Professor Sir Gordon Conway, who has died aged 85, was a world leader in international development and one of the world’s foremost experts on food security and the sustainable development of

agricultural land.

He began his career as an entomologist in North Borneo working with the cocoa industry at a time when the plantations were being ravaged by insect pests: “I discovered the growers of the

cocoa were spraying it with all kinds of insecticides like DDT,” he told an interviewer in 2014. “I decided they were killing the natural enemies of the pest with the pesticides, so I said

all the pests, and it lasted for 30 years.”

Conway went on to work extensively in Indonesia, Thailand and sub-Saharan Africa, and although he held numerous academic, government and international posts, including as Professor of

International Development at Imperial College, London from 2005 and Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for International Development (DIDD, 2005–09), he remained very much the

practical scientist, travelling each month to Africa into his eighties to talk to farmers about how to improve their crop yields. 

The focus of his career was neatly summed up in the title of his 2012 book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World? in which he estimated that world food production would need to increase

by 70 to 100 per cent by 2050 to feed its growing population. This posed a huge challenge at a time of rapid climate change, with agriculture expected to play a major part in reducing carbon

emissions, and a premium on conserving water supplies.

The answer lay in “sustainable intensification”, an approach which could be easily demonstrated at a local level but which was more difficult to envisage globally. “In Africa they’re using

the top of Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola bottles, the little cap at the top and putting the fertiliser in that and then putting that fertiliser in a hole where you’re going to plant the seed of

the maize,” he said in 2014. “So you only apply 11 kilos of fertiliser per hectare, instead of hundreds per hectare, the fertiliser goes exactly where it’s needed for the plant and it

doesn’t spread all over the field... you can do it on a small scale but doing it on a big scale is really a big challenge.”

He was as sceptical of campaigners offering magic bullets. One of the lessons of One Billion Hungry was how little – so far at least – GM technology was contributing to beating hunger. GM

crops were needed in the longer term and for specific pests and diseases, he argued, but in the meantime the world would need many different technologies to have a hope of meeting its food

needs. GM, he explained, “probably will deliver results but it’ll take time... the bulk of science that’s going into food security for the next 10 to 15 years is going to be conventional.”

Gordon Richard Conway was born in Birmingham on July 6 1938 to Cyril Conway, an engineer who worked with Sir Frank Whittle on the development of jet engines, and Thelma, née Goodwin, a

geography teacher. The family moved to Kingston, southwest London, where he was educated at Kingston Grammar School and Kingston Polytechnic. 

He went on to take a BSC in Zoology at University College of North Wales, Bangor (now Bangor University), followed by a diploma in agricultural science at St John’s College, Cambridge, then

a diploma in Tropical Agriculture at the University College of West Indies, Trinidad.

After six years in Borneo, he spent three years at the Institute of Ecology, University of California, Davis, where he took a PhD in agricultural ecology in 1969.

Back in Britain, in 1970 he joined Imperial College as a research fellow and lecturer in the Department of Zoology and Applied Entomology, rising to be founder director, then chairman, of

its Centre for Environmental Technology – and later Professor of  Environmental Technology from 1980 to 1988, serving concurrently in later years as director of the sustainable agriculture

programme of the International Institute for Environment and Development.

He remained a visiting professor at Imperial while serving as representative of the philanthropic Ford Foundation in New Delhi from 1988 to 1992, as well as six years as Vice-Chancellor of

the University of Sussex (1992-98) where he played a leading role in the establishment of the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and during a further six years as president of the

Rockefeller Foundation in the US (1998–2004).

There he was responsible for steering an endowment of more than $4 billion dollars towards philanthropic causes. As well as working to extend the benefits of the “Green Revolution” to

Africa, he took an interest in issues of urban poverty and oversaw an increase in the number of private and public partnerships. He was particularly proud of the foundation’s programme for

treating HIV-positive pregnant women in Africa with antiretrovirals, which proved highly effective in curbing rates of mother-to-child transmission.

In 2005 Conway returned to Britain as Chief Scientific Adviser at DFID, where he oversaw a major expansion in the UK government’s support for GM research in developing countries, and was

appointed to a chair in International Development at Imperial the same year.

He was elected unopposed to the presidency of the Royal Geographical Society in 2006, though in 2009, his final year in the post, he ran into controversy when some of Britain’s leading

explorers, including Sir Ranulph Fiennes, joined forces to accuse the Society of being hijacked by politically correct academics who had abandoned great expeditions in favour of studying the

environment and rising sea levels.

Conway was having none of it, pointing out that the last major expedition supported by the RGS 10 years previously, to the Shoals of Africa, had taken a great deal of time and effort and

produced only 17 cited scientific papers. “The world has changed,” he argued. “We provide money now for a lot of researchers to work overseas, but not on expeditions. We research things like

fire in the Amazon, glaciers in Greenland, climate change in the Kalahari and arsenic pollution in Bangladesh... All our charter says we have to do is advance geographical science. If

people intimate we are not abiding by our charter it is close to libellous.”

The row ended in a ballot of RGS members in May 2009. The explorers lost the vote 38 per cent to 62 per cent.

In later life Conway headed the Bill and Melinda Gates-funded project Agriculture for Impact (A4I) , based at Imperial College, looking into ways to increase and enhance agricultural

development for smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. He subsequently served as a senior adviser to its successor organisation the Malabo Montpellier Panel – a group of international

agriculture experts who guide policy choices towards food and nutritional security in Africa.

Though Conway could sound apocalyptic about the looming environmental and security problems facing the world,  he remained an optimist: “I’ve been in the development business all my adult

life,” he told The Guardian in 2005. “... I know there are answers. The world is very slow to respond but, in time, we usually put the answers in place.”

Conway was a man of wide interests, and as well as his book on the global food crisis, he published on agriculture and pollution and, in the 1990s, chaired the Runnymede Commission on

British Muslims and Islamophobia.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2004 and in 2017 was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. He was knighted in 2005 and appointed a deputy lieutenant

of East Sussex in 2006. At the time of his death he was writing a book on agriculture in the Roman Empire.

In 1965 he married Susan Mumford, who recalled that within a few days of their wedding she and her husband were busily occupied chasing a huge swarm of locusts in northern Borneo. She

survives him with two daughters and a son.