Glenn Denning, Professor of Practice at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and founding Director of the Master of Public Administration in Development Practice program, reflects on his remarkable 40-year career in international agricultural development. From his serendipitous start as a suburban Brisbane student who overheard a conversation about a cancelled research trip to Indonesia, Denning has become one of the world’s leading experts in food security and sustainable development. He has advised governments and international organisations on agriculture and food policy in more than 50 countries, served on the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force, and played key roles in transforming agricultural systems from post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia to the Millennium Villages across Africa. In 2023, he won the Global Australian of the Year Award, and in 2024 was honoured as Alumnus of the Year by the University of Queensland. His recent book, "Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet", synthesises decades of experience into a comprehensive framework for ending global hunger.
Glenn Denning, Professor of Practice at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and founding Director of the Master of Public Administration in Development Practice program, reflects on his remarkable 40-year career in international agricultural development. From his serendipitous start, Denning has become one of the world’s leading experts in food security and sustainable development. He has advised governments and international organisations on agriculture and food policy in more than 50 countries, served on the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force, and played key roles in transforming agricultural systems from post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia to the Millennium Villages across Africa. In 2023, he won the Global Australian of the Year Award, and in 2024 was honoured as Alumnus of the Year by the University of Queensland. His recent book, "Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet", synthesises decades of experience into a comprehensive framework for ending global hunger.
The conversation begins with Denning’s unexpected path into agriculture, starting as a suburban Brisbane student with no farming background who chose Agricultural Science at the University of Queensland simply because he enjoyed growing things and wanted to work outdoors. His international career began through pure serendipity when he overheard a fellow student saying he could no longer take up a research opportunity in Indonesia. Within minutes, Denning had volunteered for the position, leading to a year in Bali studying pasture science at Udayana University under the Australian Asian Universities Cooperation Scheme in 1975.
This led to his next role with the Philippine Australian Development Assistance Program (PAAPP) in Zamboanga del Sur, Mindanao, during the conflict-affected 1970s. As one of only two agriculturalists among 40 Australian expatriates working primarily on road construction, Denning quickly learned that simply demonstrating new technologies to farmers was insufficient without addressing their fundamental constraint: lack of access to credit. Working with a modest $25,000 Australian government guarantee fund, he helped design a credit program through the Philippine National Bank that achieved approximately 90% repayment rates among hundreds of farmers, proving that small-scale farmers would responsibly utilise credit when given the opportunity.
Denning’s 18-year tenure at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) began through another case of substitution when he was asked to cover for someone taking sabbatical leave. His most significant achievement during this period was his work in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, where IRRI had preserved 766 traditional Cambodian rice varieties in their gene bank, collected just as the intense bombing of Cambodia began in 1972-73. Working with the Cambodian government from 1986, Denning helped establish the Cambodian Agricultural Research and Development Institute and contributed to a remarkable transformation that saw rice production increase from two million tons to nine million tons over three decades, turning Cambodia from food aid-dependent to a rice exporter. For this work, he was honoured by the Government of Cambodia as Commander of the Royal Order of Sahametrei in 2000.
After 18 years at IRRI, institutional changes led Denning to accept a position with the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, where he spent six years directing African development programs. This positioned him to join Jeffrey Sachs in establishing what would become the Millennium Villages Project. Rather than accepting an offer to head the Mekong River Commission, Denning agreed to establish a Technical Support Centre in Nairobi that would work across multiple sectors — agriculture, health, infrastructure, energy, and education — to support African nations in achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
The Millennium Villages Project represented a blueprint-based approach to integrated rural development, working in 12 countries with a strict budget cap of $100-110 per person per year. The project was designed as “a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty” and was intended to prove the merits of a holistic, integrated approach to rural development. Denning witnessed transformational changes in villages where agricultural production doubled, school attendance improved, and maternal mortality decreased. However, he acknowledges that the project’s main weakness was insufficient engagement with middle levels of government — working effectively with presidents and village leaders but not adequately involving district and provincial authorities who were crucial for sustainability and scale.
Despite criticism regarding evaluation methodology and sustainability concerns, Denning defends the project’s “sense of urgency” approach, arguing that waiting to establish perfect monitoring and evaluation systems would have delayed critically needed interventions. He points to several innovations that did scale nationally, including anti-malarial bed net distribution programs and locally-sourced school meal programs that were adopted by the World Food Programme.
Denning’s 2023 book on food security emerged from his involvement in developing the Sustainable Development Goals around 2014, when he was asked to address how to actually end hunger rather than simply reduce it. His framework identifies five major investment areas: sustainable intensification of agriculture, market connectivity, post-harvest stewardship (addressing the one-third of food that is wasted or lost), dietary shifts toward healthier consumption patterns and social protection systems for the 1.5 to 2 billion people who cannot guarantee their own food security. Underpinning these technical interventions, he emphasises the critical importance of transformational leadership at all levels of society.
The interview explores the evolution of integrated rural development from the 1970s-80s era that saw projects like PAAPP to modern approaches emphasising localisation and community ownership. While supporting the principle of greater local leadership, Denning argues that the core concept of integrated rural development remains sound, with implementation challenges stemming from insufficient engagement with sub-national governance levels and over-reliance on top-down project structures.
Denning concludes with reflections on Australia’s current role in regional food security, arguing that the country has unique qualifications for leadership in the Indo-Pacific region given its track record of agricultural innovation in challenging environments, long history of agricultural aid programs, and the strong demand for solutions from regional partners. He points to China’s prioritisation of agriculture as national security, Indonesia’s ambitious school meal program reaching 83 million children, and Pacific nations’ new focus on food security resilience following COVID-19 disruptions as evidence of convergent interests that Australia should engage with more actively.
Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet by Glenn Denning (Columbia University Press)
Please note: We provide transcripts for information purposes only. Anyone accessing our transcripts undertake responsibility for assessing the relevance and accuracy of the content. Before using the material contained in a transcript, the permission of the relevant presenter should be obtained.
Glenn Denning (opening grab): I really wasn’t thinking so much about international development… it all came about through, truly through serendipity. I was standing with a group of our students… and I overheard a conversation about somebody who was going off to Indonesia to do field research for a master’s degree, and that he was saying that he was no longer going to go for family reasons, whatever. So I went down and met his professor… And he said, “Yeah, well, would you be interested in going to Bali and spending a year there?… And that’s how it all started, just a conversation overheard and off I went to Indonesia in 1975.
Acknowledgement of Country: We wish to acknowledge the indigenous people of Australia, the wider Asia-Pacific region and other parts of the world, and express our respect for their traditional knowledge and practices, which stem from a deep connection to the lands and waters they have inhabited for millennia.
Robin Davies: Welcome to Devpolicy Talks, the podcast of the Development Policy Centre. We’re part of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra.
I’m Robin Davies.
This is our twelfth season, and we’re bringing you a mix of interviews, event recordings, and in-depth features on topics central to our research — Australia’s overseas aid, development in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, and other regional and global development issues.
In this episode, I speak with Glenn Denning, Professor of Practice at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. His remarkable 40-year career in international agricultural development began through pure serendipity when he overheard a conversation about a cancelled research trip to Indonesia. From his beginnings as a suburban Brisbane student with no farming background, Denning has become one of the world’s leading experts in food security and sustainable development.
His career has included pioneering work in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, where he helped establish the Cambodian Agricultural Research and Development Institute and contributed to transforming the country from food aid-dependent to rice exporter, and co-leadership of the ambitious Millennium Villages Project across Africa. Along the way, he spent 18 years at the International Rice Research Institute, directed programs at the World Agroforestry Centre and served on the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force.
In 2023, Denning won the Global Australian of the Year Award for his efforts to end global hunger, and in 2024 was honoured as Alumnus of the Year by the University of Queensland. His recent book, Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet, synthesises decades of field experience into a comprehensive framework for ending global hunger.
In our conversation, we explore how his academic training intersects with the political realities of development work, the evolution of integrated rural development approaches from the 1970s to today, and what role Australia might play in supporting food security across the Indo-Pacific region.
Glenn Denning: My name is Glenn Denning. I’m a professor of practice at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.
Robin Davies: I might start by asking how you got into agriculture. I know you did your degree, your undergraduate degree, at UQ [University of Queensland] in agricultural studies. At that point, were you aiming to work in the Australian agricultural sector, or did you have international ambitions?
Glenn Denning: I really didn’t have any specific vision of where I was going to go. The reason I found myself in agriculture, which is pretty unlikely, because I grew up in the suburbs of Brisbane. I wasn’t a country boy in those days. Most people who took ag were actually from the countryside, from rural Queensland, but I was from the suburbs. My father was a farmer, but before we came along, and so I used to hear a little bit about agriculture and farming, and I have always had an interest in plants and growing things. And I thought, well, maybe this is something one could sort of earn a living from. You could actually be outdoors and enjoy growing things. And so I chose Agricultural Science at UQ and did my four years actually specialised in soil science, more by default than anything else. It just seemed sort of a grounding in growing things, literally.
But again, as I graduated, I was open to all options, domestic… I really wasn’t thinking so much about international development, but interestingly, for me, at least, it all came about through, truly through serendipity. I was standing with a group of our students in fourth year. It was having a coffee outside tea or something else. And I overheard a conversation about somebody who was going off to Indonesia to do field research for a master’s degree, and that he was saying that he was no longer going to go for family reasons. And, you know, I was a few feet away from him, and I heard this, and I sort of went over. “You’re not going, who’s going in your place?” He said, “I don’t know.” So I went down and met his professor, a guy named Ross Humphreys. And Ross looked at me, and he said, “Well, you’re not really, this was in sort of pasture science. And he said, you’re not really doing pasture. He’s going soils, right?” “Yeah, yeah. But I’m interested in pasture and growing things.” And so he said, “Come back in a week.” And during which time, he probably checked out my grades, and I wasn’t a troublemaker or something or other. And he said, “Yeah, well, would you be interested in going to Bali and spending a year there? You’ll have to take a few courses before you go to sort of get yourself up to speed on pasture science.” And that’s how it all started, just a conversation overheard and off I went to Indonesia in 1975.
So that was Udayana University Faculty of Animal Husbandry, but they had a pasture science group under a professor named Marty Nitus, and it was under something called the Australian Asian Universities Cooperation Scheme (AUCS), which was set up in 1969 by what was then the Australian Vice Chancellors Association, a group of universities. The vice chancellors wanted to have more of a footprint and an impact in the region. So it’s a sort of university-to-university cooperation, exchange of faculty, exchange of students, which is a really interesting model. And UQ was one of the early leaders in that. I know ANU was as well, and was involved in that in the early days through Sir John Crawford.
Robin Davies: Yeah, yeah. And I assume there was some Australian aid program involvement in supporting that network.
Glenn Denning: I don’t know exactly how the funds flowed, but it was certainly part of the aid program for something as relatively small as that. It had a fairly high profile. We had, I remember Dick Woolcott was the ambassador, the Australian Ambassador to Indonesia, and he flew down to Bali a couple of times when I was there. And we always met with him, had dinner with him, and he chatted about our program as small as it was, a number of others. From, I think it was Melbourne Uni and other universities came up and gave short courses and this sort of thing at Udayana while I was there, but I was kind of the resident Australian at the university. So it was very interesting, and it was a good initial exposure to tropical agriculture and to some extent, international development having a chance to work on the ground.
Robin Davies: And then subsequently you took on a role with the Zamboanga del Sur agricultural development project in the Philippines, a development project.
Glenn Denning: It used to go by the acronym PAAPP, the Philippine Australian Development Assistance Program. It wasn’t all of the development assistance in the country, but it was pretty high-profile integrated rural development project, which was all the buzz in sort of ‘70s and ‘80s. So I finished my master’s degree at UQ back in Queensland. And this, again, an opportunity came up recruiting an agronomist to work in far flung Mindanao. And at that stage, conflict-affected Mindanao. There was a lot of conflict going on, but it probably one of Australia’s, if not the largest sort of individual, bilateral project in Australia going on at the time, building roads mainly. And so the idea was, okay, we’ll build roads. And you, as the agronomist, will go in there and help the farmers. You would demonstrate new technologies and help the farmers take advantage of these new roads to market their products. So that was the kind of broad introduction. And as luck would have it, I was able to get that job with an Australian consultancy firm, and went up there as part of this big project. I think we had about, these were the golden days of big projects, I think we had about 40 expat Australians at one point on that project. And I was the second agriculturalist in the development program. The rest were all building roads, bridges, irrigation schemes and so on. But again, that was a really interesting exposure, because it helped me understand how you don’t just go to a place and demonstrate something to farmers and they miraculously pick it up and run with it and start benefiting from new technologies. It was very clear that farmers didn’t have the resources, they didn’t have the money to be able to invest in seeds and fertilisers and whatever else they needed to prosper and take advantage of technology. So one of the first things I did was help design a credit program with the Philippine National Bank, sort of understanding the role of institutions in supporting agricultural development, and therefore, as a result, being able to take advantage of the roads. The roads were fantastic. Ever since, I’ve been a great proponent of rural infrastructure, and particularly transport infrastructure, because of the benefits that farmers get from having access to everything, to health services to extension services to schools, education, all of this is improved by roads, but also they’re able to market their services, they market their products, and generate the sort of income that would then stimulate development as a result.
Robin Davies: And was the credit scheme part of the original design of the project, or that’s something you brought to it?
Glenn Denning: The concept was that I would demonstrate new technologies so various crop varieties and use of fertilisers and all of these things. And I would go around and conduct these demonstrations, and it all sounded sensible to me to what end. Like, how? “Yeah, we like these mung beans. We like we know that you put a bit of fertiliser on corn, and you’ll get an extra ton of it. But how do we actually get that?” So the thing was that in those days, all of the money, you know, this was the heyday of President Marcos, and he was really focused on rice. This was upland rolling hillside. There was no rice, but very little rice in the province at all. So none of the existing sort of formalised credit programs were supporting these farmers. So in this case, I basically had to get AusAid back then or AIDAB (Australian International Development Assistance Bureau). I think it was to come up with guaranteed funds. We got $25,000 from the Australian government as a special guarantee fund against which farmers could borrow, and we were able to convince the Philippine National Bank to lend money at virtually no risk. At least I wanted to have an actual institution doing it, instead of me running around with a bag of seeding money and whatever, having farms borrow through me. I wanted them to borrow through a bank, so that the Philippine National Bank eventually they were convinced. We showed them the numbers. And those are the days you could have engineers designing a road project, and then you could just improvise around the edges, so you could do that. Now it was pretty good. We then also, by the way, in terms of improvisation, after a year or so, we realised that actually we needed more research. We needed more applied field research to sort of identify which were the which crops, which varieties, fertiliser levels, pest control, and all that sort of thing could be done locally, so we justified additional positions to work on, to do the research. So that actually turned out to be very productive over time.
Robin Davies: And I understand when the repayment rates were evaluated, it was pretty impressive, like 90% repayment rates.
Glenn Denning: It was about 90% and we were talking about hundreds and hundreds of farmers, not thousands. So it wasn’t at a massive scale, but I think it was a concept that small scale farmers, if given the chance, are willing to utilise credit and repay those loans. Of course, if they didn’t repay, they wouldn’t get any more credit. So it was part of the deal, but it was also tough, because these rain fed areas were you’d come and look at the clouds and pray that it was going to rain at the right time or not rain at a time when they wanted it to be dry. So financing small scale farmers, low income, very impoverished farmers in rain fed environments is a great challenge. I think we made some progress.
Robin Davies: So when you say it’s proof of concept, I guess that leads to the question, was the concept then adopted without the backstop of a donor guarantee for the Philippines National Bank, that it was adopted elsewhere, or did it continue in that area?
Glenn Denning: I think it would be a stretch to say that it stimulated or led to the government picking it up and running it at large scale. I think it had an impact. Certainly, financing of non-rice crops expanded in subsequent years. Perhaps our program contributed to that. But, you know, when I say, it proved the concept to me, at least, yeah. I think at the time, there were a lot of design issues around that project. So it was, we learned a lot. I think it was pretty top down. It was, you know, the roads and a lot of other things were designed basically in Canberra, actually in Cooma, to be more precise, and SMEC [Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation], when at that tender age, I learned a lot about rural development and it stuck with me for a lifetime.
Robin Davies: Yeah. As you say, those integrated rural development or Area Development programs were all the rage in the late ’70s, and the Australian aid program certainly supported a lot of them. And then they went completely out of fashion. We will come to Millennium Villages shortly. But do you think something was lost in that process?
Glenn Denning: I think the core idea of integrated rural development is a good one. The challenge is in the details of implementation. When you’re working with fairly traditional line ministries, and you know in particular, when you have leadership of those ministries sitting in the capital city, it’s hard to design and execute at a much lower level, say, down at the province level, or even sub-province level, I think we didn’t do well. I’m not sure we could have done more, but incorporating the insights and getting buy in of lower levels of government and getting a real ownership of local government is absolutely critical for that to succeed. And I would say a certain amount of decentralisation of funding would also be necessary and flexibility for that funding to be executed. That, of course, comes with risks if you don’t have sufficient capacity locally to be able to do that. But I think at the time, we just assumed the only way to get this job done was to create a project, a project structure, implement the project, and somehow hope that it would be picked up. I think that was the great fault of that era of integrated development projects.
Robin Davies: And now, of course, there’s almost a donor obsession with localisation, and you would hope that over time, that leads donors to circle back to a different type of Area Development Program with greater flexibility and more local leadership.
Glenn Denning: I think it’s reasonable to say that in most of the countries in the region where we work, local capacity is much stronger than it was then. So local leadership at the province district level, I think there’s a greater recognition that communities need to have more of a say in design and implementation and evaluation of these initiatives. It gets, you know, it’s not as neat and clean as making decisions in Manila or Jakarta and rolling them out to the rest. But I think it is for me, I’ve seen so many good examples of complementarity, investing in different sectors concurrently, that I think it’s a goal worth pursuing.
Robin Davies: So after your work on that project, you then stayed in the Philippines quite a long time with the International Rice Research Institute. Again, an interesting case of serendipity.
Glenn Denning: I was actually supporting, implementing some field trials for IRRI, for the Rice Research Institute. In Mindanao, as I said, there wasn’t a lot of rice growing there, but they were interested in seeing how rice would perform in that area, so I was doing a few field trials for them, basically on the side. And on one of the visits they came down, looked at it, they said, “Oh, the person running the show was leaving for a one year sabbatical leave back in the United States. And would I be spending a year at IRRI?”
Robin Davies: This is a theme in your career, substitution.
Glenn Denning: And so I said, “Absolutely.” And I was at that point, I’d already spent three years in Mindanao, right? So I’ve spent a longer period, certainly longer than any other single person who’d ever spent time there. It was one of the records of three years ended up on this project. So I was looking for maybe going to Thailand or Indonesia or something. But this opportunity to go to IRRI, you know, very famous, you know, the forefront of the Green Revolution during the ’60s and ‘70s. I thought, what a great opportunity. So I went for a year to learn and contribute and enjoy. And I stayed for 18 years. I went from one position to another, you know, and they wanted me to stay on. I did a lot of field work. Started off mostly in the Philippines, but ended up extending into different parts of the region, eventually to Africa, but always based in the Philippines. Along the way, they told me. One of my mentors told me, “Look, you really you’re never going to get far in international agricultural research. You need a PhD, so you better get yourself a PhD quickly and smart.” And so through some connections, I enrolled at the University of Reading in the UK, and with much more data than I needed for about five PhDs, I completed my doctorate there, and at that point, M.S. Swaminathan was our Director General, and he wanted me to stay. Said, “No, you stay. We want you here.” And so I then again, stayed. Stayed on working in one of the main areas that I focused on, particularly sort of from the mid-’80s onwards, was the so called Indo-China region. So Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos.
Robin Davies: Well, I wanted to ask you particularly about your work on Cambodia. In the post-Khmer Rouge period. So IRRI played a very important role in, I guess, the reconstruction of Cambodian agriculture. Could you just talk a bit about that?
Glenn Denning: Well, how to compress this to a few sound bites... But you know, in 1981-85 our director general got a request from an NGO in Cambodia for seeds, for rice seeds. They said, “Oh, after the Khmer Rouge, farmers are starting to come back to their land, and many of them lost their rice seeds along the way. They either consumed them or just simply lost them, or they became non-viable.” And you know, I thought, well, this is interesting. And so we looked into the gene bank at IRRI, and we found there were about 766 traditional Cambodian rice varieties that have been conserved. They’ve been collected in 1972-73 in a period just as the intense bombing of Cambodia began, really got going. So it was really very lucky that IRRI had them in the gene bank. And so we said, “Yes, we’ve got these seeds. We can help you. We can repatriate them and make them available.” And you know, sort of, that was a very early stage. Then Dr. Swaminathan said, “Well, we want the government to request us to do this. We can’t just be responding to NGOs, because if you want our people to go in there, our scientists and that, we want to be there officially, not under cover.” So eventually, a request came from the government, from the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture. So in January 1986 myself, together with two other colleagues, went into Cambodia, spent 10 days there, and out of that came the design of what became a quite a long term project to really rehabilitate, re-establish the rice industry in the country, including the repatriation of the seeds. But much, much more than that. So that was absolutely fascinating, and the experience was very motivating for me when I was about 30 years old or so, just well motivating in the sense that you could see even several years after the end of the Khmer Rouge government, they were still around in rural areas. But there was very little happening in terms of agricultural productivity and extension and no research at all. And all of this was the result of the utter destruction of the country’s infrastructure and human capacity. So that became the big focus. And of course, we had to find a donor. We had to find somebody who would support this kind of work. It turned out to be Australia.
Robin Davies: And I believe you established the Cambodian Agricultural Rural Development Institute.
Glenn Denning: Yeah, that was one of the first things we did, an important conceptual part of working with countries, something that IRRI had done a really good job with in many parts of the world, was we recognised that you didn’t just want IRRI to go in there and kind of do the research for you and spread it to farmers and the like. You needed to build local capacity. And of course, Cambodia at that point had no real local institutional capacity to do Research and Development on anything, let alone rice, which was their major crop. IRRI had a long history of working with countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Bangladesh, of course. But this presented a really interesting and important challenge. And you know, the reason it was particularly challenging is at that time, Cambodia had no diplomatic relations with any country outside of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, Cuba and India. India was the only one outside, although they were sort of had a foot in that, but they were the only non-Soviet bloc country that so. So how do we get the funding? Some of the ideas came from, you know, we were able, through Dr. Swaminathan, to get some of the concepts from India and so on, but they wanted, at a stage, then to be able to find any donor assistance. So we thought, “Well, what about Australia?” And we heard that former foreign minister, Bill Hayden, had had an interest, let’s say, in the Indo-China region at that point, and he, through some connections, had indicated that, you know, Australia may be able to support it. But what we did was we enveloped it in something called the Australia-IRRI Australia Indochina program, because Australia still had diplomatic relations by then with Vietnam, and I’m not sure about Laos. Probably Laos too, but not Cambodia, because Cambodia was still strangely, but maybe not if you’re in diplomacy, the UN still recognised the Pol Pot regime, recognised the Khmer Rouge as late as 1986-87 when we were getting the program underway, because of the argument that it was illegitimate, that Vietnam had installed a new government or supported the installation of a new government. Anyway, we got around to getting, you know, the funding through all kinds of interesting ways, through ambassadors and folks we knew in Canberra. Even Bob Hawke and M.S. Swaminathan met in Manila briefly at one point, so that a lot of this, I think, was very interesting behind the scenes to get the job done, but ultimately we had a great program operating. Harry Nesbitt, pretty well known, he was the project leader there for about 11 years. Imagine that! If you’ve got a wonderful project manager leading the effort on the ground, with a team of, not always Australians, but a mix of people from IRRI with different areas of expertise. And that program just went on. I recall, you know, a few times, can’t remember at that point, it was probably AusAID. They, you know, you got the sense that they would like to close out the program, and we’d all sort of gather around and work out what our strategy would be to make that not happen, because we knew that to rebuild an agricultural system after conflict can’t be done in a few programs. No, it’s got to be more than a decade. Full credit to Australia. They actually bought that, and continued to you know, to this day, even ACIAR, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research has lots of projects there. I’m not sure whether DFAT still has sort of agricultural rice focused programs in the country, but certainly ACIAR has an active program, often working with people that we trained back in the ’90s and the like.
Robin Davies: And then, after your time at IRRI, what next?
Glen Denning: Okay, so it’s a long story, isn’t it? So from IRRI. You’re gonna pick up a theme here. So I’d already been at IRRI about 17 or so years at that point, and there was a, you know, the institution was undergoing quite a bit of change. And I could sort of see that, you know, the future might not be what it used to be.
Robin Davies: Can I just ask what that change was? I mean, I know this was a time where a lot of money was coming in from new sources, particularly the Gates Foundation. What was the nature of that change?
Glenn Denning: No, no, there was there was a new general director at the time, was George Rothschild, so former director general of ACIAR, and essentially so George had done some reorganisation within IRRI, and part of that was I was leading all of our international programs, all of our country and regional programs, donor relations, all of that side of things. And it was interesting that during that period, I was contacted by ICRAF, another one of these acronyms, the World Agroforestry Centre. We mercifully, sort of changed the name to that later, asking if I’d be interested in a Director of Development position over there running all of their African development programs. And I said, “No.” I said, “I’ve just been made Head of this IRRI international work, and I would love to go to Africa, but it’s just not good timing.” But a few things went awry in the subsequent months. And George left IRRI, and a new person came in, and, you know, as usual, reorganisation was in the works. And so I contacted the person there who had earlier contacted me about the position, and said, “Is that position still available in Nairobi with the ICRAF?” And they said, “Well, as a matter of fact, it is. We had two people come for interviews, and we didn’t like either of them. So there is, in fact, you know, if you’re interested, we’d love to talk to you.” And so I talked to my wife and kids and said, “Like, do you want to come to Nairobi?” And we did, and ended up, where I spent six years with ICRAF World Agroforestry, and then at the end of that period, I was looking to come back to Asia. In fact, I’d been I had been offered the job of heading up the Mekong River Commission. Can’t remember what year that was now, but I was really very close to agreeing to that, but then I met Jeffrey Sachs and Jeff, at that point, was really promoting development in Africa, very much, very high profile work, working with national leaders across Africa. So he said, “You know, we’d like to set up a kind of a Technical Support Centre in Nairobi. Would you be interested in heading that up? It would be more than agriculture. You’d be working on agriculture, but I want I want to include health, and I want to include infrastructure and energy and education and all these other areas, because we would like to support African nations to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and that would require an integrated approach and so on.” So I agreed to that and turned down the offer from the Mekong River Commission and stayed another five years at ICRAF. I mean literally in the same office, because I was able to convince them to host and we built up a team of about 20, mostly Africans, great folks who were supporting mostly working at the government level, like working with, I think they were called poverty reduction, national poverty reduction plans, yes, and included, but not a primary focus, but included in that was the Millennium Villages Project, the demonstration project that would go side by side with this national level advisor.
Robin Davies: So I very much wanted to ask you about your experience with the Millennium Villages Project. First, just, I mean, for people who are not familiar with it, so it was a while ago. How did it work? I mean, was it sort of blueprint based, or was it more along the lines of the improvisation we talked about earlier? I mean, it’s essentially a form of Area Development, you know, it was, I mean.
Glenn Denning: It was fair to say it was blueprint based, in the sense that the blueprint was the millennium development goals. So this was a set of goals, you know, agreed in 2000 in 2004-2005 I think it was 2003 actually, Kofi Annan said, “We’re not making any progress here. And the whole purpose was to really stimulate development in Africa. We’re not we don’t seem to be getting ahead.” And so they called in Jeffrey Sachs, noted development economist, and said, “Would you start something called the Millennium project, the UN Millennium project, and would you work, you know, take the lead as my special representative to increase the level of investment and increased the level of seriousness and action around the Millennium Development Goals.” And so that was a very important step. And so he sort of stepped up and took the lead on that. So the idea was, as I said, was it happened in different ways it was to provide pathways for achieving the goals, and where that was, again, you could call that a template or a blueprint, but like, how do you get more kids into school? How do you reduce malaria? How do you increase agricultural productivity? So in my experience, like the things that were included there were very consistent. We worked in, I think, 12 countries, and very consistent from country to country, even though we placed our work in different sorts of different agro ecological zones, the consistency with which we saw things like, kids can’t get into school, kids are hungry. Mothers are dying in childbirth. Infant mortality rate is high. There’s no electricity, no energy in these rural areas, roads very seasonal, so it wasn’t kind of rocket science to work out where you needed to invest quickly. And I saw it in many of these villages. It was simply transformational when you brought all these things together in one place, going back to my Mindanao days, admittedly, in a somewhat artificial way, in the sense that it was very project based. But we this was the idea. We said that if if there was public investment at the level of at the level broadly, that would be that had been agreed to by the rich countries in terms of their ODA contributions, we estimated about $100 per person per year. So we it wasn’t like an unlimited budget. It was $100-110 I think it was $100 per person. We monitored that very closely. We didn’t let it go to 150 or 200 but that was the level of investment, the kind of a cap that we applied in these different situations across the African continent and things. I mean, it was transformational. Before our eyes, we were seeing these things change. We were seeing improvements in the effectiveness of the schooling, of the health, agricultural production was doubling. All these good things were happening right then. The obvious question is, so like, what about scalability and sustainability, right? So scalability, we thought, “Look, the theory is we’re not asking for a ridiculous sum of money that it was more than most governments could afford, even though we knew that governments could afford more than they were spending. But in terms of the promises made in terms of financing and development assistance, debt relief and the like it was, it was achievable.” So the question of sustainability is a sort of a second question. So who does this? You know, we can’t. We can’t have a model where we go, “Okay, we did it in this set of villages. We just go to the next set of villages now, and the next set and the next set and the next set until you cover the whole of Africa.” We didn’t as a project, we didn’t have the capacity to do that. So our goal really was, “Well, I think we did a good job in sensitising and getting the buy in of the top political leaders.” I mean, we would meet with every president that we worked with in every country that we worked with. They were very familiar with what we were doing. We would bring them to the field along with their ministers, and Jeff would talk to their cabinets. And so we, you know, there was a lot of excitement and motivation there. I think in the end, where we sort of missed out a bit, was that sort of the middle levels of governance, again, the sort of sub national level were often left behind. We would work with presidents and village leaders and not enough at and with communities right, but not enough at the district, province, state, whatever level, which I think if we could have it all over again, we would have spent a lot more time and money in sensitising and bringing them on board and getting them more involved in that. Yeah. So I think in the end, a number of the innovations that worked well in the villages went to scale at national level. I think a lot of I mean, the bed net story is a great one. Anti malarial bed nets. People said, “Oh, it’s not sustainable, you know, because five years from now, you you know, they’ll have to buy bed nets. So we should just focus on on making making them pay for it, and having a market for bed nets.” And Jeff just he utterly rejected that. “So we’re just going to let. Children die while we make the markets work? No,” and eventually, the WHO they came on board and adopted complete coverage as their policy. And I think it’s contributed to a reduction and significant reduction in deaths from malaria across Africa. I think school meal programs have been very successful. I was involved in a lot of those locally grown school meal programs, where you would source food locally. The WFP picked up some of these. The World Food Programme picked up a number of these things as well and extended them. Not easy to implement. I mean, none of this is easy.
Robin Davies: Yeah. And so you’ve talked about, I guess, a deficiency being a lack of focus on the middle levels of government. I know the whole enterprise got eventually got a bad press, I think because of criticisms emanating from, well, from some researchers, and maybe, maybe the World Bank as well. And there were suggestions that the original evaluations suffered from, you know, selection bias and lack of control groups and all of that. When you look back on the whole process. Now, do you think the debate is reasonably settled?
Glenn Denning: You know, the way that development works. If I get up in front of my class at Columbia and talk about and say the Millennium Villages project, they’ve never heard of it, so I think we’ve got to probably start the discussion again. We need to take lessons from integrated rural development, from the Millennium Villages project, from our efforts with national poverty reduction programs, MDG focused and the like and come to the drawing board again with all the knowledge that we have. So this is for people who are wanting to publish in obscure journals and PhDs and what they can carry on about that. But for me, you’ve got to remember there was a sense of urgency. So it’s true, one could have spent gone a lot slower, and set up all the Monitoring and Evaluation systems and all the consultation systems along the way, and brought the districts and the states and provinces on board, and probably possibly ended up with a with a better outcome. But I it was that sense of urgency that I think really drove us to act quickly decisively. Best bet technologies, rather than refining it to high levels. It’s always good, in I mean in the agriculture side of things, it’s always good to have precise fertiliser recommendations. But unfortunately, we don’t have that level of understanding of what every farmer’s needs are. So having a kind of a general recommendation isn’t a bad starting point. It’s a better starting point than saying, “I have no idea.” Yeah, like the best bet. It’s true across the board, approaches to education, health, agriculture.
Robin Davies: Yeah, you published a book in 2023 on food security, which is really, I guess, an overview of lessons learned from your life in the sector. How would you sort of summarise those lessons?
Glenn Denning: Well, let me start. Okay, one starting point. Let me explain how I got to writing that book. And it’s an exercise. At that point, it was about 2014, and we’re ending the period of the Millennium Development Goals and going into the Sustainable Development Goals, if you’ll recall, under the MDGs, the goal was to halve hunger by 2015 and you know, we came close, depending on what indicators you use, reasonably close to halving hunger over that 15 year period, although they take it back to 1990. But as we were going toward the SDGs, David Nabarro was very strong, a whole leader in that there was something called the Open Working Group, which this, they wanted to increase participation of countries. So this perception that the MDGs was worked out in the basement of the UN by a group…
Robin Davies: Of, you know, yeah. And they were goals for donors, not goals.
Glenn Denning: For even the UN and not countries, right? So SDGs were going to be different. The open working group was going to change that. And so they had a consultation at the time. One of my jobs, aside from being a professor at Columbia, I was the head of the New York office of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which was another one of Jeff’s initiatives really, to promote SDGs, really. And so they invited me to talk about, at that point they’d got this idea of SDG Two was ending hunger, no hunger. And they wanted me to talk about it at this UN event. And I thought that’s a really interesting question, like I can increase production, I think I know a few bits of the puzzle. But how do you actually end hunger? How would you if you if you wanted to bring it down to close to zero to negligible, what would you need to do? So that really got me thinking. And that was sort of 2014 I got started on that and and through various iterations, I ended up with the book, a kind of a framework for what it would take to truly end hunger and and malnutrition, okay? Well, technically, hunger includes malnutrition, depending which definition you want to use, but you basically, how do you? How does the food system deliver what it’s meant to deliver? And that’s basically healthy diets for everyone, right? And that it should come from sustainable food systems. So it should be, it should come from production and post-production systems that can be sustained over time. So this was an important challenge and and that’s what I focused on in the book, and I came basically came to five major investment areas, of which sort of agricultural productivity was one, so one of five, right, which was my previous 30 years experience was very much on that agricultural side of things.
So sustainable intensification was number one, not in any particular order, but actually increasing availability of food, which I believe was necessary at that time, talking about seven and a half billion, 8.2 billion now, but we were going to be increasing, probably adding another 2 billion people, 2 billion mouths to feed. Many of our production systems were clearly not sustainable, so that would reduce production. Sustainable intensification meant more food, less environmental impact. So that’s number one. Number two. Basically it was market connectivity. It was connecting to markets. So again, right back to my Zamboanga del Sur days you can produce more food, but unless you can connect that food with the demand, with consumers, whether they be in cities or in other parts of the world, it’s not helpful. Post harvest stewardship. We lose a third of our food. It’s wasted or lost along the value chain. So that’s the third area. The fourth area was really focusing more sharply on diets and shifting our focus toward healthy diets. So that brought in the idea of not only undernutrition, but over consumption as well. So adjusting that is an important part of food security, especially if we take on board food security as including nutrition, right? And the fifth area was social protection, something I haven’t really thought about very much over the years, but the idea that, you know, there are lots of people in this world who simply do not have the capacity to guarantee their own food security. So you need social protection systems, which could be anything from subsidy, subsidised food programs to school meal programs, et cetera, et cetera, food for work programs and the like. So there’s a lot of that. There are more than 2 billion people, 1.5 billion people, I think, who get part of their food security from social protection. So my feeling was that, after having looked at that, bringing those five areas of investment together in a comprehensive, integrated, coherent manner, underpinned by other factors that are important across the board, such as good governance, such as women’s empowerment, these and sort of broad advances in education and the like, they were all important. But for me, there were investments across the board, but these five areas would lead us toward a food system that enable us to transform the food system in a way that it became more productive, more profitable, healthy, inclusive, sustainable, resilient and ethical. And these were the goals.
So understanding those goals very clearly, understanding what was needed. And then I got to basically chapter 15 or 14 or so and I said, “Yes, but how do we actually do this? How do you actually move from what we need to do to what we actually do?” And so in the final piece of universal food security, I really focus in on the importance of leadership and the importance of institutional change, but but institutional change, as well as individual, personal change, comes from leadership. Yeah? Transformational Leadership. People stepping up, and I don’t just mean presidents and prime ministers all the way down to local government, the private sector, the NGO community and so on, exercising leadership in focusing on this goal of universal food security. And I did, rather late in the piece, I latched on to the idea of universal food security as distinct from global food security, which is commonly discussed, and we could get into the semantics of it, but honestly, the reason I chose universal was I just felt universal, kind of focused on the individual eventually, that it meant every person. It was consistent with the idea of the UN Declaration on Human Rights. It was consistent with the definition of the SDGs that no one would be left behind. Food Security meant that every person would enjoy a healthy diet from sustainable and resilient food systems.
Robin Davies: Yeah, but sort of analogous to the concept of universal health care, universal health care, yes, which is then contrasted with health security. So, yeah, yeah. Finally, I mean, you’re here to speak at the the annual conference of the Crawford fund, and you are an Australian, so I’m interested in your reflections on what Australia is currently doing to support food security globally and in our region, beyond the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. I mean, we’ve really pulled back a lot. So what do you think we could be doing?
Glenn Denning: Well, I mean, the bottom line is, I think we should and could be doing more now. Why is that? I think Australia has some unique and important qualifications, particularly in the in the Indo-Pacific region. I think first of all, our economy, still to this day relies at least partly on on agriculture, and it has developed, I think, a pretty enviable track record of being able to produce food in in pretty hostile environments. So I often compare Africa and Australia, and I tell my friends in Africa, “We’re not all that different from you in terms of our physical environment, but there are some big differences in terms of innovation research, in terms of institutional support, and in terms of infrastructure.” So the three are: incentives, right, providing farmers with incentives, providing the infrastructure for food to be moved around, and essentially, institutions to support farmers during difficult times. So look, I think we’ve got a great track record there. We’ve, I’ve been involved not just in not in Australia, actually much more in the region. And so I think we have a track record there. DFAT and its predecessors in the ODA area have been supporting agriculture and food related programs in the region for 40 or 50 years, right? So we have a track a track record. But I think the most important thing is that our regional partners are looking for solutions. They’re looking for answers. You can start where you like. Start with China. You know where Xi Jinping has said that agriculture is a national security issue. It’s a national priority agriculture, right? You look at all their every year the big Congress gets together, and always, agriculture and rural Development are the first thing discussed in China, right? Our largest neighbour, Indonesia, another country that has done remarkably well over the years, but the new president, President Prabowo has launched a school meal program. That’s right, they’ve reached 83 million children with free school meals. You know, it’s been criticised and not properly. You know, worked out, planned. Implemented and so on. But goodness me, what an amazing commitment. And I think I’ve actually got two of my students, innovation students in there now working with IFPRI and others, to try to learn more about it and see how we can support enhancing the program, not finding faults with it, but finding ways in which implementation could be improved. Because I think it’s a great initiative. School meals in general, I think are a great initiative, especially when they’re sourced locally. So look and our Pacific partners, they’ve recently come up with a new strategy for agriculture and food security, for greater resilience and the like. They learned a hard lesson from Covid being so dependent on imports and the disruption to trade, not to mention the risks they’re facing in terms of climate. So my sense is we have a real convergence of interest and capability. One is that I think Australia has a good track record. I think it’s in our geopolitical best interests, if you want to put it that way, to be responding and partnering with countries, not just through ACIAR. I think ACIAR is a great model and should be expanded. But I think more broadly, with with DFAT agriculture. You know, it doesn’t, it’s there, you know, I’ve looked at the new strategy, and it gets a mention occasionally, but there’s not a lot there. I don’t think we’re exercising our strengths as clearly as we could be. I think 8% of the budget, of the $5 billion budget, goes to agriculture. But I’m not suggesting just agriculture, but I’m looking across the board. We need to think of food security. I advised the Irish government about 20 years ago, I think it was 20 years ago, with their Irish Hunger Task Force, and they came up well as a result. I said, “Put a number on it,” and they agreed to put 20% of their budget into ending hunger. And to this day, I’m told they’re still using that as a target. So actually setting some targets, whether it’s hunger or I would say food security, would be, would be a good way of looking at it, because food security is is national security, not just for our farmers, but for Australia. So I think having being in a neighbourhood where people are able to flourish because they’re not constrained by food insecurity for those countries, that’s a win for us.
Robin Davies: Have you got time for one more question? I’ll ask it, but we can throw this out if it’s too hard. So for my last question, which might be a bit hard to answer, but I wanted to ask you about your current environment at Columbia. I mean, you’re working in a university that’s that’s had a troubled relationship with the Trump administration, and you work in areas that are particularly out of out of favour with the Trump administration. The US has very actively criticised the SDG agenda and regards a lot of the work that happens in universities as globalist and views that in a negative light. Is this having a chilling effect on your ability to, you know, to do your work, to attract students, to have policy impact?
Glenn Denning: Well, obviously, many of those decisions, including the decision to end USAID, I think, the decision to end USAID, I think is really disappointing in the sense that they did important, good work, and sadly, people will die as a result of that of the change. But at the same time, it doesn’t have a chilling effect. I think it has kind of the opposite effect. It kind of it mobilises me and my colleagues, and I’m trying to mobilise my students to think more positively going forward. I like to remind them that development should not be equated with aid. Development is, you know, this broader goal to help people achieve their potential is something that has that should not change. It hasn’t changed different policies, whether it’s the US government, even Europeans are also kind of focusing more on other things these days. Development has has to go on. And you know, we’re also living in a what I think is a multipolar world now, and I think there’s a lot of room for improvements in terms of the organisation and impact of other parts of the development ecosystem. I think, for example, the multilateral development banks have a much bigger role to play in this region. Asian Development Bank is really a big one, and they’ve just committed I think the figure was $30 billion between 2022 and 2030 for food security. I’ve never seen ADB so excited about food security. And ADB is very good for having its finger on the pulse of its member countries. They they do listen a lot. Some would say too much. They have responded by upping their commitment to food security and agriculture in ways that I haven’t seen for decades. So I think we will continue to dialogue with the administration and hopefully realise, hopefully that they will realise that there is strength in partnering with universities and realising that there’s mutual interest in development and aid, that not only the successes won’t just be felt by those recipients, but also those who are contributing resources to development. So we will continue. It’s work in progress, and we’re not we’re certainly not giving up. And I’m just encouraging all my students to redouble their you know, their efforts build their skill sets in such ways that, you know, they can apply them in other kinds of institutions, even the business sector, in the private sector. I mean, a lot of development, improving people’s lives can come through the private sector. So I, for better or worse, still consider myself to be an optimist.
Robin Davies: Well, we will put a link to your book in the notes for this episode, and look, thank you very much for making time to speak with us.
Glenn Denning: Thanks. All right, great.
Outro: Devpolicy Talks is the podcast of the Australian National University’s Development Policy Centre. Our producers are Robin Davies, Amita Monterola and Finn Clark. You can read and subscribe to our daily blogs on aid, international development, and the Pacific at devpolicy.org, and find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website. Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. Send us feedback or ideas for episodes to devpolicy@anu.edu.au. Join us in a fortnight for the next episode of Devpolicy Talks.