Upcoming Events

One Health Meeting

May 2009
St. Paul, MN

Public Health Institute

May-June 2009
Minneapolis, MN

Executive Leadership in Food Safety Program

August 2009
Ecuador

Farm to Table Tour

October 2009
South America

State Policy Making

October 2009
St. Paul, MN

2009 / 2010 Regional
Food Systems
Leadership Forums

Africa, Asia, Europe,
Latin America and
North America

For more info

To find out more about the Global Initiative for Food Systems Leadership, download the answers to our Frequently Asked Questions. It's a great way to share our mission with others.

Suggestions?

If you have any suggestions for making this newsletter more informative or resourceful, please send them to Will Hueston.

“Leadership means different things in different cultures,” said GIFSL Executive Director Will Hueston. “Our objective was to bring together experts from different disciplines, different countries, public and private sectors, and ask: What leadership characteristics would it take to ensure that everyone in the world has an adequate supply of safe, nutritious, and affordable food?”

The three-day summit, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, revolved around three themes: food safety and security; environmental sustainability; and economic and political stability.

The Ranikhet Gathering

A Post-Bellagio Regional Meeting: April 14-17, 2009 The Ranikhet Gathering is the first regional meeting to come out of Bellagio and is being hosted by participants from the South Asia region. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Initiative for Food Systems Leadership will provide partial funding for the meeting.

The purpose of this regional meeting is to continue the exploration of global strategies for leadership development as it pertains to the current South Asia situation. Meeting objectives include:

• sharing the Bellagio One Health (OH) leadership model to improve our response to global public health and food systems across various Asian communities and cultures
• discussing the critical competencies that have been identified for effective OH leadership and identifying the most viable and appropriate way for developing these competencies within Asia
• involving new parties to start the viral learning process (infectious sharing)
• making use of the Bellagio Declaration and outcomes through follow-up projects
• identifying potential funding sources for regional leadership development activities and projects

This regional meeting will catalyze the creation of local initiatives and the development of global food systems leadership with a shared sense of ownership. Participants will include five to six people who originally participated in the Bellagio meeting along with persons from other countries in South Asia. The introduction of new participants from different Asian regions will allow for broader sharing and perspective in the development of food systems leadership in this region.

Public Health Institute 2009

Courses in global food systems leadership are among the dozens of offerings at this year’s Public Health Institute, an initiative of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in cooperation with the College of Veterinary Medicine and School of Nursing.

The Public Health Institute (PHI) is offered each year over a three-week period in late May and early June to provide public health professionals with an opportunity to advance their education on an intensive basis. Individual classes range from one-day sessions to three-week programs. A PHI highlight from a food leadership perspective will be the Global Food Safety Systems Leadership course, taught by GIFSL Executive Director Will Hueston and GIFSL Senior Fellow Daniel Stone. The course, held June 1–5, will address the skills and traits needed to be an effective leader in addressing food safety and supply issues in industry, academia, and government.

Other courses with GIFSL ties include:

• Food Safety Systems in a Global Food Market, taught by E.G.M. (Ed) Van Klink, GIFSL Senior Fellow and policy coordinator with the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, the Netherlands
• One Health: The Convergence of Human, Animal and Environmental Health, taught by Lonnie King, director of the National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne, and Enteric Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Food Safety: Risk Management, taught by Craig Hedberg, associate professor of environmental health sciences, Donald Schaffner of Rutgers University, and Dane Bernard from Keystone, a large food company)
• Ecosystem Health, Sustainability and Environmental Change taught by Katey Pelican, assistant professor of veterinary population medicine at the University of Minnesota
• Principles of Risk Communication, taught by Katherine Waters, assistant professor of veterinary public health, Buddy Ferguson, Public Information Officer MN Dept of Health, and Lillian McDonald, Executive Director Emergency and Community Health Outreach.

Courses may be taken for academic or professional continuing education credit. For more information on the institute and to register for classes, please see: http://cpheo.sph.umn.edu/cpheo/institute/home.html

Engaging WTO, WHO, OIE, and FAO

For many food system leaders, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as the World Trade Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are important but somewhat mystifying institutions. GIFSL helped a group of early and mid-career leaders add faces and functions to several IGOs in February with a short course entitled: Engaging Intergovernmental Organizations for Food Safety, Animal Health, and Public Health. The course was attended by 14 participants from the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

“I was familiar with a few of the organizations. My goal was to learn a little more about the ones I didn’t know,” said participant Elizabeth Parker, chief veterinarian with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in Washington, D.C.

The seven-day, three-country event began with presentations at the World Trade Organization and World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Participants then traveled to Paris, where they visited the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), and to Rome for a daylong session at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Topics covered included health issues related to global trade, global animal health surveillance systems, and food /agriculture capacity-building in developing countries. Presentations by the IGO representatives were complemented by small group sessions and informal discussions among group members.

“It was a good experience for me to learn the way IGOs think, meet interesting people with leadership skills, and work in a diverse group—different ages, opinions, professions—during the week,” said Thiemo Albert, assistant professor at the Institute of Food Hygiene, faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Leipzig, Germany.

Participant Khaled Gohary, a resident in food and animal reproduction and herd health at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, said he appreciated the opportunity to gain a better understanding of how IGOs work and the roles countries can play with the organizations. “It showed me that even as an individual, I can have an influence in the different approaches around me just by being knowledgeable about how things are going,” Gohary said.

As part of the learning experience, participants worked on a capstone project in which they served as panels of experts, incorporating their knowledge and experience into a recommendation on how countries can prioritize their animal health, zoonoses, and food safety issues. The recommendations were presented to FAO officials on the final day of the program.

“With the scientific background of a veterinarian, I try to always consider facts for priority setting,” Albert said. “During this course, I learned that sometimes facts are only one piece of a puzzle and that it is important to see things in general and to think as part of a network.”

Engaging Intergovernmental Organizations is an annual event offered by GIFSL in collaboration with Washington State University School of Global Animal Health, University of California, Davis, and University of Minnesota Center for Animal Health and Food Safety. For information on future opportunities, check out “Our Programs” on the GIFSL website www.foodsystemsleadership.org.

Upcoming One Health Meeting to Focus on Emerging Issues

“One Health: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Solving Emerging Issues” will be held May 5 at the University of Minnesota Pomeroy Center on the St. Paul campus.

The second annual convergence event, organized by the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety (CAHFS) and GIFSL, will bring a broad range of academic, industry, and government partners together to discuss anticipated needs and issues at the interface of animal health, human health, and the environment. The goal of the meeting is to develop interdisciplinary strategies to address these needs and issues, according to CAHFS Director Jeff Bender, who will facilitate the meeting with GIFSL Executive Director Will Hueston.

The meeting will focus on challenges anticipated by the year 2015. Various individuals and agency representatives will predict challenges that will be at the forefront in six years. The group will propose and discuss the mechanisms that should be put into place today to make sure capacity exists to address the challenges of tomorrow. Participants will also have an opportunity for interaction and partnership building.

As part of last year’s One Health meeting, four recipients received seed grants of $10,000 each to kick off new initiatives with a high likelihood of success in fostering government-industry-academic collaborations in teaching, research, or service. Those individuals will provide an update on their activities at this year’s meeting.

“We hope to provide similar seed grant funding for proposals for new initiatives this year that demonstrate innovative, interdisciplinary solutions to emerging issues,” Bender said.

“Ultimately, we hope to catalyze a number of new cross-disciplinary public-private partnerships.”

The program is being sponsored by a variety of industry, government, and academic

sources.

For more information or to register for the event, contact Kate Hanson (hanso041@umn.edu.)