In 2050, when China will have just celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and Washington will be preparing to observe America’s 275th year of independence, historians may look back at this summit meeting of the two most consequential leaders on our planet.

Recognizing the meeting is coming a time when the international order that has kept our planet safe from a global conflict for 80 years seems to be called into question, these future historians may ask: What did those two presidents do that either put our planet on a trajectory toward continued peace and development or allowed it to dangerously continue on an adversarial course with enhanced prospects for bilateral and potential global conflict?

Will China and the United States be seen as partners or adversaries? In my view, the answer is that China and the U.S. should be partners in pursuing “peace through agriculture.”

The state visit of President Donald Trump to Beijing this week provides an opportunity to answer that “fundamental question” in our relationship by the U.S. and China announcing a “partnership” to address the greatest challenge humanity has ever encountered: Can we sustainably feed the 9.5 to 10 billion people who will be on our planet by 2050, including an additional 1 billion people on the Africa continent.

Specifically, I propose a 25-year-long Sino-American collaboration to help uplift Africa by upgrading farm to market roads across that continent, which has an acute need for enhanced rural infrastructure. Iowa’s Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and World Food Prize founder Dr. Norman Borlaug, America’s greatest agricultural scientist, famously said “If you want to feed Africa, build roads.”

With the leadership of President Xi Jinping and President Trump, China and the United States can build a road to global peace through agriculture or as I phrase it in Latin they can build a “Pax Agricultura,” the theme I chose for the 2019 World Food Prize Norman Borlaug International Symposium in Des Moines.

It was a reference to the historic term “pax Romana,” a 200-year period of peace and prosperity between 27 BCE and the year 180 AD implemented by two leaders — Augustus and Marcus Aurelius — — whose names are still noted in history 2000 years later.

There may not be another time in the next several decades when leaders of the U.S. and China are both positioned to take similar dramatic steps. My hope is that President Xi and President Trump will seize this opportunity and strive to achieve historic greatness by taking the first steps toward building peace through agriculture.

The place that would be the perfect setting to begin discussing that process to attain peace through agriculture would be Iowa, the state where both President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump took early steps in their political careers.

Iowa is also a state with an extraordinary legacy in citizen diplomacy: from Soviet President Nikitia Khrushchev’s visit to the Garst Farm and the Iowa Hog Lift to Japan in 1959; to George Washington Carver’s advice about nutrition to Mahatma Gandhi as he led India’s quest for independence; to the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979; to Gov. Robert Ray’s welcoming refugees from Southeast Asia; to Gov. Terry Branstad and Sarah Lande of Muscatine welcoming young Xi Jinping in 1985.

Des Moines is home of the World Food Prize where:

— Professor Yuan Longping, the greatest agricultural scientist in the history of China received the prize from Dr. Norman Borlaug, Iowa’s Nobel laureate and father of the Green Revolution;

–Laureates M.S. Swaminathan of India and Pedro Sanchez of Cuba were named chairs of the U.N. Hunger Task Force by Secretary-General Kofi Annan

— Bill Gates launched his multibillion-dollar initiative to uplift Africa and eradicate poverty;

-President Lula d’ Silva, the president of Brazil and President John Kufuor of Ghana received the World Food Prize; and

— U.N. Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon traveled to Des Moines to present the World Food Prize to Daniel Hillel, an Israeli irrigation pioneer who had been nominated by three Muslim and Arab scientists for his work in Palestinian villages.

It would be an extraordinary contribution to our state’s humanitarian and agricultural legacy if Iowa would inspire President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump to seize this unprecedented historic opportunity and begin the process to achieve Peace Through Agriculture in Africa and a Global Pax Agricultura.

——-

Ken Quinn is the former ambassador to Cambodia (1995-1999), former president of the World Food Prize Foundation (2000-2020), and member of U.S. Global Leadership Coalition’s Iowa Advisory Committee.