During the Green revolution, the environment often took a back seat to productivity. Conway says there are “four routes” that should be pursued to ensure food security: innovation, markets, focusing on people and political leadership.

“If we take innovation first, what we’re trying to do there is to produce appropriate innovations -- innovations that bring about high productivity, but don’t have the side effects that maybe occurred in the past. And with markets, we want fair markets and efficient markets. With people, it’s particularly about engaging women, because a large number of farmers in Africa and the developing world as a whole are women. And political leadership – it’ll only work if leaders really focus on agricultural development and food security,” he said.

The Imperial College London professor said this also hinges on mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change.

“If you take Africa, the prediction is by 2050 the growing seasons will have shortened by five percent. I was in northern Ghana last year and the growing season was very short. In other words, the rains came a month late and they finished a month early. Secondly, the temperatures are going up. In Africa, as the temperatures get above 30 degrees [Celsius] the maize crop begins to suffer,” he said.

Food security on the household, country and global levels becomes even more important as the world population grows. The U.N. estimates it will rise to more than nine billion by 2050. That’s about two billion more than we have now.