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US-China Agriculture Conference Aimed at Future
About 200 scholars, high-ranking government officials and industry representatives from the United States and China met this week at a bilateral agriculture conference to discuss the challenge of feeding a growing world population in a way that protects environmental and economic health.
The conference, Cooperation for Progress in the 21st Century, was held Monday and Tuesday at Riverside, California.
Experts from both sides talked about land use, soil quality, water resources, pest management, biotechnology, traditional plant breeding, food processing, trade, environmental protection and labor.
They also drew up plans for cooperation to outline ways that policy-makers and scholars from the United States and China can work together to solve agricultural issues shared by two of the world's most agriculturally productive nations.
"This conference is not about the past, but about the future," said Raymond Orbach, Chancellor of University of California at Riverside (UCR), who was instrumental in arranging the chance for an academic exchange with high-ranking US and Chinese agriculture ministers. "I can think of no more important goal than feeding the world's population," Orbach said.
"In the short term, we will be planting the seeds for future cooperation," said Federici, a UCR entomology professor. "In the long-run, we are going to find that some of those professional relationships bear fruit in scientific discoveries."
Zhang Baowen, Vice Minister of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, and Richard Rominger, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture delivered speeches at the conference.
The conference was a joint effort of UCR, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, China Agriculture University, the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the UC Pacific Rim Research Program, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and the United States Department of Agriculture.
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