A professor of global health with McMaster University is encouraging developed nations to share resources and expertise with less developed nations to help reduce both poverty and hunger.
“World Food Security: The Role of Canada’s Agri-Food Industry” was among the topics discussed yesterday as part of the Canadian Institute of Food Science and Technology and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada biennial joint conference underway in Winnipeg.
Stephen Lewis, a professor of global health with McMaster University and chair of the Stephen Lewis Foundation observes one billion 400 million people live below a dollar and a quarter per day.
He notes reducing by half the level of poverty and hunger by 2015 is at the premier level of the international community’s millennium development goals and he believes Canada has a role to play.
Primarily the role is one of resources, is one of giving the developing the world sufficient funds to be able to deal with agricultural productivity and that means sufficient monies for seeds and for fertilizer and for some small crop irrigation and for plants which are drought resistant and those are the things which we can make possible in developing countries by providing the resources when they need them urgently.
You know Canada’s always been a country which has been regarded internationally as having a humanitarian bent and the agri-food industry no less than others cares about what happens in other parts of the world.
If the knowledge and expertise which the agri-food industry and the crop scientists and the food safety scientists, if that knowledge can be shared I think that’s the contribution that can be made.
Lewis says there are many excellent agricultural schemes underway in Asia, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, Africa and Latin America but they need help, they need resources, they need new techniques and that’s what Canada can bring.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
