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Acclaimed journalist and science communicator Julian Cribb will warn that Australia must urgently prioritise agricultural science to find solutions to a likely global famine when he gives a public lecture at the Institute of Agriculture, The University of Western Australia, this Friday.

At the 2008 Hector and Andrew Stewart Free Memorial Lecture, Adjunct Professor Julian Cribb will discuss global food production by next-generation farmers that will need to more than double, using only two thirds of the currently available water.

"Barring nuclear wars, pandemics and cosmic accidents, there will be about 9.1 billion people in the world of 2050 - but they will be eating as much food as 13 billion at today's nutritional levels," Adjunct Professor Cribb will say.

"The greatest issue confronting humanity in the next 50 years is not greenhouse - it is whether humanity can achieve and sustain such a harvest."

The Hector and Andrew Stewart Memorial Lectureship is given in memory of the late Mr Hector J. Stewart, MLC, and of the late Mr Andrew Stewart, a member of the teaching staff in Agriculture at The University of Western Australia from 1937 to 1959.

Julian Cribb, a UWA graduate and an Adjunct Professor in Science Communication at the University of Technology Sydney, has won 32 awards for his work in scientific journalism, including the highly regarded Order of Australia Association Media Prize.  A former Director of CSIRO, he is the creator of Future Harvest , the global public awareness campaign for the World Bank's Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

Adj Professor Cribb's lecture is free, open to the public and can be heard in UWA's Molecular and Chemical Sciences Lecture Theatre from 5-6pm on Friday, March 7, 2008.  (Entrance no.4, from Fairway, Nedlands, car parks 14 and 21).

Media references

Institute of Agriculture  61 8  6488 4717
Janine MacDonald (UWA Public Affairs)  61 8  6488 5563  /  0432 637 716