Industrialized food production and international food supply chains significantly increase food insecurity, worsen environmental degradation, and lead to inadequate livelihoods especially for women and youth. Food systems have the potential to be multi-functional levers for change. Small-scale, Indigenous, and traditional approaches can offer needed solutions for transformation.
From May 14-17 at Dawson College, a group of food researchers from Kenya, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and other parts of Canada met each other for the first time as part of a new major international project to identify, measure, and tell the stories of regional sustainable food systems. The project is called FLOW (Food, Learning and Growing) Partnership: Seeding Sustainability Transformation.
Alison Blay-Palmer of Wilfrid Laurier University, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair on Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies, is the lead researcher on the seven-year project. Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant, the team includes 35 partner organizations across four continents. FLOW research will map and monitor specific practices that are driving sustainability on a regional level and amplify them to influence meaningful, long-term policy decisions globally.
"This is the first study to compare regional sustainable food systems over time," says Alison Blay-Palmer. "We're engaging policymakers in each country from the beginning so they can tell us where the gaps are and what kind of metrics they need to implement changes. In Brazil, our partners are literally bringing decision-makers into the field and educating them about what an agroecological food system can look like. As a result, laws have been changed to accommodate a more regionalized food system."
Dawson's Anna-Liisa Aunio (Faculty, Sociology) is working with Blay-Palmer as a co-director of the project, responsible for the Montreal region. Anna-Liisa brought food researchers to visit some noteworthy Montreal food projects in the Peter McGill district of downtown Montreal, in Verdun and at Dawson and delegates shared their local food research during a three-day conference May 14-17.
