“Take It To the Farmer”—Patience Koku to Speak at 2023 Borlaug Dialogue

Patience Koku is slated to speak at the 2023 Borlaug Dialogue on Tuesday, October 24, 2023. She’ll bring a first-person perspective on living and working and farming in Nigeria, a region  dealing with bandits, a lack of fertilizer and lack of genesis-edited biological solutions that enable cereals to fix nitrogen, issues that are impacting food security today and looking forward.

She has discussed these in a GFN column:

We’re not looking for charity or subsidies. We want markets to work, allowing more fertilizer to make its way to the part of the world that has the greatest potential to boost its food production. This means robust trade networks as well as healthy financial services. It also calls for political stability—and not the coup d’état chaos we’ve seen recently in Niger, which borders my nation to the north. And we have our own troubles in Nigeria, where bandits have overrun some of our best agricultural land.”  Continue reading more here.

The 2023 Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue has selected the theme Harnessing Change. On Tuesday, October 24, five GFN members will share their story of harnessing innovation, adaptation, and diversification during “Take It To the Farmer” programming:

• Jose Gonzalez Chacon, Colombia
• Marcus Holtkoetter, Germany
• Kornelis Huizinga, Ukraine
• Patience Koku, Nigeria
• Rotimi Williams, Nigeria