Food Systems Academy - Talks: 12 talks cover 4 major themes including gender, the right to food, nutrition, and power

Talks

This series of talks is designed to give you an insight into the range of issues involved as well as suggesting desirable directions for creating a well-fed world at peace. All the contributors recognise the need for change and a move away from what has been business a usual these past few decades. This is necessary for thriving human communities globally, eating well and sustainably and being able to meet the challenges facing people this century without the global conflicts that so rent the last.

Topics

We have grouped the talks into five main topics:

Thinking about food systems
Geoff Tansey's first talk provides an overview of the food system today, the basics the different actors have to deal with, and the various tools for control that are used. In her first talk, Harriet Friedmann discusses the major food regimes that have dominated the world since the 19th century. In her second talk, she gives an example of how some radical rethinking and new practices are emerging in Southern Ontario.

Patents, power and food - the growing impact of 'intellectual property'
Some of the key factors influencing how our food systems are being transformed today are new, increasingly global, legal frameworks, especially those on intellectual property. Peter Drahos explores the meaning of intellectual property today and its consequences in his two talks. The first provides a basic background while the second exlores how the global rules were changed at the behest of a few major business interests. Geoff Tansey looks at the new global rules on intellectual property, biodiversity and plant genetic resources in his second talk. He gives an outline of how global rules have changed. These talks show why those rules on patents, plant variety protection and other forms of 'intellectual property' are so important this century.

Food, human security and thriving people
Paul Rogers puts food into a broader context of peace and human security. He looks at the challenges ahead and draws lessons from the past. He takes some encouragement from humanities success in avoiding, so far, the use of nuclear weapons, and discusses the prospects for dealing with climate change as part of the third great transition in human history. In a short talk Malcolm Dando discusses the challenges of ensuring the potential of modern biotechnology is used for peaceful purposes and does not become a new weapon of war. He focuses on the importance of the 1975 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) and 1995 Chemical Weapons Convention today. Geoff Tansey examines the prospects for food and thriving people, the crucial choices to be made in deciding the direction of our food systems in the light of these challenges and the paradigm shifts required.

Gender, nutrition and the right to food
Olivier de Schutter, the second UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food, shows how the human rights framework – one of the great achievements of human aspiration – applies to food. Janice Jiggins looks at both the gender dimension to agricultural systems change and the need to build upon and develop further agro-ecological principles and practices in transforming food systems. Elizabeth Dowler examines the reality and consequences of eating patterns, the creation and continuation of food poverty, itself a manifestation of poverty, and the role of food in it.

Changing food systems, diets and cities
In the first of his talks Tim Lang, explains why the current food system is fatally flawed, reviews the key problems, the need to move away from a productionist approach and take a new direction for food policy that builds it around sustainable development, low impact farming systems and diets and low energy usage. In his second talk, he grapples with the issues surrounding what is a good diet for people's health and environmental sustainability, argues that achieving sustainable diets is a political issue as it is about questions of control and call for a 'contract and converge' approach to achieving both sustainable diets and the sustainable development goals. Carolyn Steel traces the development of cities from the earliest times, through ancient Rome, the growth of London to the present day and their relationship to food. She explores the dynamics of feeding a city from the pre-industrial to post-industrial world and the way food can be the lens through which we look at creating the good life for all in a sitopia.

Keynote Speakers