Proudly presenting our new series, “In conversation with…”
September 23, 2026
The Crawford Fund for Food Security is proud to present a new video series featuring conversations with prominent Australian and international researchers exploring their careers, passion and drive to pursue a more food secure world.
The challenges facing global food security have never been more obvious or urgent. Disease outbreaks, climate change, natural disasters and geopolitical shocks all threaten supply chains, trade, and stability.
Australia’s food security cannot be considered in isolation. It is bound to the resilience of regional and global systems. Hunger and malnutrition fuel instability, while food builds trust, prosperity, and cultural exchange. By investing in people and partnerships, and embedding research and evidence in policy, food security and resilience into the future is possible.
The challenges are significant, and seem increasingly overwhelming, but there are extremely dedicated people around the world focused on the science, the solutions, and the networks to make a difference.
Now, is the perfect time to present these voices and hear these stories.
His christian upbringing shaped a desire to help the poor, and a re-evaluation of his priorities following Cyclone Tracy set him on his international agriculture career path, starting in the hills of Thailand, and becoming what would be a “marvellous, wonderful ride, a vocation.”
We present to you, In Conversation with…Emeritus Professor Lindsay Falvey.
Watch the video, or read more below.
Q: Tell us a bit about yourself, in terms of how you define yourself and the work you have done, and currently do.
A: I’m Lindsay Falvey. I’m a commissioner for international agricultural research, which provides advice to the Foreign Minister, but predominantly oriented to ACIAR, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. I’m in this position because I was earlier chair of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and Dean of the largest faculty related to agriculture in Australia, at the University of Melbourne.
I’m an animal scientist, and initially, I was involved in ruminant physiology research. And then over the years, I moved towards management and then into governance of research organisations.
I think I came into agricultural science from being steered in my generation as many through church, helping the poorer people, and so forth, and the rhetoric of that day. Also wanting to work outdoors, agricultural science seemed to be it. And, I have to say that it’s been marvellous. It’s been a wonderful ride. I see it as I saw it then, as a vocation.
I was working in the Northern Territory. Cyclone Tracy came along and blew the house away, and this caused me to look more widely and to re-evaluate how I could actually fulfill what I thought I should be doing. So I applied for three roles. Two of them were agricultural missionaries and one was with the Australian aid program. Fortunately, the third one came up first. So, I went to Thailand as a livestock researcher for five years working in the highlands of Northern Thailand for ways to increase ruminant productivity.
Q: What has been the driving purpose behind your work?
A: In retrospect, what unifies the things that I’ve done is a desire to actually get things working, see what a problem is. If it requires research, do that. If it’s a development problem, then to use development tools to do that. If it’s a problem of lack of local knowledge, then it becomes education and training.
There’s also another theme that I can see unites my work, and this comes out of the University of Melbourne, it gave me a higher doctorate based on this concept of integrating all aspects of research and development and agricultural science across all the disciplines. I see that as the most critical aspect of most of the work that I’ve done rather than specialising in one aspect, understanding where that fits into a whole system, approaching the whole system before any plans are made for development so that the information that’s gained from research isn’t biasing some other part in that system unwittingly and leading to problems later on.
Q: What what do you regard as your greatest achievement?
A: I haven’t achieved anything by myself. So the greatest achievements I’ve been involved in, they’d be in three separate areas. The first would be in a development context of saying, look, here here is an issue. And not quite agricultural, but almost, we had a large project in Thailand during the early nineteen eighties where the issue was providing safe drinking water to villages. The normal solution was to have engineers put pipes in and all of that. The real solution was to create large water jars of a certain design so that they didn’t breed mosquitoes, they didn’t become contaminated, the rainwater became better than any other water to drink, and there was enough for a family for a year. That type of development is so simple that people think anyone could have thought of it, but it took seven different people working in a range of disciplines to come back to one particular solution.
In research areas, I think the biggest impact has been in the animal sciences to actually show that we can produce animals more efficiently and therefore have lower numbers. The big issue today with ruminant livestock is the public perception that methane gases are a huge contributor to climate. Of course, they are. However, we have two angles of research. One is reducing the methane emissions and the other is in fact having the animals more productive so you get the same amount of animal product from less animals. They grow faster. They don’t die as often. They have more calves, all of this. These are the major successes and they never seem to be major successes in research because people don’t notice the change. It happens gradually over time.
The third area I’d say is in education, and I think the the biggest success I’ve been engaged in was when I had the opportunity of working with some really good people at the University of Melbourne to bring different institutions, merge them together, create a large pool, a very huge pool, nearly five hundred staff, and to then specialise in areas that suited Southeastern Australia to be excellent in those areas.
Q: Why should Australia invest in international agricultural research?
A: I see Australia’s investment in international research as one of the most successful pillars of our, foreign affairs investment. Development projects are great and visible and can you can put a label on them and have a flag and an opening ribbon ceremony. But agricultural research, it’s cost effective. The rates of return are far higher. You know, if the truth’s known, the rates of return are so high that often they’re brought down a bit to make them believable for when presenting to people.
But this doesn’t mean all the research is successful, of course. Some is amazingly successful and some goes nowhere. It’s the average. Australia’s contribution is tiny compared to those that go in globally, yet it’s, disproportionately effective. One reason is that, ACIAR itself uses a partnership model where scientists in the countries where the research is being done are brought in as genuine partners. This is a very important part of having more clout brought to the agricultural research, but also it gives us a relationship with those countries which has a political spin off.
And that’s why it’s conducted within the portfolio of foreign affairs and not agriculture.
That’s why it’s important for the organisation like ACIAR. Having said that, the organisation needs to change over time. And right now, it’s poised for a new strategic plan to be developed to take it into the next era. This will be an exciting time for ACIAR. The other component which is funded via ACIAR but in its own tranche is to the CGIAR and the International Agricultural Research Centers. The one I know best, the International Livestock Research Institute, one of the major centres, is an efficiently run organisation, but not all the centres are.
And I’ll be quite candid, I think there are too many centres. The money, is being allocated to, support overheads that are not all justified in my opinion. And this is nobody’s fault. This is just what happens to institutions that have been around for a while. They accumulate overheads and head office expenses, and these can be hidden by where the people are located and so forth. But the real essence is to have Australia’s money go to targeted research and for that money to be seen to be as effectively spent as it is when it’s done through an ACIAR bilateral program.
So, I don’t want to appear too political in this, but I do think it’s important for Australia to see the efficiency of its expenditure in these areas. The other aspect, of course, is the benefits to Australia. We are a major beneficiary, and this is reasonably well known within the profession that the research we conduct overseas has spin-offs at home. The obvious spin-off is, you know, in the the cereals field where we might rely on new varieties of wheat that have been adapted to similar climates elsewhere.
This is a a genuine benefit. We shouldn’t shy away from it. I think this is why the Grains Research Development Corporation has an interest in international agricultural research. However, there is another spin-off, and that is that Australian scientists get exposure to different environments, different ways of thinking because different cultures think in different ways. And this is a great benefit to coming back to conduct research in Australia. So an extraordinary contribution to capacity building in Australia.
Q: What would success in ten years time look like for you?
A: I’m at the last stage of my career, and I think it’s been a really wonderful time. And I see challenges right now. I see the challenges that have been mentioned more widely of climate change, and I see conflict rising. I therefore see migration as something that will come as a major activity. If I look into the future and just say ten or fifteen years hence, I won’t be around. But I do see that one of the major challenges is to see the issue of food security as central, but also not by itself. There’s a tendency in in our profession to see food security as the bailiwick of agricultural science and the research. I see it more as a national security or a human security aspect.
So that therefore becomes a defence matter. Defence isn’t always about war. Defence is for good planning and looking at the future. So I see food security as a major component of national security, not just for Australia, but for all countries. And I see that we can help this, and I can see that some of our defence expenditure could be increased to help other countries take this approach.
