Course Spotlight- World Food Systems & Policy
MET ML 720A1, World Food Systems & Policy will be taught this spring by Ellen Messer, Ph.D. Anthropology.
Global societies in 2025 confront major challenges to ensure that all people can feed themselves sustainable, healthy diets and enjoy basic human security in a warmer, more crowded and interconnected world threatened by climate change, global pandemics, and structural violence.
Through readings and discussions, course participants acquire working knowledge of the ecology and politics of hunger, food security, and nutrition, and the evolution of global-to-local food systems and diets. Overviews of world food situations and international institutions are combined with analysis of more detailed national and local-level case studies that connect global to national and local food situations, crises, and responses.
Key Policy Questions Explored:
- How many are hungry and why? What are world food situations and priority policy concerns in 2024-2025, in contrast to the late 20th century and pre-pandemic 2020?
- How stable and equitably distributed are world food supplies? Which agriculture, nutrition, and related technology and trade issues have advanced or declined on the world and national food-policy agendas, with what impacts on food supply-chain stability, sustainability, safety, health and nutrition?
- Are animal-source foods necessary for human health and well-being? What should be the roles of livestock, animal protein (meat, seafood, dairy), and meat substitutes in diets favoring planetary and human health? At what scale(s)?
- Can traditional, or more diversified agro-ecological agricultural methods, feed the world?
Learning Objectives:
- Master food-system, food-value-chain, food-security, food-sovereignty, and human-rights terms of analysis at multiple (local to global) scales and demonstrate their interconnections in short weekly critical reviews and food-focused mid-term country-level assignment and final country report.
- Evaluate the relative merits, deficiencies, and overlaps of comparative advantage (markets and trade) vs. food-first (food sovereignty and food security) policies; and “basic needs” (Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) vs. “human rights/rights-based” food-policy approaches in mid-term and end-of-term evidence-based national case studies.
- Navigate the international agricultural, food, nutrition, and health agencies that monitor and evaluate food and nutrition and become a food-and-nutrition policy expert on a particular country, its hunger situation, and its significance in international food production and trade.