The first report, ‘2011 State of the World: Innovations that Nourish the Planet’, was produced by the Worldwatch Institute. The report is based on two years of extensive reviews of farming and food across Africa. It highlights the centrality of women as the major contributors to farming, the massive post harvest losses that remain common, and the importance of taking an ecological approach to addressing soil health. It is illustrated with many optimistic stories of real progress in boosting productivity in a continent that contains over 250 million of the world’s 1 billion hungry.

The second report, a product of the United Kingdom’s Foresight team and entitled ‘The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability’ is based in the inputs of over 400 scientists around the world. The report paints a stark picture of a failing food system that will be subject to greater volatility in years to come. It highlights how the current food system has negative impacts on global water use, green house gas emissions, biodiversity and human health.

At the official launch on January 25^th, the report received strong support from the UK government along with a commitment to act on the domestic and international recommendations.  These include: increasing food supply in a more sustainable and intensified way and through greater use of a range of technology options; moderating demand for some foods, particularly meat; reducing waste (post harvest waste in Africa and post purchase waste in developed countries); and building closer links between nutrition and agriculture (with a greater focus on biofortification being just one example cited).

The emphasis on Africa comes just as PepsiCo has announced plans to step up its activities on the continent. This creates unprecedented opportunities to partner with leading development agencies like the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and build private-public alliances aimed at boosting ecologically sustainable forms of agriculture that are directly linked to job creation and hunger elimination.

The focus on sustainable agriculture comes as we implement our bold commitments on health and the environment in a more integrated way. For example, as we expand our dairy business, we will need to consider ways of offsetting the increased methane production it will cause with tree planting and other agricultural investments.

The success of our Global Nutrition Group, and in fact all of PepsiCo, will increasingly depend upon how we secure our supply chain for the future. And this will increasingly require us to redouble our insights and investments in sustainable agriculture. I urge our readers to read these reports and send comments about how you feel we should respond in the short, medium and long term. This might start by committing to eat less meat, starting a vegetable garden, or becoming a volunteer!

Undernutrition is one of the world’s most serious and least addressed global health and development problems. As a global food and beverage company, PepsiCo believes it can play an important role in reducing the human and economic costs of the issue. Women and children are undernutrition’s biggest victims and, along with other development challenges, undernutrition causes an estimated 3.5 million preventable maternal and child deaths a year.  Folate deficiency, which contributes to premature birth, low birthweight and neural tube defects in infants, plays a crucial role in undernutrition. The human body requires folate to manufacture erythrocytes, synthesize DNA, and to regulate normal growth. The recommended daily intake for young women is 400 mg. Poor overall nutrition and lack of access to folate-enriched food products present a critical barrier to women in developing countries.

As part of the our response to this issue, PepsiCo worked closely with the New York Academy of Sciences, InnoCentive and Scientists Without Borders to develop a recently posted “Challenge” on food fortification for women in developing countries.  The Challenge seeks to leverage open innovation for solutions to develop a low-cost, practicable, and scalable method to effectively and safely fortify or supplement staple foods with folic acid.  Folic acid supplementation in the pre-conception phase is critical for saving the lives of millions of infants and yet many women in developing countries face many barriers to getting enough folate through their diets.  Socio-economic considerations suggest that solutions that give women control are likely to have greatest impact. Read more here about this exciting approach to help solve a critical nutrition and public health problem, and if you have solutions, please submit them!

Since the announcement of our participation in ScienceBlogs.com, we’ve heard some very candid feedback from the ScienceBlogs community. As many of you have undoubtedly heard by now, the Food Frontiers blog has been removed from ScienceBlogs. In hearing the community’s feedback, we agree with this decision and feel that the best approach is to take a step back and first examine the role industry scientists, such as myself, can play in the discussion about nutrition science within the larger scientific community.

We knew going in that there would be real differences among scientists within and outside of industry. Our intent is to embrace that conversation, share what we’re doing, and have open discussions to learn from one another as we move toward real solutions. We look forward to engaging in those discussions in communities such as ScienceBlogs as well as here on Food Frontiers.

On a personal note, I joined PepsiCo as its Chief Scientific Officer because the company is committed to making a positive impact on global nutrition. In this role, I am responsible for focusing efforts and attention on nutrition science and solutions.

Since I joined the company, we’ve expanded our global research and development capability. Our network of leaders comes from diverse fields of classic nutrition science, epidemiology, endocrinology, molecular biology, agronomy and sensory science.

As we continue our work, I am enthusiastic about sharing insights while also hearing and learning from the larger scientific community online. That is why I would like to open an invitation to anyone interested in food and nutrition science to join the conversation on Food Frontiers.

We will continue to talk about specific science, nutrition and global health policy topics – and we’ll open the floor to include more voices to help us best address them through science-based solutions.

I speak for all of us when I say; we look forward to productive and substantive dialogue.

The report took two years to complete. Its bland number and boring cover hide the power of its simple messages and the complexity and broad based partnerships it will take to implement them.

It set out to document the optimal diets and level of physical activity populations required to minimize their lifelong risks for a range of chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes. This required bringing together experts from around the world to sift through the cumulative wisdom of many and distill their ideas into a set of science-based nutrient and activity specific conclusions about what we should eat more or less of; and how much physical activity was desirable.

The main messages were not terribly surprising: eat less sugar, salt, saturated fats from red meat and dairy products; eat more fruits, vegetables, fish, nuts, grains and legumes; and be more active. But behind every food group or nutrient the report suggested was needed less of, stood many food companies, industry trade associations and defenders of the status quo. And they were not going to simply accept the recommendations without a mighty fight.

Luckily while the report was moving through the many decision makers’ corridors, an outreach effort was quietly underway between the food industry and WHO. It started gingerly, filled with suspicion on both sides. But is now forming into a mechanism for sustained dialogue and in time, we hope, joint action.

Within PepsiCo, 916 now has been embraced as a critical input into how we define nutrition criteria for all our products-along with a few other core national guidelines. And we know that many other companies and governments are using it as they develop norms for their populations.

Sitting where I do now, it is clear that we could have done so much better at developing actionable norms if the climate for collaboration between WHO and the food industry had been better then. The cost of distrust meant that industry insights are only now being used to develop population approaches to tackling the diet and activity underpinnings of chronic diseases.

But I sense that we are turning the corner on change. That private, public and community based groups now understand that the siloed and often ideological differences of the past must give way for real collaboration. Collaboration that is driven by our common desire to improve global nutrition.

For those one billion individuals however, the consequences of dismissal are enormous and range from diminished intellectual development of children to reduced economic productivity of communities and nations. Those most affected are very young, often rural, very often women and typically marginalized in society.  They lack the energy to organize for themselves. They lack the voice to call for change or the power to mandate it.

Here’s the hard truth — one billion hungry people are relying on people like you and me to reach out and support efforts to address their most basic need for food. I for one am eager to help. I’m passionate about the issue and I feel incredibly proud that I work for an organization that is both willing and capable of making a real difference.

At PepsiCo we believe in “Performance with Purpose” – where improved health and nutrition is seen as a key to addressing the human dimension of purpose. As an operating philosophy, Performance with Purpose enables us to develop programs that make a real difference in the world, while at the same time delivering results for the business.

One such program is Asha.   Sanskrit for “hope,” Asha is PepsiCo’s multi-country effort to address the nutrition needs of the world’s poorest. Through the Asha program colleagues from across the company are exploring ways in which PepsiCo can deliver the greatest impact on global hunger. They’re donating their time and expertise in areas such as research, marketing, finance, procurement and distribution to find solutions for those in need in Dallas, the Nigerian countryside, Mumbai and everywhere in between.

Through the Asha program we’ve seen the start of serious debate about the need for new business models that will support such initiatives. We keep finding examples of product or processing research developed for high-end markets that have applications for the poorest consumers. For example, work on protein snacks for boomers could address a protein lack in many of the urban poor and better ways of fortifying iron could address one of the most intractable deficiencies we face.

We keep finding amazing partners in the communities and countries we seek to work who are pushing us to do more – these extend from Naandi in India who provide hundreds of thousands of meals to school kids; to the nutrition department of the South African government; and global players like GAIN and Synergos which actively work to provide real nutrition solutions.

Will we succeed in changing the face of global hunger? It is way too early to be certain. What my colleagues and I at PepsiCo are certain about it simple – when passions and expertise are channeled to address real problems, absolutely anything is possible.