IDS Director Professor Melissa Leach and IDS researcher Stephen Devereux will speak alongside experts from around the world tomorrow (11 May) at the landmark Extinction or Regeneration conference, convened to respond to the growing global climate and food crises.
Organised by Compassion in World Farming alongside IDS and other partners, the conference is taking place over two days (11-12 May) in London and online and aims to urgently find more sustainable means of food production that work for people, animals and the planet.
The role of food systems in preventing pandemics
Professor Melissa Leach will open the conference plenary sessions on an issue that demonstrates the wide-ranging and interconnectedness of our global food systems – their role in preventing and preparing for the next pandemic.
As the World Health Assembly begins at the end of May to discuss a Global Pandemics Treaty, much of the focus remains on vaccines and drugs but Professor Leach will highlight that effective pandemic preparedness needs to look much further than the biomedical and incorporate the social and political dimensions of pandemics, as the recent IDS report ‘Pandemic Preparedness for the Real World’ argues.
Professor Leach, will warn: “Current food systems are a source of pandemic threat, contributing to disease emergence and outbreaks; and when they do occur, an amplifier of spread, and of devastating and inequitable impacts.
“If we are to head off future pandemic threats and protect the health and wellbeing of populations when they do occur, then food system transformation is vital, through approaches that consider human, animal and ecological health together and place care, equity and justice at their heart.”
Achieving Food Justice
Dr Stephen Devereux, IDS Research Fellow and member of the IDS-hosted Food Equity Centre is speaking at the conference session on Achieving Food Justice organised by IDS and IPES-Food. From production to consumption, the session will discuss the power imbalances that impact every part of our food systems, and what is needed to achieve greater food equity.
Dr Devereux will share emerging research findings from work with IDS colleagues and partners from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. as part of the Food Equity Centre, including the ‘slow violence’ of avoidable hunger; the transmission of dietary deprivation across generations; and a territory-focused approach to localised food inequities.
He will also speak on the Food Equity Framework developed with IDS colleague Lidia Cabral that recognises the multiplicity of overlapping food concepts – such as food aid, food assistance, food security, entitlements to food, food systems, food rights, food justice, and food sovereignty, and helps to frame how greater food justice can be achieved.
The full two day Extinction of Regeneration conference programme is available to view online, and will address issues such as:
- How to feed 10 billion people with nutritious, healthy food in a more equitable, sustainable, and socially just way.
- How we protect the fertility of the precious soil we have left and restore its life and depth.
- How to avoid future pandemics due to changes in human interactions with wildlife and the keeping of animals in industrial farming systems.
- How we can restore plummeting biodiversity through nature-friendly approaches to food production and innovative nature-friendly science.
- How to respect animal sentience and provide good animal welfare in farming.
