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"    BOSTON \u2014 It&amp;#039;s not the draw it was in pre-bust 2007, when Michael J. Fox and Queen Noor were among the headliners, but still about 15,500 people are expected to find their way here for BIO 2012, the biotech industry&amp;#039;s annual international tradeshow and convention. On Monday, about two dozen of them managed to make it past a small clutch of Occupy protesters \u2014 and a woman holding a hand-lettered sign warning Monsanto Hates You, and a young woman handing out free earplugs from Action on Hearing Loss UK, another distributing hand sanitizers from Insight Biotech, and one from Cisco scanning badges for a chance to win a movie theatre popcorn-maker \u2014 to wind up in a small conference room to discuss business and social responsibility in food and agriculture. To be sure, it was not a great turnout. But there was heavy competition from the truly sexy panels, like access to and uptake of biosimilars in Europe and the Rio de Janeiro biotechnology cluster model. Still, given that agricultural biotech has always been biotech&amp;#039;s homely little brother, getting attention only when smashing fish genes into tomatoes or pulling wings off monarch butterflies, it was almost impressive. The world&amp;#039;s population has grown nearly four-fold over the last century, and is projected to rise from more than 6.6 billion people today to more than nine billion by 2050. Depending on whose numbers you&amp;#039;re using, by 2050 \u2014 or 2030 \u2014 feeding the growing population will require a doubling of food production and massive improvements to food distribution. Less land will be available for agriculture, and climate change. Water will become increasingly scarce. Forget stem-cell therapies and personalized vaccines. It now looks like it&amp;#039;s up to little brother to save the world. The only open question is whether he can save it without trashing it in the process. That concern has inspired some, well, interesting partnerships. In January 2011, The Nature Conservancy, the world&amp;#039;s leading conservation organization, announced its collaboration with Dow Chemical Company to &amp;quot;incorporate the value of nature&amp;#039;s services&amp;quot; into Dow&amp;#039;s business plans, goals and operation. For the conservancy, that also means committing to a kind of corporate triage. Getting Dow to think about its ecoservice systems at its manufacturing means looking the other way as Dow pushes for regulatory approval of its new 2, 4-D resistant corn. Powering a plant with waste biomass in Brazil may mean tolerating excessive pesticide drift in Iowa. Another collaboration was announced earlier this year, when Field to Market, The Keystone Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture, named Fred Luckey its first chairman. The appointment of Luckey, recently retired as executive vice president at Bunge North America, a major agribusiness and food ingredient manufacturer (can you say &amp;quot;transforming commodity oils into value added ingredients&amp;quot;?) represents FTM&amp;#039;s dedication to increase &amp;quot;agricultural productivity while improving the environment or society.&amp;quot; To that end, Luckey is calling to the table participants as diverse as Cargill, Coca-Cola, DuPont, the University of Wisconsin ag school, and the World Wildlife Federation. &amp;quot;Upstream participants do not want to be dictated to,&amp;quot; Luckey says, adding he&amp;#039;s seeking a &amp;quot;palatable way to bring this together.&amp;quot; One key thing: recognizing what will not change, and the virtue inherent in what some perceive as vices. &amp;quot;Changing the [economic] system is not a real option at this place in time,&amp;quot; Luckey added. &amp;quot;Capitalism has fundamental virtues that we can leverage,&amp;quot; agrees Greg Hills, managing director at Foundation Strategy Group (FSG), a global strategy consulting firm. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s really good at ramping up solutions, at the concept on innovation. What&amp;#039;s needed is for companies to see the business opportunity in solving these problems. We call this creating shared values.&amp;quot; That is, value creation that simultaneously yields more profit and greater social impact. Indeed, shared values, first detailed in a lengthy 2011 Harvard Business Review article, is pretty much FSG&amp;#039;s raison d&amp;#039;etre. &amp;quot;Not all profit is equal,&amp;quot; claimed the article&amp;#039;s authors, FSG co-founders Mark Kramer and Michael Porter. &amp;quot;Profits involving a social purpose represent a higher form of capitalism, one that creates a positive cycle of company and community prosperity.&amp;quot; It must give moderator Denise Dewar, executive director of CropLife International, a small, private pleasure to be introducing &amp;quot;Howard Shapiro from Mars.&amp;quot; Point of fact: Shapiro \u2014 Howard-Yana Shapiro, to be precise \u2014 looks not so much like an extraterrestrial visitor as the love child of Santa Claus and a Breck girl. Shapiro is global director of plant science and external research for Mars, the privately held multi-national famous for its eponymous candy bar. Shapiro went over the wall 15 years ago when he engineered the sale of the organic seed company he co-founded, Seeds of Change, to Mars. At least twice a month, a Seeds of Change customer, new to the ways of the information highway, tumbles to the change and posts a howl of outrage, betrayal and a promise to buy purple dragon carrot seeds elsewhere. Shapiro spearheaded Mars&amp;#039;s project to sequence the genome of the cacao tree, with data made freely available to researchers. Now he&amp;#039;s the moving spirit behind the African Orphan Crops consortium, working with African scientists to identify at least two dozen African food crops and tree species that have been neglected by science because they are not economically important on the global market. &amp;quot;Every hour, 300 children die of malnutrition,&amp;quot; Shapiro says. &amp;quot;Stunting is irreversible.&amp;quot; Plants can be genetically engineered not only to be disease or pesticide resistant but to be more nutritional, he added. &amp;quot;We need nutritional security, not food security.&amp;quot; The revolution of plant genetics and plant science can solve these problems, he says, but &amp;quot;will it occur without destroying what&amp;#039;s left of the planet&amp;#039;s ecodiversity? I&amp;#039;m not sure we really have the will to do that.&amp;quot; In the meantime, two floors down, there&amp;#039;s a young woman handing out free compasses for those who have lost their way. &amp;quot;Airgas,&amp;quot; promises the carabiner. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll find it with us.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a14514/bio-2012-conference-day-1-9862083/>