Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi and Howard Yana-Shapiro, a senior fellow in the Department of Plant Sciences, will participate in next week’s UC Global Food Systems Forum: California Roots, Global Reach, addressing how to sustainably feed 8 billion people by 2025.
The daylong program is scheduled for Tuesday (April 9) in Ontario (San Bernardino County). Anyone can watch and listen live on the Web (preregistration required); as of today (April 2), the registration list included people from Australia, Kenya, Thailand and Venezuela and elsewhere arond the world. Twitter users can join the conversation via #Food2025.
Katehi will be on the forum’s California Panel, and Yana-Shapiro, who, in addition to his duties at UC Davis, is the chief agricultural officer for Mars Inc., will be on the Global Panel.
The forum highlights UC Davis once again for what it brings to state, national and international efforts to increase the world’s food supply, and to do so sustainably and in the face of climate change.
Last fall, for example, Katehi and the UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute hosted an AGree workshop on local and regional food systems. The Washington, D.C.-based AGree is a privately funded agricultural policy initiative that envisions everyone in the world having enough to eat by 2030.
Just over a month ago, Katehi unveiled her vision for a World Food Center, a UC Davis institute that would be the world leader in “innovation and research on how to feed and nourish a growing planet in an environmentally sustainable way.”
And two weeks ago, Katehi and the campus hosted the Climate-Smart Agriculture Global Science Conference, drawing more than 300 participants representing 34 nations on six continents.
‘Science-based solutions’
Next week’s forum is part of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources’ statewide conference. Mark G. Yudof, UC president, and Barbara Allen-Diaz, vice president in charge of ANR, are scheduled to deliver opening remarks at 9 a.m.
The keynote speakers:
• Mary Robinson (9:15 a.m.), president of the Dublin-based Mary Robinson Foundation-Climate Justice. She served as president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997 and as the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, 1997-2002.
• Wes Jackson (11:45 a.m.), founder and president of the Salina, Kan.-based Land Institute, which promotes “an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops.”
The global panel begins at 9:35 a.m. and continues at 1:15 p.m., with Michael Specter, global issues writer for The New Yorker magazine, as the moderator.
The California Panel starts at 2:30 p.m., on the topic Innovations and Implementation: A California Perspective on How to Launch New Ideas and New Movements to Address the Food Challenge. Mark Arax, award-winning author and journalist, is the moderator.
“As a public research university, we’re a recognized leader in tackling the world’s toughest challenges,” Allen-Diaz said in a news release. “Building on our expertise in agriculture and finding practical, science-based solutions, it falls to us to convene these sorts of conversations and look far beyond the borders of our campuses.
“Only through discussions of this nature will people find the common ground to move the world forward on what is a compelling, complex and crucial issue.”
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Media Resources
Dave Jones, Dateline, 530-752-6556, dljones@ucdavis.edu