There is still time for EU campaigns to book places and set up literature tables on October 16 and 17, when Nourish Scotland hosts the Nourish Conference in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Food security and biodiversity top the agenda as farmers and policymakers from India, the Caribbean and Malawi share their experiences and try to come up with ways of feeding the world without messing up the planet.
Rising levels of food poverty means that people are going hungry across Europe and the Commonwealth alike. “There is enough food for everyone,” organiser Megan MacLeod told ARC2020, “yet people go hungry in Scotland, as they do in poorer Commonwealth countries.” All the while in 2014, the UN year of family farming, peasant farmers are being pushed off the land by a food system that damages biodiversity and puts food production at risk.
Our Common Wealth of Food has an extensive speaker list, featuring former UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter; Rucha Chitnis of Women’s Earth Alliance, Eating Better speaker Sue Dibb and food security expert Dr Terri Ballard.
The conference will celebrate World Food Day with an evening event at The Old Fruitmarket, during which broadcaster Sheila Dillon will chair a panel discussion on the role of human-scale farming for global food security. More details on the conference are here. Those wishing to bring exhibition material and literature can contact the organisers at conference2014[at]nourishscotland.org.uk or phone +44 131 226 1497.
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