On the Sunday of the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, I pulled on my increasingly neglected research uniform, headed south on NY Interstate 81 to Cornell University and then spent three days at the 2nd Global Food Security conference. It was an opportunity to re-engage with a community that had been at the centre of my research world from the early-1990s until about 2010 and the Conference provided a window into how this research field has progressed over the past 5 years.
I could not help but marvel at the breadth and depth of the research as I skimmed through the abstracts of more than 350 papers and posters. I was also struck by how several familiar themes were still prominent. Hunger was trending down in all regions other than sub-Saharan Africa, food systems are complex, food security is much more than food production, and globalization has not delivered food to all of the world’s population were a few of several very familiar themes.
Not surprisingly, a few new research themes that have the potential to shape the future of food security trends, research and policy garnered considerable attention over the three days. At the top of the list were repeated calls to make nutrition central to food security, including the need to improve nutrition from conception to age two, transitioning away from high calorie – nutrient poor diets that underpin the global obesity epidemic (e.g. the North American diet) and changing the focus of food aid from the delivery of pallets of food and to the temporary provision of higher quality food. In addition, considerable hope was being placed on the use of information technologies and mobile devices to deliver better information to farmers, to improve transactions within food chains, and the role the private sector might play in the delivery of IT applications captured considerable attention as well. All of this created a buzz to place greater emphasis on sustainable diets and calls to move beyond the more traditional research field of sustainable agriculture.
Standing back from the details of food security themes and looking at the entire conference, I could not help but notice that applied interdisciplinary research could have been the major conference theme. Interdisciplinarity, in its many forms, was omnipresent and re-affirmed (for me) the importance Carleton’s continued commitment to the creation and delivery of academic programs that are not confined by disciplinary silos. Projects and research programs built around international research teams that spanned the environmental, social and engineering sciences were the norm as was research that encouraged collaborations across agri-food sectors and engaged consumers and producers. The most striking feature of the private sector contributions to the conference was its limited profile. An international agri-food conglomerate was a major sponsor and a few representatives from multinational corporations were in attendance but overall, the private sector’s role was quite limited, suggesting that interdisciplinary food security research is not yet fully mature. Nevertheless, papers by the lone-wolf scholar on a highly focused topic were without doubt the “odd ducks”, adding additional evidence that food security is amongst the growing number of societal issues that cannot be addressed by traditional disciplines and the field is an important actor in the future of applied interdisciplinary research.
Beyond all of this good news, a potential disturbing trend about interdisciplinarity, was beginning to emerge – domination of the conference agenda by a few very large interdisciplinary projects. Not surprisingly, research from these well-established projects was featured prominently in the plenary sessions and several conference sessions had direct affiliations with one of these uber-interdisciplinary programs. These projects are providing amazing learning platforms for graduate students and unparalleled opportunities for collaboration, while at the same time serving as the training ground for the next generation of food security scholars. What was, from my perspective, potentially disturbing was how views that did not fit well within these now mainstream large interdisciplinary projects were, at best, given little air time. It has been known for a long time that science is far from unbiased and this was especially evident with respect to the setting of the food security agenda. All of this has made me pause and ask, “How do we retain innovation within interdisciplinary projects?” and “Should our academic programs explicitly consider fostering and retaining innovation in interdisciplinary environments?”
Some food for thought on the cusp of the US Thanksgiving weekend.
– Mike Brklacich (Chancellor’s Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Associate Dean ((Interim)), Graduate Programs & Research, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences)
