Tropentag 2010 (English shop)

World food system - A contribution from Europe

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The TROPENTAG has become the most important international conference on development-
oriented research in the elds of food security, natural resource management
and rural development in central Europe. Since 1999, it is convened alternately by a
number of German universities engaged in agriculture and forestry in tropical countries
in co-operation with the Council for Tropical and Subtropical Agricultural Research
for Development (ATSAF e.V.) and the GTZ Advisory Service on Agricultural
Research for Development. This year, for the rst time in its history, the TROPENTAG
will be held outside of Germany – at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Since quite
some years, members of the North-South Centre of the ETH Zurich have been regular
participants of the TROPENTAG, leading to this adventurous experience of moving
the three-day conference to a new national and cultural environment.
The TROPENTAG provides an international platform for scientic and personal exchange
for students, junior and senior scientists, development experts and funding
organisations together with their various international partner institutions. The increasing
international interest in the TROPENTAG of a large and still growing audience
– some 1200 participants from 82 countries have registered so far – demonstrates
its importance on the agenda of both, the development-oriented scientic community
and the implementing development organisations.
The TROPENTAG 2010, organised by the North-South Centre of the ETH Zurich,
will shed light on the conference theme “World food system – A contribution from
Europe”.
The world food system encompasses all the natural resources required for, and affected
by the production, distribution and consumption of food. This also includes
resource management and food processing. The world food system provides the foundation
for the nutrition of humankind and includes all related ecological, economic,
health and social aspects.
The global population faces many challenging problems, among them population
growth, food, water and energy scarcity, climate and land use change, as well as
threats to human health. All these problems are interrelated and most are also connected
to the world food system. Food production under changing climatic conditions
will become even more difcult as human population grows, natural resources such
as soils and water become increasingly depleted, and global markets set diverging
priorities such as agriculture versus bioenergy. By providing relevant information
and advice, scientic knowledge supports policy-makers and society in implementing
strategies that address and solve these problems.
The TROPENTAG 2010 will address these enormous challenges in a developmentoriented
and interdisciplinary manner. To broaden the accessibility of the results of
this venue, the abstracts of all contributions are published both as hardcopy and at
www.tropentag.de. In addition, student reporters will contribute to a multi-author
blog with text and visual content in order to increase the outreach of the conference.