It's a wonderful question. Thank you for that.
The green revolution technologies, which are ubiquitous and miraculous in the west, were developed with a number of assumptions that were perfectly legitimate. The scientists who developed the hybridized seeds, etc., assumed that farms were large and relatively fertile, that markets functioned, the politics were stable, and that rural populations were relatively sparse. In other words, they assumed the conditions of North America and to a large extent parts of Europe. In those conditions these technologies and these companies' technologies work exceedingly well.
The problem is that those conditions don't exist in major parts of the world. In those parts of the world there's an enormous yield gap between what could be achieved theoretically and what is currently being achieved. The subtle point is that if we are going to develop new technologies to close this yield gap, to boost yields in sub-Saharan Africa, we have to engage in new kinds of partnerships between agricultural experts where the expertise largely resides in the west and the farmers who are going to use those technologies in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia.
It requires not just a new approach to developing science but a new approach to how we fund science and how we develop partnerships. In my opinion, it comes back to my point about the desire to link the development agencies and the agricultural agencies to fund and establish some of these initiatives. The Oxfam point needs to be well taken, and it requires us to rethink how we do science.