Focus The Woods: Global food and land use issues

Join us Tuesday, February 8 and Wednesday, February 9, 2011 for Focus The Woods: Global Food and Land Use Issues.

“One billion people are hungry today.” This statement by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations challenges us to care about hunger around the world. 

Hunger and possible solutions to feeding the hungry will be addressed at the Focus the Woods: Global Food and Land Use Issues on February 9, 2011 at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College.  The College takes an interdisciplinary look at national and global information related to food and land uses that face our world. Focus the Woods, an annual symposium, tackles topics affecting our global society including climate change, sustainability and water accessibility. 

Focus the Woods: Global Food and Land Use Issues kicks off with the viewing of the film The Global Banquet on February 8, 2011, which demonstrates how food security is linked to social development and how women, in particular, are affected by it. This film reveals how agribusiness squeezes out small farmers and how trade liberalization undercuts subsistence farming—in the U.S. as well as in developing countries.

 Presentation topics by Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College faculty and students include access to land, forests, water, grazing or fishing grounds; poverty; agricultural support; and social responsibility. The keynote global food and land use issues will be delivered by SMWC Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Kennedy Ondimu, Ph.D., dean and associate professor in the department of geography from Egerton University in Kenya, Africa.