghanistan and like his father he also is a farmer operating a four hundred you didn't start out life as a farmer yet you describe yourself as an avid farmer a passionate farmer even how did you become one it's a bit of a long story so i gave you the short version my mom always said i didn't have enough talk of toys when i was little so i got big and i got bigger toys but i've always loved equipment i've always loved being outdoors and so i kind of found my way going down that path and i did think i was going to have a rather short career in farming because  had a neighbor who was pretty pretty patient with me because i want to learn a little bit about farming and he put me on a roll fifty twenty john deere tractor and put me out in the field and and then one time we were down on a field where there were tears as it was getting dark and  i was like to use excuse the tractor didn't have very good lights but anyway i moved up to the next terrorist as it got dark and also there was this pickup truck flying up behind the flashing lights i'm sure was talking but i couldn't hear it and i stopped and wayne stumbled into it in a way i mean i just kept the more i had exposure to it the more i liked it and the more i learned and it was a challenge and today i've been farming thirty years and i just love it another passion photography and your passion for farming and for photography have kind of merged in your interest to alleviate global hunger can you describe how that happened yeah you know originally i i started out with photography just on our farm and sunsets and moon rises and animals around the farm and then eventually i got a lot more serious about it and the most important thing i think about photography and what i've done and last decade or two has just been that it's been a tool it's been a tool to try to prove to people that there are things wrong in the world to put stories with the faces that i've been able to see and bring them home and one thing the cameras done for me although it's got me arrested in  some tough spots a few times in other parts of the world is it's it's allowed me to go places i would never go because i want to get photographs that really demonstrate the hardship and the conflict  in the kinds of things that that are around the world that a lot of people will never really physically get to see in person and by doing that the camera gives you a tool to do that so i probably have the places i've gone in the world i would have gone if i weren't carrying a camera and can you describe what happens when you take a photograph of an individual in terms of your relationship with that especially if it's of someone in hunger or pain kind of depends if they have a gun or not but i've a that mistake a few times so it gives you this unique opportunity to make you feel like there's a separation and so  it doesn't it doesn't happen right i mean at least for me it took it took a while but after after a few years in some tough circumstances in refugee camps and i d p camps and hospitals and places it started to give me this a different sense of the ability to separate from the subject in a way that if i'm photographing i mean i can name three places where i photograph young girls that have died within three days and when i photograph them you don't forget that and you don't forget their faces and you don't forget that you couldn't do anything about it but you know it allows you to take a subject and treat it a little bit differently and maybe it sounds even a little callous but it's it helps you remove part of the the frustration and pain that you're seeing because you have another purpose in your purpose the introduction in the book talks about when i was one of the worst warlords it's ever  been on this earth in my lifetime and an opportunity to interview a photograph of just a few days after he was captured in in in sudan but those those things are not easy to do so you have to have some separation you have to have some way to in your mind even sometimes justify why you're doing what you're doing and so the camera does that and i don't know how to explain it any other way it's it's  tool to be able to bring back the truth of what is happening in the world on the other hand you do manage to get out from behind the camera but that's the power of the stories you tell people with names with lives with mothers and fathers or brothers and sisters that's you know that does so much more to the to those of us who have a need to sort of person this thing called global hunger if you could tell us some statistics about global hunger and it would not move us the way the story of one individual well i think that you know to me every statistic has a face now and many faces you know if you want to talk to me about hunger amount of trish and i can tell you about a woman and goal in two thousand and six that came up to me and tried to forcefully make me take her child and telling me that if i don't take a child the child's going to die in the responsibility will be on me that's that's something that's really hard i will never forget driving away from that village in the land cruiser we were and just feeling just like a truck ran over me i mean it's like i can't do anything and i can't take your child and i can't i can't i can't save the child i can't really even do much for this village and you could look i refer to the village i mean i got there in the very first one i looked at the four or five hundred people sitting there and the moms in the front with all these young kids i mean i the very thought that came into my mind was this is a village of death i mean there are just going to be hundreds of people that die and there's nothing you can do about it you can't stop it but i had i had two big lessons from that experience and one was that i really went into high gear and i was with some great people from world vision and we went in and figured out what is the take for therapeutic feeding was a take do the analysis was a take full of just fix what is it take for the general food aid with all this stuff as four and a half million dollars to probably try to save around fifteen hundred people and it all had to come in the right order and had to have the right people there to assess things and and it was very complex very expensive and then the world food program didn't have the food available and so i realized ok it's not going to worry if we want to have an impact is not going to work to go village by village project by project and because we have the reach not everybody has the same resources i'm talking about of the perspective from our resources our resources are big enough that we need to use them in a bigger way so we have to look at not just one village we have to look at what are the policies why why why are these people so poor why can they not get achieve better agricultural productivity so now you talk about advocacy and governance and policy and a whole different array of things that i had no real interest in at the time and no familiarity but i realized that this is what we had to do and so it really changed that was when i started kind of accepting the fact it took me a while but i mean that we really were going to have to change what we did in our foundation if we wanted to have big impact howard how did thanks to my father and the way that he's including all the sats you could stand there with he had i don't know if it's foresight i don't know what i don't know what it was but he decided he wanted to include me in everything that he was doing in his life and to share the experiences and exposure to frankly a lot of very difficult things around the world and we spent these last fifteen plus years getting exposed to so many of the stories that we talk about in forty chances but i think most importantly actually getting exposed to dozens of truly remarkable people who are dedicating their time and their energy and their lives to improving the lives of others and we probably have at least a dozen if not two dozen stories in forty chances about names you've never heard of that most people never heard of who are truly changing the world for others and we will go into details right now but but there are the folks that are inspiration and that i'm so thankful to have met and gotten a known yeah it's a very biblical number but i don't know where does it come from forty chances i was bored one saturday afternoon so i went to this thing that they call planter's school at our john deere dealership and that's supposed to have a speaker there that helps you learn how to plant better and of course i know i needed the help and and so i showed up a lot about forty or fifty other farmers and we were in this the back shop area and and and the guy starts saying you know you guys really don't think about your profession correctly and i thought that was a pretty bold statement so i started listening to him and he said you know you think about you plant you spray your fertilizer harvest and then your role in the next year and everything just keeps going like one cycle after city really to think about it a little differently by the time your dad lets you climb on the tractor to learn how to plant and you start planting by the time you climb off your son or daughter climb on you got about forty crops season and it really was actually it really kind of hit me because i thought that's not very many and i've already wasted at least ten so i mean you know i need to get to work here and i started farming differently in some ways because i realize that every single day this was one chance this was one opportunity instead of just thinking wow you know i can buy mess it up this year i'll fix it next year and so then i realized well you know life's not much different you get through school and you get a little experience and you know you got forty or so good early primary years to accomplish your goals so what it did for me is particularly in the foundation is you've got you know in this very finite time period so what does that mean it means you need more urgency it means you need to be focused it means for me that you take more risk because we spent how much intellect and how much money and time and effort has been spent on trying to end hunger i mean it's huge and we're not get it all right so it means to me you've got to try some things that are different which means you're going to take some risk and you're going to fail and that's ok to fail and i think part of our problem in philanthropy is we just don't want to fail we want to be successful we need to look like everything we're doing is right and it's going to work and the truth is it's a complicated world with very complex difficult problems and to think that you can go out there does get them all right you're never going to get it done one of the great success stories in combat in world hunger of course was the green revolution and accredited do norman borlaug most you may think of them as a texas a and m an aggie but you know where your originated so we tell i was i was hoping to brown university of minnesota right here he's on that her go for which we were going to get to the gopher husker game if you want to go there but there's a reason your microphone wasn't working earlier so norman borlaug the father of the green revolution of the sixty's it had a billion people in india and other countries when you talk about the brown revolution we need can you describe what that is how the green revolution was you know this period where there was amazing things that happened and norman borlaug was the was the you know i mean he's a very he's really a hero in many ways in terms of how he drove research and and  innovative and but you know in today's world you know things change and how he keeps telling me that because i still use a fax machine he's trying to get me to use a computer but you know some of us are slow but you know i mean things change and so if you look at the world today and if you particularly look at africa africa was a continent that is it has the most weathered soils in the world by far the glaciers moved off early on on that continent and then they've degraded about seventy five percent of their their soils and habitat by by por management techniques are what we walk on and so if you look at africa the green revolution as we know it as we knew it as india knew it won't be very effective in africa for a huge part of the continent i mean first of all africa's fifty four countries it's not a continent by itself you have fifty four different governments you have hundreds and hundreds of different growing zones you have arid tropical subtropical all sorts some temperate not much and so you have all these different complications that don't fit into a green revolution model and one of the biggest challenges i think we have is everybody who knows what's worked for them and in the united states you could call the green revolution model doesn't just transfer to six hundred million small farmers it operate on two or three acres that actually consume their own production and have very little ability to enter the marketplace and probably experience many of them their families experience hunger period so farmers who can't feed their families that's not our model that's not what we're good at that's not what we understand so we have to think about how do we make africa look like africa should look not how do you make africa look like we look and so around revolution is all about how do we reclaim soil soil health and rebuild  what's been damaged on that continent and you have to start i mean you know this is well as anyone i mean it starts under your feet i mean you've got to have the foundation you've got to have the belief you've got to have the faith you've got to have you know the ability to produce and it doesn't happen in this just by accident and it's not going to happen by putting on synthetic fertilizers or hoping that it's going to happen is going to happen with a lot of hard work to rebuild a continent that has been destroyed in a lot of ways know highly a tablespoon of highly organic soil has more living organisms than there are people on the planet and it's that complex so if you think about that i mean this is biological activity this is life someone once came up to me and said well no you got to do is put fertilizer on it and i said well there's such a thing as dead soil dead soil just means you don't have the microbes you know activity microbiology biological activity to make everything work right and now you just put for allies or are just like real know and he's still trying to think about that when i laugh but but but i have not seen that work but i don't know i just think that that people have to realize that you know there have been great civilizations in history that have gone down because they destroyed their soil and they couldn't feed their people i mean that's a fact and so this is not rocket science this is like learning from past mistakes and we just haven't learned a very well now son sometimes it's not a matter of learning in africa and in a huge case it's a matter of those farmers have no option you know they don't they don't have a choice they're trying to feed their family they're going to make that i mean someone wants and to be you know no one will starve to save a tree and there's not a more tr single statement and so it isn't like they set out to destroy something they don't have options and so one of the biggest one more real quick thing and there's a guy in the book daycare man who we talk about all of it and we're so used defining poverty by economic terms and so we say well the world bank says the dollar twenty five a day or it's two dollars a day and it's some economic term what jake says is i define poverty by how many choices people have and it's a really better way to look at it i was in democratic republic of congo a few years ago and we were meeting with coffee farmers that were worker cocoa farmers actually farmers that we were working with and this guy says the nie you know when i started in this project they told me i was earning a living living on a dollar a day and said now that i'm selling a cow coco to joe joe when he this guy  with us who's in the book too they tell me i make six dollars a day he says i don't know whether i make a dollar a day i don't know whether i make six dollars a day says that doesn't mean anything to me would mean something to me as before i couldn't feed my kids every day i couldn't send my kids to school today i can do it so you know we always say we're so it's so easy for us to think about poverty or certain things and always putting it in economic terms but if your kids are starving and dying you don't care whether you're making a dollar a day or five dollars a day you just care about how do i fix the problem you also don't care about whether you're encroaching on a forest to get the exactly you know exactly how or you're a note hill farm or here you're concerned about what you do the soil as a can you describe what noto agriculture is yeah although i mean i have to first and foremost say that i mean i am taking after my dad on that and i had the benefit of seeing a few dozen of his chances go by and observing you know it's true go i've only been farming for about three or four years now and so i was able to i guess leap frog a lot of things and we started in with no till which means you don't turn over the soil at any point during the year and so you  use a no till planter that deposits the seed directly in through the old crops cover that's left sitting on top of the soil and there's a lot of other things we do that are critical for conservation based farming we use cover crops which are crops that you don't harvest you plant them you let them grow and then they die ideally on their own during the winter frost and then that organic matter breaks back down and improves your soil content over time and then we also do a lot with nutrient management and this last year was my first year putting on fertilizer through my center pivots which is a highly more efficient way of doing it in a better timed release as well so we've looked at a number of specific practices that are really critical for conservation or biological based farming and one thing that gets me excited though is the government now actually has a conservation program called the conservation stewardship program and so for the first time since two thousand and eight they're actually contracting with farmers this is not a subsidy this is a contract for the farmer where if farmer takes on specific conservation based activities they'll get reimbursed for those costs dollar to dollar sometimes a little bit more and so i get about thirty seven dollars an acre in value from the government in order to implement specific conservation based activities which gets me excited because that means that our government is now placing an actual dollar value on what it means to preserve and improve your soil your water quality and your air and to me that that's exciting because we'll have those metrics that we can use going forward to incentivize even better behavior from our from our farmers let's talk about global climate conflict you seem to have a kind of an adventuresome spirit you know you go places where most people would never dream of going can you describe the relationship between global conflict and global hunger hunger creates conflict and conflict creates hunger you cannot separate them i i think i think probably the reason why we work in the places we work which would be south sudan in burundi and d r c and central african republic and sierra leone library in those places because i just feel like we should be able to take the risk the go into those places and try things other people may not want to try you're never going to get a government agency u idea or anybody else to go in and do very much in a conflict area and i think one of the things we learn in this in eastern d or c we're trying something very different and it's required a lot of time and effort i mean it's taken a lot away from the other things we've done because you have to show up and you have to show up often and you have to build relationships so we work with the president kabila gami in the seventy and we meet with farmers and tribal leaders and everybody to try to figure out the solutions and we of came to this conclusion a while back that that maybe we could use our development efforts to actually help create peace rather than waiting for peace to be created so that we can rush in and try to fix everything so w invest forty some million dollars this year just in north kivu and he's the one province probably do the same next year and it's total risk capital but we're building we're funding the largest infrastructure project in the province that will bring electricity to one hundred thirty thousand people we're funding road projects and water projects so the m twenty three the big rebel group one of them that has been the biggest focus recently just surrendered in the last two days and they're the group we used to meet with regularly because they control the area where we work and so if you look at that we have an instant demobilization i mean you know instead of waiting until something happens and scrambling and trying to figure it out we thought well let's let's do it the other way so we'll see what happens in a few years but our effort is to give people hope we learned this in afghanistan i mean people are under this is a place where over five six million people have died in the last decade or so this is a place where if you're a mother you likely don't think is my daughter going to get raped it's when is she going to get right now think about that every day the walk outside your home and you don't know you're not safe you don't know what to expect you're fearful i mean this is how people live millions of them and so you know it's absolutely not right and so we felt like could we participate in this differently so that we could try to use our dollars and our efforts to bring peace rather than then be kind of a solution to it later so you know those parts of the world are the places where i think we do best in a lot of people wouldn't want to be there and a lot of people aren't there but it's just it's a natural place for us to be you mention afghanistan a place where our government is militarily a lot of the work you've done through the department of defense which finds itself doing things other than  you answer because he's really has a lot of experience with it but what was interesting is they put together this this task force which is the one who i work for and what i found interesting is that and this is what i talk about taking risk and i realize you have taxpayers and transparency accountability and all these things you have to do but in afghanistan you're going to go out and see you know basically a tribal leader i got to tell you there's m machine around ok there's no can i write you a check there's no you know so you have guys going up there one hundred thousand dollars in cash but they're going up there because they're going to talk about how they're going to build a school we're going to talk about how they're going to get in food you know talk about whatever it is that that community leads and needs and and there's only one way to do it but it's a very unconventional way so the reason the task force eventually pretty much gotten down nothing is because people couldn't handle that process so we have an inherent conflict in how we do business and how the rest of the world does business in those kinds of circumstances it's not it's not easy i mean we have some other ideas and you know i mean you can use cell phones a day to do certain things and you know and but but it's a difficult thing because you have to go to them and relate to them the way that they want to solve the problem and you don't show up in the middle of some province in afghanistan and say here's your credit card and it just doesn't work so it's been a challenge but about how we should just talk for a minute about it he has more hands on experience and i do well fortunately i never had one of those bags of cash that's what he says that know afghanistan's an amazing place and i think one thing that that gave me hope but also frustrated me a little bit after our first trip when there was that public perception particularly back here in the united states it is incredibly skewed towards war destruction and bombings death and it's very dark and it's a very one sided perspective i think the media has really characterized afghanistan and and we got our first trip there on the ground and then subsequent trips after the you know we began to really learn about the community what their needs were the kinds of people that they were we met with farmers you know these are farmers who had no interest in growing poppy you know and grating opium and telling us that they they hated the fact that their previous years they were growing that substance that was addicting youth to a drug i mean they really just disdained it but one of the other interesting things we learned is that drug lords ironically are incredibly effective at value chains and that's what we in terms of a licit a legal crop that's what we struggle to create all over the world but when you're a drug lord you have a lot of advantages so in the case of growing opium or poppy in afghanistan the drug lords would show up at a farmer's doorstep they would hand them a seed they would pay them up front for the crop they would protect them throughout the year and checking to make sure they were doing things right and they would come and collect the crop after been harvested and everything was said and done it was a piece of cake those are all different services that we find incredibly hard to build develop or sustain in all different parts of the world and yet you know these guys are the bad guys on the ground who got it figured out to a tee unfortunately and so you know there was a lot of interesting lessons to learn from that and then of course existed in the country thirty some years ago so we had some very unique experiences there that i think at least for me adapted out to how we wanted to approach a value chain development in a lot of places around the world and yeah we mean we really do a lot from that i lie like the cash option kit as a joke you're listening to the westminster tile forum broadcast from westminster presbyterian church nicollette mall in downtown minneapolis i'm tim hart anderson senior minister of west been surprised that you're in church and moderator of the forum we're delighted to welcome to the tunnel forum authors and philanthropists howard g buffett and howard w buffett while the ushers collect questions from the in house audience i'd like to invite the radio audience to join us at westminster church at noon on thursday november twenty first when neurosurgeon dr eben alexander will discuss proof of heaven the nature of human consciousness visit our website westminster forum dot org for more information on our upcoming events the buffet name is synonymous with investment success how is your work fighting global hunger can two successful market investment you know it's a great question because the truth is a market system works with a certain amount of offish and sees that when you don't get things right somebody loses a job or someone votes you how or something happens philanthropies is a little bit the opposite and i think it's one of the things that we really have to try to change which is as as long you can raise money as long as you can convince people that what you're doing is worthwhile you can continue with a bad idea for a long time and and it's true and and so you know i have these jobs well it's not that easy but i have an easier job because as long as i don't have my dad mad at me i'm getting my money for the foundation and and as and as long as i  doesn't think i did something wrong then i've got incredible freedom incredible freedom to do things and so that freedom is something that i think i have an obligation to use but we i think so i think what the dynamics of both you know are very different and so it's up to us to challenge donors and the challenge ourselves and that the challenge n g o s to to be willing to have a little different mindset and a little set a little different paradigm so that everything doesn't have to be successful that you know we can we can fail we can try new things and that's what isn't very evident in philanthropy because everybody wants to feel like their money was well spent they want to feel like you know we had the success we feel good about it and you can feel good about failure you just have to know why and you actually can so i think it's the dynamics are so different i would say the most common thing that they have together is that our our biggest focus is we invest in people and so just like my dad would tell you that the success of berkshire is investing in good managers in all the different businesses that virtue or as i would say are the success that we have in the hope that we have is in investing in the investment that we put into people let's talk a bit about corruption you've probably experienced a good deal of it as you travel around the world how  op of an obstacle is corruption to making progress in fighting world hunger corruption is huge there's probably it's hard to boil down to one or two things but between land ownership and corruption those are private two biggest  of the five biggest impediments that we would run into and you know we have a story in the book about tony blair and what he's doing with his african government initiative a g i and we learn the hard way that you can do a lot of good things on the ground and they can absolutely pretty much not last because you've got somebody that will take advantage of it take it away change the rules and you know when a few people have power and they can exercise that power over a lot of people nothing works well if you look at a lot of countries in africa and it's know when i say it i mean there's we've got lots of problems here too but when you look at africa where we do our work there's a very strange dynamic because if i have diamonds or cobalt or oil i can make as  leader of a country i can eighties or leader the person who's in charge can can actually make a deal with somebody and become very wealthy protect their interest protect their power  and you do that by taking care of some of the generals and some of the other you know the judges and whatever there's plenty of history that goes with it tell you how you do it and they don't need my vote if i'm out there and they don't need my taxes so there's no system that demands accountability and no system that demands transparency in fact i'm i'm an advantage if i keep people fragmented and poor illiterate they are not going to not going to join up against me they're not going to understand as well what i'm doing and so the dynamics of what corruption does is it just undermines everything and that's a huge problem and it's probably the biggest single impediment to you how effective is a former leader like tony blair or for that matter a celebrity or an entertainer like obama or secure in really getting significant work done and alleviating global hunger i think it it can make a difference i will tell that you that tony is so committed to this and so passionate about it he he's to me he's one of the most hopeful people i know because i think he will change things i think he has changed things and he cares about doing it and he can stand toe to toe the prime minister president and he's done it he's been there he knows what the problems are and more importantly he knows what the solutions are in government and and when you talk about the solutions i'm not talk about the sophisticated complicated stuff and i'm not talking about whether you're deciding whether you go to war with you know the united states and afghanistan or so i'm talking about how do you make a government function i mean if you go to rwanda you know stuff just happens like this ok and that country works ok you go next door to democratic republic of congo it is not functional now there's something that makes a difference between those two countries and that difference is the ability to understand you know the important things you put in place i mean i can tell you i've been when i go see president khatami i show up he's there i see him things happen when i go to see other presidents i won't name him but i have showed up before at a presidential palace no one has my name on the list the appointments been made they tell me to go back to the hotel for a couple hours of calls later and then they calls later and then we come back and then they can't find my name on the list and say that starts all over again i spend a whole day trying to see the president and eventually i might see him but i mean you know people don't know if you're trying to attract business and you're trying to create jobs and you're trying to you know bill infrastructure you don't sit around you say there's these are places that do this i don't need to beat my head against the wall so you know it is a huge challenge and i just feel like somebody like tony is has the ability to walk in there and analyze it and make suggestions and the one thing really import about it is he does not go to a country obviously where he's not invited and so you know the president or someone the prime minister has to say we would like your help and then he comes and he actually integrates really good well talented people into the government they work side by side and make some changes let's talk about climate change what's the connection between climate change and global hunger if any well climate change really amounts to i don't know if it's part of a two hundred year two thousand year cycle but i do know this we have spewed a lot of stuff into there in this world we have cut down a lot of trees in this world we have destroyed a lot of water quality and soil quality i absolutely have to believe that those actions have contributed to a decline in our environment and if part of that is climate change and that's what it is but to me what i know is that that a lot of small farmers will be affected by it we've done you know you can do modeling and modeling is only as good as the information you put in it but if you if you look we did this in central america if you take some of there is in central america and you put in the current temperatures and you change those temperatures you know by three degrees or five agrees you can start to see what happens to your ability for crop production and it's going to hammer small it's our it already has in some places i mean it just hammers small farmers and one of their options you know it's like all you go to nicaragua and while i'm on hundred i mean every piece of that country is accounted for for somebody who's got it using it ok so it's like well move up the mountain you know thirty feet  grow better coffee it's not done work that way so you know i think climate change or however you want to define it it will have some net positive in some places in fact minnesota could be  positive if you're climate warms you will have a longer growing period as long as you know water but you know in many places particularly where there's poor farmers and in different climates other than temperate climates it could be a very net negative thing for farmers howard when you began farming you chose to do no till agriculture what about organic did you consider doing organic agriculture not at the scale that we have at least four hundred acres and we also at least in a farm in a basket don't have the ability right now to be managing livestock and so at the time no it hasn't been a viable option for us that we've considered is organic farming a way that world hunger might be will be primarily biologically based organic based because they have to be they don't have many options you don't think we're a long hunger can be solved by organic farming on a massive scale i think it's going to take every bit of every kind of farming and every farmer that can do it the best that works for them so i think the most important thing is to give farmers options and choices and most small farmers don't have those choices today and so how is correct in terms of my assessment that they'll be tens of millions of farmers and in africa that will be organic not by choice not because there's some great thing about being organic because they get some certification and they get more money for anything else like you do here they're going to be organic because they don't they don't have the access or they can't afford or they don't have the training or whatever it is so that's one of the things that's one reason why green revolution doesn't just work to replicate it in africa because those farmers are not going to be high fertiliser users are not all going to start out with hybrid seeds they're not going to have access to a geisha and so you know the things that the green revolution was built on don't exists or for those farmers so they'll be organic by default and we refer to as biologically biological farmers because i always get concerned when you think organic is a certain you know characteristic certain impression of what organic is in this country and that's not what it is over there you say we need all kinds of farming that include genetically modified foods but i know you're what i know is that we went into it quickly in this country but this quite a country was is as regulated as any country in the world and you can debate all day long whether we should have done a better job of that and i wouldn't debate that we could have done a better job of that but where we are is where we are and we can't go backwards on it so the question is the really understand it as well as we can you know the thing that's really frustrating for me when we talk about agricultural development particularly in africa and central america is those are not there's not a farmer i met in central america or africa that would benefit from g m knows not a single one yet ok now that doesn't mean someday they might not but the truth is they're starting at at a at a benchmark so much lower than how we think in this country that the last thing i would worry about would be getting them g m o seeds i would be worried about how do you build soil health how do you get cover crops how do you get either improved open pollinated varieties or better hybrids and one of the things that people do in this debate is a they say all hybrids are g m o so that's just so untrue i mean ten fift twenty years ago g m was an existing we had great hybrids so it gets it's more complicated it's a hard thing to answer you know simply but you know for the very most important thing is understand the science and understand the implications and i'm the last one that would want to see anything that we do from an agricultural standpoint damage our environment so i think you know it's a tough balancing act and the other thing is we need to you this is important to say i mean we need to use all the technology that we can to fight hunger and usually you want to me say that because i mean technology is not going to fix a lot of things and and hunger agriculture but we still need to tap into that resource and make sure that what is available and what we feel is safe and what science supports that we use it so you know there the worst thing in the whole g m o debate is you get people on each side of it companies on one side people on one side whatever that just dig their heels and draw lines in the sand and now everything is going to be either this way or this way and you're never going to solve the problem that way let's talk about u s government policy or there are one or two changes you i got to tell you who would want to run for congress that's the problem i mean you know but but yeah i think you know first of all the farm bill has been debated on and on and on and as ever you know i don't know when it was over get done  i think the biggest mistake we've made in our farm bill for years has been that conservation has not been the primary focus and has not been funded like it should be funded so in that respect you know taxpayers pay for the farm bill but taxpayers also have a benefit from a great agricultural system that provides choice diversity safety you know inexpensive food all those things so it's not a perfect world but we it's a lot better than most places in the world in terms of how we're able to walk to the supermarket on every other corner and have choices so and afford most of it so i think you know the farm bill is something that needs to be accountable to the public and the most accountable thing to the public is how do we keep our water clean how do we preserve our soil you know how do we take care of our environment and all of those things are at the absolute bottom of the list of the farm bill and always have been in a very first one to get cut so that would be one policy that i would say really needs a lot of work but about america you haven't discussed hunger in america what's your foundation doing about that what we're we're we're very involved in it now in the last few years we work a lot with feeding america they are of been a great partner they work in every county across the country that's one reason why when we partnered with them is because we wanted to scale but you know if you look if you look in this country you know we have enough food to feed everybody in this country it's a matter of distribution access affordability political will is probably the biggest one it's complicated i mean it's not easy but the truth where their meal's going to come from that day they don't know that they can feed their kids or they go to bed there's something really wrong with that in this country i think it should shock people but it doesn't i mean it does  but it should really shock people and we should do better than that and the truth is this is where i always say everybody can do something because the most effective and i'm not saying this because i'm sitting here the but the most effective organizations in fighting hunger in this country are churches and organizations that that they get volunteers and go out as meals on wheels and it's serving meals here at your soup kitchen and it's voluntary at the food bank it's doing all these things that that actually do change lives for people who don't have the same opportunities that we have or the same access to the services that we have and so in this country i think it's a really serious issue it's gotten worse the last four or five years it used to be about thirty seven million people now fifty million people obviously it's related to the economy there are some of those things we can't do anything about but i think it's really hard to think about the fact that we have neighbors  quick story that we're sitting at thanksgiving two years ago and we're talking about this and my daughter who lives in madison wisconsin she said why you know i had this really interesting experience about two weeks ago i accidently left my garage door up all night and we have two cars and there was some money in the cars or skateboards and lawn mowers and you know bikes and all this different stuff and she said you know the only thing anybody took was a food out of a river extra refrigerator and she lives in a nice neighborhood i mean you know so hunger is everywhere in this country it's hidden in this country and i think that you know when you have when you have a country like this it should be shameful we can't feed our population and feed them properly what in your experience is the role of women and empowering women in alleviating global hunger well i always say that the fastest way and i mean this the fastest way to see change in africa is the have at least half of the continent twenty five countries be led by women i think that women bring a different thinking process a different  is very biased because i had a mother that had a strong influence on me but but i you know i think i boy i can boil it down to the ross part of what i mean which is i've been in a lot a lot of places where there's starvation and malnutrition and people have to make really tough choices and the truth is in those situations if there is minimal resources a woman will take care of her family first and better than a man will now if you can translate that into politics and policy and innovation and ideas which i know you can then you will see a different kind of leadership and so i don't understand why i mean it's taken us a long time in this country to get to where we are and we so long ways ago but when you go to cultures where we have this experience and afghanistan where we had done a project where women had access to farmland for the first time on their own and everybody wanted to talk to the women i said that you know i actually had rather talk to their husbands we could only find one husband that would talk to me but he stood there with his wife and the husband and he was all through translation and he basically what he finally said as well and i understand my wife has some value and i thought  wow if i said that the my wife i mean you know and so but but it's it's it's a huge mindset shift i mean you know so if we go over there in development and we don't even understand how far apart the thinking is on stuff like that we're never going to get it right and so when it when it comes to that i just think you know if you believe that all human beings are created equal and if you believe that all people should have equality and access to equal services an opportunity then why in the heck are we treated women the way we've treated them  nominee and i could have my grandkids giving money away and you know great but why would i think why would i want to do that the problems are so big today there are people dying today there are people hungry today what i what i what i what i pile up money so that somebody else and give it away in the future and why would i do that was some i don't know what my grandkids are going to be interested in i don't know if they'll even be good at figuring out how to give money away and giving money away is not so easy if you want to do it intelligently anyone have impact i mean i've learned that i've made a lot of mistakes so you know i want to i want to take those mistakes and use them productively with the money now so i don't i mean i  get why people want to build a legacy and they want to do certain things and there would be people who clearly would disagree with me but i just look at i think all right i have this ability and this opportunity to use a huge financial resource why would i not use it now to try to fix as many problems or address as many problems as i can now and i have this great fortune also i have several i have three of my kids that are trustees and those three kids all bring different skill sets out of the five of them there's three of them on there and that causes me another problem but and you know but they all contribute and they're and they understand different things and they bring value to it and so why would i harness that energy and that passion and the interest in the opportunity and do it now i just i don't you know you know you don't sit back and say well i think maybe in twenty thirty years i'll try to earn some money i mean you know you're trying to do it now you want to get it done now and so i just don't i that's how i look at it we have t time for one final question that you've been to one hundred thirty plus countries you've seen some awful situations about which you probably can't even speak it's so terrible how do you not get overwhelmed by that how do you hang on to hope while there is a long time where i was overwhelmed the be honest with me and i think it started partly because when i really started using photography as i mentioned earlier as a tool to try to collect damages that's overwhelming you come home and  relive what you just saw and you don't know what you can do about it so the way that you get hope is you figure out what can you do about it and really the truth is that writing this book  probably gave me more hope than any single thing i've done because it forced me to look at what have we done what have we done well what are we not done well but who are the people that i've met who are the people that every day make a personal sacrifice to get out there and try to do something better for other people when they don't have to do it or when when they could do something else for themselves so the book really is about our experiences in terms of i think in a sense how have we found hope because it's a pretty depressing world in a lot of ways and it is pretty overwhelming the challenges are big but i would just say that you know everybody can do something you've got to show up to do it  show out there it out use your skills figure out what it is you can do and everybody can contribute to help somebody else and it's not that hard to do thank you howard g buffett and howard w buffett th