After Frances Seymour’s keynote talk yesterday afternoon, Friday started with an introductory address by Dr. Anna Herforth on nutrition and joining forces with conservation through forestry.
In her talk, Dr. Herforth raised the question of what food security is. According the FAO (World Food Summit 1996) “Food security exists when all people, at all time, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for a healthy and active life.” While being pretty comprehensive, this definition leaves out the physical access to food. Convenient access to food is often a concern in remote areas. Furthermore, food needs to be nutritious besides providing calories. Dr. Herforth used the example that many of us take power bars and extra vitamins with us when…
Frances Seymour, former Director General of CIFOR, gave the keynote address of the Conference of Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters after an introduction by Sir Peter Crane. The talk, entitled “Forests and food security: Questions and quandaries” gave an overview of some of the many challenges of conserving nature and alleviating hunger while increasing social well-being.
Forests have many functions on different geographic scales. Forests have positive impacts on the farm- and the landscape-level, and also a continental and global scale. Services provided by forests reach from habitat and pollination, to water and materials, to climate regulation and climate change mitigation, to mention only a few. There is still a lack of appreciation of the many ways in which forests contribute to food security. Increasing agricultural production…
Before I became deeply embedded in the sphere of environmental policy, I used to be a chemical ecologist who spent two summers researching the Costa Rican and Ecuadorian tropics. Yesterday, I decided it was time to go back to my "roots," and attend a session of the International Society of Tropical Forests conference. I landed in a workshop on Intellectual Property Rights and Ethics led by New York Botanical Garden's Ina Vandebroek, who is an ethnomedical research specialist.
Ina's work, particularly in Bolivia, involves close interaction with communities who have a lot of local knowledge about plant and tree species endemic to their areas. The knowledge of medicinal plants, in particular, is of potential interest and value to pharmaceutical companies who may stand to profit from discovering a…