In conversation with … Dr Tony Fischer AM FAIAST FTSE
October 27, 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.
A Crawford Fund Medallist, longtime ACT Committee Coordinator, and ongoing mentor for students looking to a career in international for development, our next guest in this series started his career as a research agronomist in Wagga in the 1960s before he went on to dizzying heights – working with Nobel Prize Laureate Dr Norman Borlaug, leading CIMMYT’s global wheat program, and contributing to Australia’s impact in international agricultural research through various roles with ACIAR, CSIRO, the Crawford Fund for Food Security and ANU.
We present to you, In Conversation with…Dr Tony Fischer.
Watch the video, or read more below.
Introduction
I’m Tony Fisher. I grew up on a wheat, sheep farm in Southern New South Wales. I was lucky to get a scholarship to do agricultural science in Melbourne; went on to do a PhD in California; and, during my postdoctoral period back here at ANU, I was offered a job at CIMMYT. I had already worked quite a lot in wheat physiology, and I was offered a job as a wheat physiologist in the wheat program. A wonderful position, a wonderful program, and I grabbed it, and I was at CIMMYT from 1970 to 1975.
What was it like working with Dr Norman Borlaug?
Doctor Norman Borlaug was my boss, and I had the good fortune of arriving a week before the announcement of his Nobel Peace Prize.
Borlaug respected me as a farm kid. I knew how to grow a decent wheat crop, and he funded me well. I had a wonderful team of Mexican scientists, and almost all of my work was fieldwork trying to understand what was driving yield and yield progress in wheat and how we may help the breeders continue to progress the yield of wheat, particularly the potential yield because that was an irrigated environment.
What was your greatest achievement from that time?
Donors wanted to know how good the science was, and so we we made a lot of progress in increasing the scientific publications out of the program. We made progress on a number of other fronts, particularly also the one that I started working on in Australia, which is direct drilling or conservation agriculture as it’s called these days.
What is your response to FAO claims that food security is improving?
One of the things I did while I was at CSIRO, I wrote a six hundred and sixty page book on global food security. The subtitle was, Will crop yield increase continue to feed the world? This is free on the web, actually, if you go to the ACIAR publications. So I have followed that, and I continue to follow that area.
Yield progress is slowing as yields get higher, and we need to boost it. You say per capita food security is improving a little bit, and population growth is coming down. That’s something people don’t realise, that it’s actually dropped below one per cent. Now demand per person is increasing as incomes increase, so you might think food demand is increasing maybe one plus half a per cent, one and a half per cent. Crop yields a bit below that now. That puts pressure on more land, and we don’t want that.
More land means clearing land is the biggest contribution to greenhouse gases from agriculture apart from nitrogen. And so continuing to increase crop yield, especially our staple crops, is important even if we have alleviated to some extent the number of poor hungry people in the world. But the number’s still pretty high.
How do you regard Australia’s contribution to international agricultural research?
Well, I I worked at ACIAR, which is a major part of it, although some contribution goes directly through DFAT as well. But I’m very proud of having worked at ACIAR. I think it’s a wonderful model and pretty successful, good benefit-cost ratios, and bringing in a lot of unquantifiable benefits. What is this? We’re making friends in developing countries.
We are recognised as a friendly country because partly because of what Asia has done in places like Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, the South Pacific. This is buying goodwill as well as the other major effect of that sort of research is helping these countries along the path to modernisation and better incomes and lower population growth partly as a consequence, better education coming with better incomes, and essentially making our environment more peaceful, I believe.
And it’s indirectly helping Australia in its part of the world.
What is your advice to the Australian government on prioritising funding for international agricultural research?
The amount of money being spent through DFAT and through ACIAR is relatively small as a percentage of of the research budget, as a percentage of budgets, and as a percentage of national GDP. We’re quite low by world standards compared to a number of European nations, even compared, I think, to Canada.
We need to increase that. We’ve let it slip a little bit. I believe we need to increase that because there’s plenty of things to be done facing the challenges of the climate change. I haven’t exaggerated them. I haven’t because I think it’s somewhat exaggerated in the media, but it’s there. We’re seeing some of it. And just doing more research in today’s climate is going to help us deal with tomorrow’s climate. Because if you think about it, every every year in the next decade is probably represented by one or two years this decade.
What are your hopes for international agricultural research in ten years time?
It’s becoming more difficult to make progress. There’s really two ways of looking at crop productivity around the world. There are places, like I mentioned, sub-Saharan Africa, where the real gap is not so much in the research products. They’re there, sitting on the shelf. It’s there from farmer adoption, innovation, markets, those sorts of things. And that needs special attention to all those constraints that I mentioned, including from the CGIAR’s side, which Australia invests in, and the ACIAR side to some extent.
So there are three areas, I guess. There’s gap closing, which is on the fringe of the sorts of things that ACIAR does, but they do do some good stuff. There’s lifting. The bringing in new technologies in which are going to be taken up by most farmers in most areas now because they’re they’re plugged in. I mean, new varieties are taken up in Mexico in no time, in India very quickly, Pakistan not quite so quickly, China no time, Middle East a bit slower.
And then it’s raising the potential. Basically, just more yield per hectare.
What gives you greatest satisfaction looking back on your career?
My memory is not the best now, but I have kept a ring folder of all my publications. I get a lot of satisfaction out of leafing through them from time to time, reminding myself of what I wrote. And how some of it was quite speculative, most of it’s turned out to be right. What gives me a lot of unsatisfaction is I didn’t have the confidence at the time to push harder, to push harder at CIMMYT with the breeders who were who ruled CIMMYT. So, that’s two things. I’m happy with what I’ve done, but I’m unhappy that I wasn’t more confident in what I had done.
For other videos in this series, please visit here.
