The ICABR is pleased to extend congratulations to longtime colleague Robert Paarlberg on his recent gold medal distinction in recognition of his most recent book. This is a very well deserved award.
The focus lies on the motto: The economical value of food bioeconomy.
Armed conflicts, pandemics, and climate crises
challenge sustainable development. The recent
experience has shown that modern biotechnology
has a lot to offer addressing some of the challenges
such as the gene editing for the production of more
efficient and sustainable crops, animals, energy and
medicines. In this session international experts will
discuss the economics of bioeconomy innovation in
response to crises.
ICABR Speakers:
Climate, war and Covid – Can Bioeconomy Help to Cope With Crises?
The war in Ukraine is affecting food security not only in Europe, but worldwide, and is driving up prices accordingly. Also, fertilizers for agriculture are also becoming scarce and expensive. Global logistics chains continue to be disrupted by covid lockdowns, such as in Shanghai or Beijing, or have not yet returned to pre-covid levels in their interconnectedness. At the same time, India and Pakistan are currently experiencing an unprecedented heat wave that could cause a loss of around 500 kilograms of wheat per hectare, according to initial estimates.
Is a “perfect storm” approaching here? And can bioeconomic production methods in agriculture or food production help to make our food supply more secure and at the same time more climate-friendly in the future?
Participant Overview:
This time we are honored to welcome Brazil and Israel as a partner country at the Global Food Summit on June 8, 2022 in Munich and that His Excellency the Ambassador of Brazil to Germany, Mr. Roberto Jaguaribe, will present “Bioeconomy made in Brazil” in Munich.
Speakers:
See a more detailed speaker list on globalfoodsummit.com.
How About Visiting the Global Food Summit?
You can find a complete and more detailed event program on globalfoodsummit.com.
You can buy Tickets on eventbrite.com.
The Global Food Summit will also stream live from the avenue. Be sure to not miss out from where ever you are!
You can find the registration page on globalfoodsummit.live.
The philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures published a report The U.S. Bioeconomy: Charting a Course for a Resilient and Competitive Future. The report will be presented at the ICABR 2022.
Global economic growth is slowing, and several economies are suffering from recession, unemployment, and/or environmental destruction challenging sustainable development. These developments are reinforced by the current COVID-19 pandemic. Developments in biology are expected to allow for technical change addressing many of these challenges. Reaching these expectations will require an institutional and policy environment supporting investments and technical change. This Special Issue examines the possible contributions of the bioeconomy to economic growth, employment, and the environment and addresses how institutions and policies can support these contributions.
More details at:
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/bioeconomy_growth
PNAS has published the opinion piece of Felicia Wu, Justus Wesseler, David Zilberman, Robert M. Russell, Chen Chen, and Adrian C. Dubock
On the Berkeley Blog David Zilberman posted an entry titled ”ICABR at 25 – Celebrating 25 years of Research on the Bioeconomy”
You can read it here
At a time of significant technological change and digitization in the biological sciences, the COVID19 pandemic has highlighted again the inequities in the research and innovation ecosystem. Based on a consultation with an internationally diverse group of stakeholders from multiple fields and professions, and on a broadly representative set of case studies, this report offers a new approach to the global governance of genetic diversity and genomic research and innovation.
Robert Paarlberg’s RESETTING THE TABLE: Straight Talk about the Food We Grow and Eat (Knopf, February 2, 2021) is a bold, science-based corrective to the groundswell of misinformation about food and how it’s produced.
A descendant of Midwestern family farmers, Paarlberg examines in detail local and organic food, food companies, nutrition labeling, ethical treatment of animals, environmental impact, and every other aspect of the American food system from farm to table—and finds abundant reasons to disagree with the prevailing messaging to consumers to buy organic, unprocessed foods, sourced from small local farms. Global food markets have in fact improved the American diet. “Industrial” farming has greatly reduced environmental impact thanks to GPS-guided precision methods that cut energy use and chemical pollution, in addition to reducing land use while producing more crops. America’s very serious obesity crisis does not come from farms, or from food deserts, but from “food swamps” created by food companies, retailers, and restaurant chains. And, though animal welfare is lagging behind, progress can be made through continued advocacy, more progressive regulations, and perhaps plant-based imitation meat.
Paarlberg, an adjunct professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of Starved for Science, Food Politics, and The United States of Excess, offers evidence-based solutions to the challenges of our food system today, ones that make sense for farmers and consumers alike. With RESETTING THE TABLE, he gives us a road map through the rapidly changing worlds of food and farming, laying out a practical path to bring the two together.
The aim of the book is to make the authors’ scholarly research in the area of consumers’ willingness-to-pay for new foods that have controversial attributes easily assessable to other researchers, students, and food policy makers. It addresses issues that arise in a market with conflicting information from interested parties, scientific sources, and the media. It begins with a discussion of research methods and information issues. These results include how consumers respond to food products that are produced with new technology that lowers farmers’ costs of production, enhance nutrition and food safety for consumers, or adds variety to consumers’ food choices. These results arise from data collected in a series of laboratory experiments on adult subjects at various sites in the US and consumer surveys worldwide. The data include socio-demographic attributes of subjects, and their revealed willingness-to-pay in auctions of experimental foods and food products under randomly assigned food labels and information treatments and contingent-valuation survey data.
The EBU Scientific Forum provides a platform for presenting EBU research, fostering networking and intensifying collaborations between scientists from the EBU alliance and selected partners of the EBU network.
We call for contributions for:
