Is sustainable food a common good?
04/01/2012 - Article
The inaugural conference of the Unesco Chair in World Food Systems is to be held in Montpellier on 27 January. The issue of food as a common good will be at the heart of the agenda. The conference is being organized by Montpellier SupAgro, with the support of Agropolis Fondation, Agropolis International, CIRAD, the Maison des Sciences humaines de Montpellier and the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Council.
The diagnosis of the world food situation is a very worrying one: the FAO estimates that two billion people are suffering from hunger or severe nutritional deficiencies while, according to World Health Organization statistics, around a billion people are classed as obese.
This situation has been exacerbated by rising food prices and the new constraints on agrarian systems: climate change, financial speculation, competition with biofuels, etc.
"Sustainable food" is dependent on agrifood production and marketing methods that are economically and socially fair and preserve the environment, health and cultural diversity. However, under the combined effect of changing lifestyles, the concentration and opening to investors of the agrifood industry and food distribution, the mass industrial food model, which is becoming dominant, is increasingly failing to satisfy those sustainability criteria. This raises the question of how to make sustainable food a common good or "common".
Centring on that question, the conference will provide an opportunity of discovering the points of view of scientists, representatives of public organizations and the private sector, and civil society stakeholders from various countries, with a view to fuelling the debate.
Entry free
Registration compulsory,
by e-mail
- Category: Coming up