Gordon Conway Keynote Speaker

Sir Gordon Conway (KCMG, FRS and Hon FREng) is an internationally known expert on agricultural development, food and nutrition security.

He is Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London and Director of Agriculture for Impact, an advocacy team funded by the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation.

In recent, illustrated and provocative, speeches including to the Waitrose Board in the UK, he stresses the challenges of feeding the world by 2050, coping with both population increases and rapidly changing diets, and introduces the concept of sustainable intensification with which he is strongly identified. He goes on to discuss the dynamics and practice of value chains, in terms of value, risk and resilience and uses them to position discussions of waste, nutrition, land rights etc. He concludes with a briefing on the likely impacts of climate change on all of these factors.

He is trained as an agricultural ecologist and economist (Bangor, Cambridge, West Indies (Trinidad), California (Davis)). He has 50 years of experience living and working in northern Borneo, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Nepal, the Middle East and, most latterly, in Africa.

Among senior appointments he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Susses, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Chief Scientist of DFID.

He is the author of the classic text “The Doubly Green Revolution,” (1997) and more recently “One Billion Hungry” (2012).