Please note this event will take place online via Zoom. Attendees will need to have a Zoom account to access the webinar, a free Zoom account can be set up at registration.
Speaker: Jess Fanzo, Johns Hopkins University, USA
In the context of the broad global trends of population growth, the climate crisis, and inequitable diets, food systems need to be re-oriented to ensure they can produce enough food that nourishes the world. At the same time, food systems must decrease the pressure on biodiversity loss, conserve land and water resources, minimize air and water pollution, and lower greenhouse gas emissions. The current COVID-19 pandemic has imposed an additional level of pressure on the governance, functionality, efficiency, and resilience of food systems, with potentially long-lasting implications. This re-orientation includes moving towards on-farm sustainable food production practices, lessening food loss and waste, addressing poverty by creating jobs and decent livelihoods, and providing safe, affordable, and healthy diets for everyone. This is a lot to ask of an already entrenched system involving diverse actors with diverging priorities and motivations. Food policy is central to changing systems, and bold policies must be applied to accelerate and incentivize economic, societal, and technological transformations towards a more socially just and sustainable global food system. But policy decisions come with synergies, trade-offs, and short- and long-term, often unexpected consequences. In a world of uncertainty, can we have both human and planetary health—can we have it all? This seminar will explore that question through a global lens that takes the audience through a range of sticky debates that plague food system transformation and governance.
Jessica Fanzo, PhD is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics at the Johns Hopkins University in the USA. At Hopkins, she holds appointments in the Berman Institute of Bioethics, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She also serves as the interim Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and International Research Cooperation at SAIS, the Director of Hopkins’ Global Food Policy and Ethics Program, and the Director of Food & Nutrition Security at Hopkins’ Alliance for a Healthier World. She is the Editor-in-Chief for the Global Food Security Journal and leads on the development of the Food Systems Dashboard, in collaboration with GAIN. From 2017 to 2021, Fanzo served on the Food Systems Economic Commission, the Global Panel of Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition Foresight 2.0 report, and the EAT-Lancet Commission. She was also the Co-Chair of the Global Nutrition Report and Team Leader for the UN High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition. Before coming to Hopkins, she has also held positions at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and College of Medicine, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the UN World Food Programme, Bioversity International, and the Millennium Development Goal Centre at the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya. In 2021, she published her first book, Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? and co-wrote Global Food Systems, Diets, and Nutrition: Linking Science, Economics, and Policy. Fanzo holds a Ph.D. in nutrition from the University of Arizona and completed a Stephen I. Morse postdoctoral fellowship in immunology in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Columbia University.
The talk will be followed by an online Q&A session.
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