Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. My name is Pat Turner, and I'm current president of the World Veterinary Association, and I'd like to welcome all of our attendees today to the WVA's virtual seminar on food security. We have an engaging set of expert speakers and panellists lined up for our session today.

And in advance of this session, I'd really like to thank the WVA Secretariat, the One Health strategic Focus Group, as well as the webinar vet team for all of their work in organising this session. Ensuring global food security is a fundamental challenge of our times and is linked to the UN sustainable development goals of zero hunger and poverty reduction by 2030. In 2021, when coupled together with the global COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing environmental impact of climate change, we can appreciate accelerated risks for hunger, undernutrition, and malnutrition in vulnerable and low income communities and countries all around the world.

Ensuring global food security is a one health challenge requiring veterinarians to work with farmers and others to ensure environmentally sustainable and acceptable production practises for food of animal origin such as bees, poultry, meat rabbits, farmed fish, and seafood, as well as traditional livestock species. Veterinarians are needed at all stages of production to ensure food security. From overseeing appropriate management, treatment and care practises are in place for animals to training veterinary paraprofessions for community projects to improve livestock health and breeding performance.

To control animal disease and development of biosecurity protocols, as well as ensuring that appropriate health surveillance measures and diagnostic support systems are available to minimise animal losses. It is critical that veterinarians be thinking about how they can step forward to support this effort. So our speakers will be addressing these very issues today, and without further delay, I'll hand things over to our moderator, Doctor Anthony Chadwick, to start our seminar.

Anthony, the floor is yours. Thank you, Patricia. It's it's great to interject between the two G Guelphians.

So we've got, Evan and Patricia, who I think are a couple of minutes' walk away from each other, but meeting each other in the, in the virtual space. So thank you Patricia, for that great opening. And we're very fortunate today to have.

Professor Evan Fraser, who's going to be talking to us today about obviously the, the topic of food security, and Evan has a great CV. He's a professor of geography at Guelph University, and he leads the, the team on the Food for Thought initiative. Evan's interest in agriculture began when he used to watch his grandfather picking fruit on the Niagara Escarpment.

And continues to today, he began his academic career in Leeds in the UK, so he came over to England, to the, to the mother country to study farming and climate change and to lecture in those areas. And Evan continues to work with large multidisciplinary teams to really try and work out the conundrum of how we're going to feed the growing world population whilst not destroying our very precious ecosystem. He's the author of two books and many academic papers.

One of his books is called Empires of Food, Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. And he is also a a star of, of the internet with his web series, video series Feeding 9 billion, which has had close to a million views. As well as, and I, I, I'm looking forward to play this game at some point, a card game about global food security.

So some really fascinating, insights that I'm really looking forward to, Evan, and the, the floor is yours. So thanks Anthony, and I'm gonna share my screen and maybe Anthony, before you go off, you could just give me a quick thumbs up that you can hear me and see my screen. That looks absolutely fabulous, thank you.

Awesome, thank you very much. So, what a pleasure to be here and, chatting with you, with you all, you know, as Anthony has just said, I'm going to speak to you today about one of the world's biggest problems, how are we going to feed the future. And, in this talk, I'll try to touch on a wide range of issues, include a little bit of animal agriculture.

Which is the stuff that you folks are probably most, most aware of and most interested in. But my goal is really to provide you an introduction and a high level survey to the top. And probably an important place or an appropriate place to start, is, with the challenge of population growth.

And probably, as we all know, the world's population currently sits at around. 8 billion people and this is set to grow for at least another couple of decades. And when you put all this together, it means that we are going to need more food, a lot more food as it turns out.

According to the Economist magazine, that ran an article on this a few years ago, in the next 40 years, humans are going to need to produce more food than they did in the previous 10,000 put together. 10,000 years, I beg your pardon, put together. And of course we have to contend with, with climate change while we deal with that gargantuan task of producing all this food, which threatens to make food harder and more expensive to produce, threatens to make some of our most fertile regions significantly less fertile.

But when I present the world's food security challenge in this way, it really focuses on production. And it makes us seem that if we could just address climate change and food production and boost production, we'll have a well-fed future. And of course the problem is far, far more complicated than than that simple narrative allows us to have.

First, we have to wrestle with the fact that food distribution today is actually very inequitable. Today there is probably enough food for the world's population in some measures, but yet it's not very well distributed. And I can actually think of no better way to explore the issue of distribution with you than to simply show you two photographs from what I think has to be my favourite photo essay of all time.

It's called The Hungry Planet. It's by two journalists, Peter Mentel and Faith Deluzio. It was published about 15 years ago, so it's getting a little dated, but these two journalists had the genius idea of travelling around the world and taking formal family portraits with families from different cultures.

And the great thing is they posed each family with a week's worth of groceries, and in this way they introduce us to the Revis family pictured here from North Carolina, 15 years ago, the Revis family spent apparently about $85 per person per week on food. I think it's worth pausing to revel in the colour of the American diet, the packaging that goes into our food system, and I guess the extraordinary lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. Of course, it invites the obvious comparison with the Otomo family from Mali, $1.76 per person per week is what they spent on food, largely vegetarian diet, largely free of packaging, and you cannot look at these two photographs and help but conclude that we live in a deeply structurally really inequitable world.

And, and unfortunately the data really backs this up. Here we see the cover of last fall's annual United Nations State of Food Security report provides sobering insights that provide that for the last 5 years, we've in a row, both hunger and obesity have been rising at a global level. So that's a challenge, distribution.

We also have to ask the question, are we producing the right kinds of food for everyone to enjoy a healthy diet? And a couple of seconds ago I said, we're producing enough food and technically that is correct. We are producing enough food for everybody.

We are currently producing about 2800 calories per person per day on the planet, which is enough, but it's not necessarily the right kinds of food for us all to be healthy. And so, what I'm going to show you is on the left hand side of the screen will appear what we should be eating according to the well known Harvard University's nutritional guideline called the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate Diet, and on the right hand side of the screen I've used United Nations data to explore what we're actually are producing at a global level. And we begin with the fruits and vegetables that we all should be eating more of.

About half of our diet should be made up of fruits and vegetables. Yet when you look at the actual production data, you realise that we're only producing a small proportion of the world's food, our fruits and vegetables. Indeed, the team that I worked with to Published this data, calculated that we would need to almost quadruple our global production of fruits and vegetables if we wanted to just produce enough for everyone to be able to follow dietary guidelines.

Then that's not that's assuming that people could then afford those foods. By contrast, we should have about 20% of our diets be cereals and starches, whereas the vast majority of our food system are cereals and starches, and here it's really important to note that the cereals and starches on the right hand side of this slide are for human consumption that does not include livestock feed. Oils and fats should make up a very small proportion of our diet, yet may represent a major part of the global food system.

Meats and alternatives and dairy products are a little bit difficult to interrogate, given there is a lack of consensus amongst nutritionists about how much or even if we should be eating these products. So I'll, I'll come back to this point in the the meat issue in a in a few minutes, and we move to the kicker of the punch line of this slide, which is the sugars that we all should be limiting, yet nevertheless make up a huge proportion of the global food system. And I think, I think it stands pretty obvious that when you see the data presented in this way, it's difficult not to conclude that there's some sort of fundamental mismatch between what we produce and what we should be eating, and that perhaps this mismatch finds something to do with its roots in our cases of skyrocketing obesity and diabetes.

And of course, you know, we've also have to talk about things like food waste. Most reports suggest that somewhere between 3.5 of the world's food that we produce is never eaten by by humans.

And to put that into context, here's some data published a few years ago by the city of Vancouver that suggests that Metro Vancouver wastes 80,000 potatoes, 30,000 eggs, and 70,000 cups of milk each day. And then, of course, there's agriculture's environmental footprint. Unfortunately, the global agri-food systems are responsible for somewhere between 25% and 33% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the data is also quite clear.

Agriculture is the world's largest driver in the habitat loss and biodiversity loss. Agriculture uses more fresh water than any other human activity. And agriculture is the world's biggest source of water pollution, and what you're looking at here is one of the algae blooms from Lake Erie, one of Canada and the US's Great Lakes.

All of which is to say that developing the strategies to safely, nutritiously, equitably and sustainably feed the world's growing population has to be ranked as one of the biggest challenges we face over the upcoming century. OK, with that being said, I'd like to pivot to use that that horribly overused 2020 word and and discuss how technology, if we deploy it properly, can solve, or at least partly solve some of these problems. And in order to set this part of my talk up, let me share with you an anecdote that I sometimes use to illustrate the scale of technological changes currently underway in food and farming systems.

And, Anthony mentioned that when I was a kid, I, I I had a grandfather with a farm in the Niagara Peninsula, in southwestern Ontario. That's a picture of me on that farm. I'm sitting on my grandfather's lap.

I'm guessing this picture was taken in the mid 1970s. And as a teenager, I used to stand on the back of this tractor where my brother and my cousins are currently standing. In this picture, and one of my jobs was to throw handfuls of fertiliser pellets off the back of the tractor as Grandpa would drive slowly through the melons and the sweet corn and the strawberry fields.

Now, unfortunately, with the benefit of both hindsight and a PhD in agriculture, I'm going to estimate that 50% of that fertiliser did not end up in the right place or at the right time for the plants to utilise, and either work its way into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas or into the water table as pollution. But that was then back in the dark ages of the 1980s and the 1990s, and this is now the fully autonomous smart tractor capable of knowing where it is in the field and applying the right amount of fertiliser at the right place at the right time for each individual plant to utilise on a 1 metre by metre basis with maximum efficiency. The advent of these high-tech robotic tools is sometimes called the digital agricultural revolution or AG 4.0, lots of different monikers, and it probably began 10 years ago or so we started to see these products, these tools crop up.

And you know, to be honest, the dairy industry was at the. Guard of this transition with the robotic milkers that have become very common in some parts of the world, including in Ontario where about half of our dairy farms now use robotic milkers. And the interesting thing about the dairy milkers, the robotic milkers is they more or less autonomously milk the cows, so reduced labour requirements.

And while they're being milked, the robots capture the biometric data that helps the farmer manage the herd health, estimate, enhance animal nutrition, maintain productivity, identify mastitis before the cow even knows she's sick, let alone the farmer who thinks to call in one of you folks to to diagnose it. And that probably means that farmers with robotic milkers use less antibiotics, for instance, to treat mastitis. Now similar changes as this are happening up and down the food chain, including smart packaging materials that biodegrade but also change colour when food goes bad, and that's a way of enhancing food safety, reducing food waste, as well as reducing the pollution that comes off of food in the form of plastics.

Although. Through to what sometimes are called blockchain enabled e-commerce platforms. These would be computerised systems that allow greater transparency from farm to fork.

So consumers can see sort of see what the farmer was doing with their food, and the farmer can really understand what the consumer is demanding. As a result, many folks in this field believe that the next big digital frontier will be the application of digital tools to food and farming systems, and that we will be able to help improve food security through technology. And the literature really gets quite breathless with excitement that not only are there huge business opportunities, but we can produce more food on less land, we can reduce waste, and we can feed the world's growing population while shrinking the environmental footprint of our food system all at the same time.

But if all this maybe sounds a little too good to be true, then I think you have a right to be critical. So I'm going to pause for a minute and I'm going to reflect a little more critically and drill into two technologies, two specific kinds of technologies which are capturing a lot of people's imagination right now, but I think need a little bit more explanation. And I'd like to start with the broad area of vertical farming or indoor horticulture.

Now investment money and media attention has poured into vertical farming really recently, and I think a large part of this is very, very significant and very legitimate. My very strong prediction is that over the next 5 years, we will see a rapid deployment. Of technologies that will bring fruit and vegetable production both indoors and closer to home, even in places like Canada, where we've got a growing season that usually doesn't allow us to produce fruits and vegetables in the winter.

For instance, we know that there's well established tomato, cucumber, and pepper operations using traditional greenhouses, high degree of automation that are giving us year-round production and some key things. That's only going to grow and become more sophisticated in the next little while. This approach to food production is picking up space.

As a result, proponents of vertical farming really believe that we are moving to a point where we can produce, and the phrase that I keep hearing is any crop anywhere, anytime. But let's pause again. While I do think this technology has tremendous potential, I don't think we're there yet, .

And for instance, first of all, vertical farming today mostly produces expensive salads, which really isn't in my opinion, a very exciting part of a global food security strategy. So let's let's be realistic here about what vertical farming is and what it does. In addition, there's also some very important pieces of research that really need to be undertaken before we can get this level of ambition.

First, we need more varieties of crops that are bred for year-round production. Like I just said, mostly it's producing salads. Well, we need strawberries, we need blueberries.

I actually just started working with a vertical farming company that's producing high end high protein livestock feed on vertical farms, in the form of microgreens that are feeding them to cows as a as an addition to a ration. So that's a very interesting livestock related animal agriculture application of vertical farming. Second, we need more work to be done on mechanical harvesting, to bring the costs down because it's no good to just be producing expensive salads if we want this to be a viable food security strategy.

Third, and this is a really interesting one from a science perspective, we need more research to be done on how, fruits and vegetables perform differently under wavelengths of light. Now I realise that you, you folks are are veterinarians and interested in animals, but I couldn't help but show you three heads of lettuce because I think this just illustrates where this technology is going, and I find it fascinating. So, here's some, this work was done by a colleague of mine, Mike Dixon at the University of Guelph.

The lettuce on the right, which is under the blue light, was produces a lot of what are called antioxidants that gives the leaves the purple colour. The lettuce in the middle was produced under red light, and that lettuce is actually twice as big as the lettuce on the right, and the lettuce on the left is the control one produced under white light. And what Mike has discovered is that you can actually completely change the shape, the texture, the size, and the taste of vegetables and fruit just simply by changing the wavelength of light that the plant grows under.

Mike, for instance, has shown that if you start lettuce off with with red light, they grow really big, and then you change them to blue light for the last couple days, you get the antioxidants that give them the purple leaves and you can get a premium in the marketplace. So my message to you is that this space, this vertical farming space, is going to be huge, but we're not quite there yet. Not all the research has been done, and we really need to be thinking a bit more ambitiously about using technologies for food security rather than just producing expensive high quality salads.

I'd like to now shift to technology number 2, which is also capturing people's imagination, and that's of course the the protein revolution, which threatens to be incredibly disruptive. And here I'm talking of course about the advent of plant-based protein, but also this thing called cellular agriculture that involves synthesising what are ostensibly animal proteins in the laboratory. Now these products hit the news in 2020 with the initial public offerings of beyond and impossibles and whatnot, we now have companies like Tyson and Canada's own Maple Leaf, traditional livestock protein companies investing heavily in this space, and, you know, to quote a Canadian, very senior Canadian meat guy, Michael McCain, he says the future is higher quality, but less quantities of meat, but more protein.

So maple leaf is pivoting away from being a meat company to being a protein company. Huge implications for all sorts of people. There's lots of controversies.

A lot of consumers, of course, have criticised these products as being hyper processed and high in salt. Other people are deeply concerned that a large amount of what's on this screen is bioengineering, and, for instance, the ingredient that gives this new generation of meatless burgers their meaty. Texture is a molecule called heme that all mammals have in their blood.

It bonds to iron, it's what makes meat pink and juicy, and it caramelises when it grills, but it comes from a bioengineering experiment and consumers are raising concerns about this. Is this a natural food? And we get caught up in a very complicated discussion around that.

With that said, I wanted to put a company on your radar which I think proves will prove to be incredibly disruptive, and have major implications for the world's food systems and, and animal agriculture, and it's a company called Perfect Day. I learned about it last summer and they very explicitly positioned themselves as an agent for positive change. Down at the right hand side of this slide, they say that they.

Make dairy perfect, which I was giving the slide or giving a version of this talk to the dairy farmers of Ontario recently, and they find this rather problematic because Perfect Day does not use cows. It was started about 5 years ago by two chemical engineers in Silicon Valley that bioengineered a form of yeast that digests starches and produces a molecule that is identical to dairy protein. And it's a vegan dairy protein, and ice cream made with with this protein is now available across the USA.

I would be driving down to Buffalo today to try some if the border was open, and I have, but I have it on good authority that this makes really good ice cream and is completely chemically, culinarily indistinguishable from regular ice cream. So, but when we think about this, technological revolution coming at us, we have to ask the question, what on earth is going to happen to animal agriculture? Maybe we can help improve the environmental performance of our food system, but there's about a billion people on the planet today that depend on animal agriculture for their livelihoods.

If they lose their livelihoods, what impact is that going to have on food security? Are we facing a moment analogous to what must have happened 100 years ago, as tractors replaced draught animals on farms? Are cattle ranchers and dairy operators going to go the same way as blacksmiths did 100 years ago, and simply be replaced by technology?

I'm not gonna try to answer this question right now. I'm happy to talk about it in the Q&A, but I'd like to shift a little bit into the final moments of this talk and talk a little bit about what sort of policy changes I think have to happen in order to maximise the benefits of these technologies while mitigating the negative consequences. And my first point is that if one of the benefits of this digital agricultural revolution is to reduce the agriculture's impact on the environment, then governments really need to be creating what are called ecofiscal incentives or payment for ecosystem services, in other words, financial rewards to farmers who protect the environment.

This would help, such as carbon taxes, such as illustrated on the slide. So techno policies like carbon taxes could help farmers or other agents adopt low carbon or low environmental impact technologies and really create incentives to help reward agents, processors, producers, etc. Who protect the environment.

Second, one of the big impacts of this is going to be a real radical change in how food production and processing is done, and this means we need a new approach to training. Given that the disruption, I think is coming, if we want to manage this disruption of this technology, we need to be training the youth of the future leader in a better way. And this really means 3 things.

In my opinion, I think we need to be continuing to focus on and promoting the traditional agricultural disciplines, animal husbandry, animal veterinary science, so. Science crop science, but we also need to be realising that the future leader is going to be a data scientist. So we need better integration between the engineering and computer science departments and the agricultural colleges.

That means, our ag students and our veterinarian students need to be better data managers at the same time, our computer scientists and engineers need to have an understanding of ag and vet science. That's not going to be enough though. Workplace study after workplace study tells us that students also need foundational skills of critical thinking, social perceptiveness, group work.

The technologies are changing so fast that students can't just be technologically expert, they also need to be good team players and have those foundational or soft skills. Bringing all those three things together though, the traditional ag disciplines and veterinary disciplines, the STEM disciplines, science, technology, engineering, math. And the and the the foundational skills though will be a real challenge for our colleges and our universities.

And the third and final piece of policy advice that I would like to leave with you is to go back to that slide from the hungry planet that I had at the beginning of my talk, and I'd like to remind us all that we live in this deeply inequitable world. Problems of food insecurity, which is defined as a lack of ability to access healthy food, will not be solved with . Anything I've talked about in the last few slides, food insecurity is a social and an economic problem linked with poverty and colonialism and racism.

We know that food insecurity disproportionately affects black indigenous people of colour. It has been those people have been exacerbated or food insecurity amongst those groups has been exacerbated by the pandemic. So if we want to address this particular pernicious issue, food insecurity, which is a subset of food security, we need, I think, progressive social policies linked with things like basic incomes and programmes to address racism and forms of marginalisation.

Food insecurity, in other words, is a social problem and only will be solved with social problem programming. So with that said, let me wrap up. In my opinion, one of the next big frontiers of technological innovation.

It's is the digital agriculture revolution. It will shape our health. It will shape our communities, our relationship with the planet.

I think if it's properly done, it will generate a tremendous amount of wealth. What we have to work hard in order for it to not have major disruptions, negative disruptions, such as the billion people on the planet who currently depend on agriculture. And finally, although I'm under no, I'd like to stress that I'm under no illusions.

These technologies that we're facing that we hope will address global food security are not a panacea. No, no technology ever is, but perhaps with collaborative policy making, we can address some of these big social issues associated with food security. So that's it for me.

Thank you very, very much. Thanks, Evan, that was fantastic. We're obviously gonna take questions towards the end, so we're gonna move on quickly to Saskia Hendricks, who's from USAID, and she's gonna be speaking about the contribution of animal source food to food security.

Saskia is a vet epidemiologist and she's the deputy director of Feed the Future Innovation Lab at the University of Florida. Before working at the University of Florida, Saskia worked at the World Health organisation and also the International Livestock Research Institute, where she was looking at, at many different areas, but one was the surveillance of zoonotic livestock diseases. So really, really looking forward to your talk, Saskia, and it's over to you, just, unmute yourself.

Sure. Thank you very much. And just to clarify, I'm not employed by USA, I am employed by the University of Florida.

So thank you for this opportunity. I would like to Explain a bit more about the, the contributions of animal source foods to food security. And with that, I would like to start with with the definition, and I'm not going to read it all out, but, food security is not only about the quantity of food, but it's also that food also needs to be safe and nutritious.

And as I already explained, food security or food insecurity really, really differs around the world and, and this map, . Shows that and it is also important to realise that there are many threats to food security. Climate change, of course, is, is on top, but, but there's also, you know, access to land, there are pests and diseases and also conflicts.

And again, also something that that I already mentioned, vulnerability to food insecurity really differs, and this is very much intersectional, so it differs with gender and class and and age, and, and, again, The, the, the COVID-19 crisis that started last year really highlighted that, and, and countries that were shown in green in, in the previous slide, actually had millions and millions of people that depended on, on, on food banks because they just didn't have enough to feed their families. So, now I would like to, to go a bit more into detail about livestock and the link to food security. So we know that the growth in the agricultural sector yields as the greater yields a greater reduction in nutritional stunting than any other economic growth.

So that's good. However, we also know that many of the people that are involved in agriculture, including livestock, are those that, that, that are food insecure. However, also on a positive note, I would like to mention that there is evidence, and this evidence is growing that households, livestock holders are more likely than their counterparts to consume animal source foods, and I'll explain that more later.

Now, why this is important to set the scene is because 70% of the world's rural poor depend on livestock for important parts of their livelihoods. Here to the right side of, of the slide, it's an adaptation, we show an adaptation of the UNICEF conceptual framework for the, of the determinants of child undernutrition. And in green, you see how livestock production systems can contribute to, to that.

Now, why I want to show this is because We need to look broader than just food security or food insecurity. It's, it's not so straightforward to ultimately achieve improved nutrition. There are many other factors, many other determinants that influence this process.

Another important concept I would like to introduce to you is stunting. And here in this picture, this is a picture from, from Tanzania, and the white line on the screen, or on the wall really is the World Health Organization's standard height for nine year olds. And all these children, as you can see, are far below that line.

You may think, well, you know, maybe they're just short. Unfortunately, these children are stunted. Stunting is an indicator for chronic malnutrition, and it's relatively easy to measure as it's height for age or Z score.

While this is not the only indicator or necessarily the best one, it is an important indicator because it measures the culmination of a complex set of drivers, such as trials and different food crises. So that, it's difficult to measure, but it's, it's, it's a very good indicator. On the next slide, and I need to slow down here because I need to really explain this carefully, this figure shows that stunting is inversely related to meat consumption.

Now, I want to really stress, and that's why I slow down, that this is simply showing an association and does not account for the myriad of factors that contribute to animal source foods consumption, many of which are confounders. And also have an effect on, on child, growth such as, for example, education levels of, of the mothers. And this was, this is part of a publication that our team here at the University of Florida published and I'll share the link later in the chat.

Stunting is a very, unfortunately, it's a very common problem, and over 160 million children under the age of 5 are stunted across the world. And Unfortunately, these are mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. Now, you may think, you know, we are vets, why are we talking about children and stunting and all of that?

Well, I just want you to realise, and I hope it all comes together at the end of the presentation, but stunting is very important. Children that are stunted are 44 times more likely to die than those that are not. It also impacts on IQ.

So, you know, school, school success and future careers really depend on that. And obviously, ultimately the the workforce and economy suffered from it because, and, and for a country like Ethiopia, it was estimated that stunting contributes to losses in the gross domestic product as high as 16%. No.

In terms of animal source foods, animal source foods are the best high quality nutrient-rich foods for children in the age 6 to 23 months of age. This is referenced by the World Health organisation. We know studies have shown that the cognitive function is better in animal source food consumers as opposed to non-consumers.

And why is that? Animal source foods are really, really good source of protein, energy, iron, iodine. I won't read it all out, but I just want to also highlight among the vitamins, vitamin B12 is extremely important for brain development.

And apart from seaweed, algae, You cannot, you cannot have really a good source of B12, but animal source foods actually is a very good source of, of, of, of vitamin B12. It is also much more available. So all these, all these nutrients are much more bioavailable as compared to plant-based product.

And then the last point here, these animal source foods are dense. And why is that so important? Because if you think of these small children, 6 to 23 years of age, their stomach is about the size of their fist, but they have very high nutrient demands.

So you really want to be very strategic, you know, in what we, what you feed these children so that their needs are met. Unfortunately, a study from UNICEF last year showed that 59% of children are not fed these much-needed nutrients and probably due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is even worse. This is also a field that has you know, evidence has, has become much more available in, in this sense, and, and I know this is a terribly busy slide, but I just want to show you that in the last 5 years, more and more evidence has become available.

And from all these studies, I would like to study, I would like to explain a bit more in detail. The one from, from McEwen and all, Sarah McEwen, Doctor Sarah McEwan is a colleague from the University of Florida, and she conducted research in Burkina Faso, West Africa, . And as part of the innovation Lab for Lito system.

So she designed their team, I should say, designed the culturally tailored behaviour change intervention. She worked with, so she is a, a, a public health nutritionist. She worked with, with the doctors, veterinarians, animal scientists, and, they did, they designed this intervention and They were able to increase egg intake in infants from 0 to 6 eggs a week.

This is in the full intervention study that received chickens and, and training, but also the group that only received the training about the benefit of egg consumption. In that group, egg intake increased with 2.4 eggs a week at the end line.

It reduced wasting and underweight in these children, and it increased women's decision making power. And please remember that that that diagram that I showed the conceptual framework for UNICEF. Women's decision making power is very important in terms of, it's an important determinant for, for child nutrition.

So this integrated training package that the team developed, considered or included aspects on human nutrition, how you actually go about feeding an egg to a small infant, and also on best poultry production practises. And, and this has been a huge success and we're looking into expanding this across Burkina Faso but also to other countries. And I'll share the link also to this publication and a nice short video they developed in the chat in a minute.

So to wrap up, I would like to share with you, so, so there is huge potential and, if we could increase the the consumption of animal sourced foods among children in these low and middle-income countries, we really can reduce the devastating impacts of stunting and malnutrition. But for that to be successful, we really need multi-sectoral and interdisciplinary approaches. We need to reduce the barriers to animal source food consumption in these countries, and, you know, they vary.

It is often price and egg is, is, is expensive in many countries, but also milk or or meat. They also taboos that we need to overcome and sometimes it's a question of access. We also Should increase the use of animal source foods to diversify and enrich diets while ensuring moderation.

And then last but not least, environmental stewardship of life production is needed to ensure that the beneficial effect of animal ownership and animal source food consumption are not negated by environmental impacts or zoonotic diseases. So with that, and if you're interested in, in, in learning more about our work, I encourage you to go to, to our website, and I, I thank you for your attention. Thank you so much, Saskia, that was also amazing.

Just really sad to see Tanzania I visited a number of years ago to see so many children stunted. So, really great that you've shown that, connection there, so thank you so much for that. We're gonna stay within the the theme of animal health.

Moving on to Case Vanner Klo Kloster, who's gonna be speaking about contribution of animal health services for food and nutrition security. In Ethiopia. He is a vet livestock specialist.

He, he actually has a a master's in tropical vet medicine from Utrecht University. And he spent the last 35 years working in Africa and in Asia. Obviously like Saskia, a veterinary epidemiologist, very interested in animal disease surveillance, Tetsi fly control, which of course is a huge problem in Africa.

And community animal health, and of course we're all, I think, concerned about this, the whole one health concept as well. He's worked for a lot of years on Rinderpest, and I'm really looking forward to his presentation, so he, over to you. Oh, you're just muted case.

There we go just on the bottom. There we go. Great.

Thank you. There we are. OK, thank you very much and I would say thank you to Saskia as well because she has provided already quite some information which I can skip in my first slides.

I was . Thinking of doing it in this way, whereby we talk about definition of food security and then food and nutrition security in Ethiopia, livestock contribution to food security and livestock contribution to nutrition. I think some of these are already captured by Saskia and at the end, the contribution of animal health.

Now, here were the definitions and I think it's it's clear that this was already presented by Saskia. I will not read the definition then as well, but I think it is food security is food access mainly, and nutrition security is all these added. Activities like care for feeding, health, and sanitation, and so on.

And I think that, that is important and in, in, especially in Africa, a lot of accent is always on food access and which means mainly to carbohydrates filling the stomach. Here you, have the sort of differences, and I think in the definition, we have to add and supported by, environment, adequate sanitation, health services and again, that is the addition to the food security definition. I don't have to go in detail about this.

I, it was also already mentioned by events, population growth is, is huge, in, in, in this case, for, for example, I have to go to one before. Ethiopia is one of the countries where population growth is tremendous. By 2032, we expect 133 million people, and in 2050, 172 million people, we are.

Really doubling at an enormous speed and then to keep up food production with that speed of population increase, especially with the budgets available in the country is a tremendous . Challenge I, the global hunger index is not yet introduced, but I would just like to mention it that the global hunger index is, is, an index that, that deals with all issues at the same time, undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting, and child mortality, and that was already introduced by SASIA. The global hunger index for Ethiopia has been declining from 53 to 26, which is still serious, so we are not there yet and it will be extremely difficult to bring that to very acceptable levels below 9.9 in the near future, especially with this dramatic population increase.

If you see it broken down, the graph, this graph shows the breakdown of the global hunger index, scored by indicator. As you can see, the proportion of undernourished population dropped from 27% to 20%. The child's stunting, reflecting chronic, and the nutrition dropped from 58 to 37%, and child's wasting dropped from 12 to 8%.

So there are dramatic improvements, but we are not there yet. And this is one of the maps showing the food insecurity in Ethiopia. They are often geographically, reflected, that's different from, let's say, the developed world.

Here in, in, Ethiopia, food security is very much dependent on agriculture. 80% of the people are depending on agriculture. So, if the ugly crop, if the crop fails in an area or if there is a drought affecting livestock, it immediately impacts on food security in a geographical area.

In, in the west, it is more of having a job or no job. So the food insecure areas, just because this is the first map I showed, for Ethiopia, the pastoral areas are basically these, these areas and these areas are the more highland areas. Here is also still some pastoral area, lowland pastoral areas.

The next slide shows that 80% is for the population is dependent on agriculture in Ethiopia. There are at the moment about 10 million chronic food insecure people. And I think that's important if you are chronically food insecure, even a programme what we have tried to introduce, for example, the chicken, as was mentioned by Saskia.

If you're chronic, chronic food insecure, what we noticed when we, we did the same is that the poor people start selling the eggs and buying back, you know, the, the grains to fill the stomach. There is an a reduced milk and meat production that's directly affects nutrition, so any drought and so on will affect nutrition. Livestock is often an insurance against crop failure in the, in the country.

Just for your information, this on the left side, I will not read them out, but that is the livestock population in 2018, so we have got a lot of livestock in the country. And the purposes of livestock are mentioned on the, on the right. Of course, direct food source if they can afford, but .

Often livestock owners in terms of drought, if they, they have got even a proverb that they were hungry and they said, OK, I slaughtered my ox. I ate 1 kg, and, and for what did I slaughter my ox? Now, now the whole ox is gone.

draught power, manure for fertilisation, cash income. It is a living bank and in many areas, it's difficult to have access to a bank. The byproducts are sold and it leads, it contributes to GDP.

Here, you see this slides, shows the livestock contribution to household income. You, the white areas are the areas that are not included in the survey, so there's only the yellow and the blue areas that you can see. The map on the left shows the blue areas where the income from livestock exceeds that of crops.

So that is a large proportion of the country. It highlights the importance of livestock as a source of cash. The map on the right.

Shows areas where the total income of cash and food from livestock exceeds that of crops. So these are mainly showing the pastoral areas of the country. The next slide shows the income of livestock in relation to the total food needs.

So if we express the income from livestock sales in, and convert that into, into food in kilo calorie equivalent, then you can see that in areas with dark blue, it's over 100% of the kilocalories. That doesn't mean the quality food per kilocalories is, is produced more than what they need. And the lighter colours shows the areas where it is less than 100%, but you can see the importance of Of livestock, so the income from livestock is used to produce staple, cereal and then convert it into calories.

You can, you can see how big the contribution of livestock in fact is to food security. Of course, this is not the same for all areas. It's not homogeneous.

It all depends on having access to markets as well. Here you can see 3 different areas in the pastor areas and how for the poor people, the income is generated. The white is from milk, the yellow is from livestock sales, and the other colours are from other sources.

Now, for example, if you have got an area in up there which is really has got no access to, to livestock of of to markets very well, they supply mainly charcoal, the brown parts is a major part of their income. In in Hashin, where there is access to milk markets, you can see that milk is an important part of that income. And in Moyala, which is in the border with Kenya, they have access to livestock markets and you can see that livestock sales is a major contributing factor to their income and thus to food security.

We have also asked what were the main constraints of poor households, to livestock production. So the top left one shows the constraints to livestock, production. And and you can see that in the highlands, it's mainly access to credit and capital, the brown collar.

And in the pastal areas, it is droughts and pasture and water are the limiting factors. On the bottom right, you see how the better of households look at it and over there, you see that it is mainly pasture and droughts and their animal disease comes in as an as, as a factor as well. Much less credit and capital.

So you have got a sort of idea that animal health is not the only factor. It is the environment, it is what, what Evans was mentioning as well, the droughts, the climate change, and those kinds of factors. So the, livestock contribution to nutrition is mainly by income generation through the sales of livestock, the sales of animal source foods, the sales of non-food products, and the provision of various paid services like draught power.

The contribution to nutrition is the consumption of home produced food. If the better off, normally they consume quite a, quite a bit of their own produced animal sourced food, but the poorer people first have to fill their stomach and often sell the animal source food and they buy. Food back.

First, of course, the the, the, the, the crops and then if they have got a better income, they will buy back, buy back better food. But it, it's also important in, in contribution to, non-food items like soap, hygiene is important in for nutrition, buying health services, in assets in times of need or crisis. It is an asset in times of need and crisis when there is an, a person sick in the family, often a sheep or a goat is sold to be able to pay for those services.

And of course, in in times of need, they may may need to sell animals for animal feeds and veteran services. Just one minute in case, right? Just one minute to go.

One minute to go, OK, then I will speed up. This was already mentioned that the over and under nutrition, this is also observed in a, in a developing country like Ethiopia. Here you can see the consumption of Ethiopia as compared to the standards.

The consumption is by far less than what is, let's say required, recommended. It was already mentioned before. So, here you can see from an a weekly budget, that about 25% of the household income is expended on animal source food.

Here, we have got animal diseases contributing two ways. You have got in, in terms of economic, risks, production losses is more towards food security and human health risks, which is, pandemic disease and, and foodborne illnesses. This is the city of diseases present in, in Ethiopia, the, and, and there are many more, of course.

Here you have got the disease ranking that was done by Ethiopia, the diseases that are taken up in, in policies so that we would be controlling them. These are having Impact on public health as well as impact on food, on nutrition security. These are anthrax, brucellosis, rabies, and, and bovine TB are the ones impact on nutrition security.

These are mortality rates that are reduced in the country, enormous mortality rates that can only be reduced by massive vaccinations on the right. You have got the vaccinations done by the veterinary services at the moment, they reach about 100 million, but still it's very little as compared to, let's say the requirements in the country, but this is an financial issue, poor livestock owners are often not be able to, afford, vaccination. I I have to mention that in, in Ethiopia, the main poultry disease is Newcastle.

It almost wipes out 50% of the poultry population, and I think Newcastle disease vaccination is one important vaccination in improving human nutrition. And we are doing about 190 million out of the 60 million poultry in the country, which is still a very small number, but it is really appreciated by the lives of owners. Disease risk mitigation is, is important and that is done by surveillance activities and, and direct mitigation activities.

I think as we have got very limited time, I think we, you have had a quick browse through that. Control of diseases will, vaccination programmes and other parts supply of veterinary services will really be contributing to reducing mortality and making, animal source food available in the country. Ethiopia promotes one health in a big way.

This is almost the last slide. It's, I think one Health is really, picked up, in Ethiopia in a, in a big way, and, and we have, we, we will distribute the slides so you can read these ones. Any, in dollar invested in nutrition will, contribute to $16 return as from the various, Millennium Development Goals, will, will show and As the last slide, you can see that, good health and well-being is related to good animal health services in the Millennium Development Goal 3.

I leave it like that over. That's great, thank you so much. Sorry I had to rush you.

We're just very keen to have loads of time for questions, so, as you say there are Santesana. So we're finally moving on to our final speaker for today is Carla Luci Verastigoy Castro. So Carla, if you want to start pulling your slides up on the screen and, and, if you share your screen there.

Carla is gonna talk about the role of vets in food security. Today she's representing the Colegio Med Veterinario del Peru. She's a consultant for the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism.

And has also worked as a consultant for the Food and Agricultural organisation of the UN. At this present moment, she's an assistant professor of veterinary medicine at the universidad Peruan Cayetano Herea. And I'm really looking forward to us finishing with the role of vets, how are we gonna help to sort out the food security problems.

So over to you, Carla. Thank you, Anthony, and thank you for, for Spanish, using the Spanish words. Thank you very much.

And well, it is a pleasure to talk to all of you about a bit of the experience I've had trying to pursue as a veterinarian, trying to pursue food security in Peru. It's a big challenge. I just love this graph from the organisation, World organisation for Animal Health, actually.

It really makes like clear our presence all along this very complex trip that food makes from the farm to the table. I'm gonna speak a bit of this functions we have in every single step of the production chain. We At the first part of the production, animal production, we are in charge of the safe use of veterinary drugs, genetic resources management, feed quality and control on and nutrition of the animals.

Surveillance, prevention and treatment of diseases, and animal welfare, but we must be aware that we are, we must be involved even before these animals arrive to the farm because, for example, in farm structure design and in the distribution, you know, we, we must be part of this big team, and I'm gonna be talking about being part of the team in my whole presentation. So, in transport, for example, we must assure that only animals, healthy animals go to the slaughterhouse, but in this part of monitoring health and welfare during transportation, I must like emphasise the important role we have, not only monitoring because maybe we're not there to monitor that, those, the welfare of, of the animal, but we have to train people, we have to train the driver, for example, and not only train them, but sensitise them in order for them to understand how important and healthy and happy animal is for the production and of course, for keeping food security. And also inspection and regulation enforcement by the veterinarians that are part of the authorities.

In slaughterhouses, you must know, we do have a lot of work to do. I just solve this part because it's like the transformation from of the animal to, to food. And well, we have to make the health status assessment of the animals that are arriving, we have to do the anti postmortem inspection and condemnation of unacceptable parts of the animal or maybe the whole animal, and keep monitoring pathogens and Drug residues or other contaminants that appear there and of course, by the, and, and, and I've been part of a food safety authority, so it's going to be regulation and inspection by the veterinarians that belong to the, to the authority.

In this, in the processing plants, we do have something to, something very important to do, and I must tell you about an experience I had when I just finished studying veterinary medicine. I arrived to the processing plant in order to make a traceability programme of milk, and the engineer that was in charge of, of the quality control office, she told me like, what are you doing here? You are a vet, you must be with the cows.

And I really, it, it really shocked me and it really made me think about like, we, we should make people understand that even though we love animals, we, we don't only belong with them, right? So, here, our, our work in the processing plants and I've seen it from the inspection and, and law enforcement parties for traceability. We have we have an advantage in traceability because we know the old, what, what happened before the, the food arrived into the processing plant.

We know where the critical points are. We know how the food can get contaminated in the farm and forward. So, And we know when producers are telling us the truth or just telling something that is not so true.

So, we, we have a big advantage there, and we must use it in, in these multidisciplinary teams, we should be participating of, for example, in the management of risk-based food safety systems and inspection, again, inspection regulation enforcement by the authorities. I must tell you some interesting information about Peru. We have 3 different authorities addressing food safety in our country from 3 different sectors, there are national authorities, and these 3 national authorities delegate some.

Duties of surveillance and control of markets and restaurants to, to the municipalities or to the local governments. So, we also have veterinarians working in local governments and municipalities, and they expect the markets. Here you, you can see the fish market and, and small market from the centre of the city and you can see also restaurants, and we do address all of that.

In research and development, and I said in the beginning, we're everywhere, we're in the private sector, in the government, and in the academia, working to improve production, animal health and welfare, and, and of course improve ways of assuring food security and and making more sustainable, finding more sustainable ways of producing food. About vets in vet in sanitary authorities, that is my, that is what I did and really it's a lot of work and it's a big responsibility, but it's an, an amazing experience. So, of course, we manage health crisis, epidemiological surveillance, this is controlling our education, policy development, and we are in charge right now in to, to make these policies or these regulations.

Like, they have to make enabling environments in order for having more innovation systems and having a more flexible regulations, so people can like go into this adventure of making things more sustainable, and I had this terrible experience in the government when I just arrived. There, there was a company that was trying to make more sustainable, more sustainable activity, fisheries company, and they said like we need to do this and it's not contemplated in the regulation. And the, the authorities just said like, we're sorry if it's not in the regulation, you cannot do it.

But we're gonna waste less and we're gonna use a a lot of more of this, we're, we're gonna produce more protein, you know. No, I'm sorry, if, if it's not under regulation, you cannot do that. That thing just made me think about working in policy development, and we veterinarians are prepared for that more.

About SPS measures, we are part of, Tables of negotiation of, for example, free trade agreements. Actually, Peru has a lot of free trade agreements and we not only negotiate, but we also keep part of the SPS team and we keep working through years in order to revise some terms and, and improve trade. So we have risk assessment of imported animals and foods, inspection duties and we also are in diagnostic laboratories.

I'm gonna tell you a bit of the experience of Peru. Actually, Peru is one of the biggest, if not the biggest exporter of fish meal and fish, fish oil. And I must say that Lima is the capital, is by the sea coast.

So, And in Lima, we eat 60 kg per capita per year of chicken. It's a paradox, I know, and we are trying to look for I mean, we're trying to diversify the protein sources. And we're trying to use this experience we have a fisheries country in order to also create an environment for enabling aquaculture.

What you can see on the right side is vaccination of trouts. We have trouts that they can grow in 3000 metres, 4000 metres above sea level, and they develop well, and it's a source of protein, right? And On the other hand, the chickens cannot because of their metabolism.

So, the, the big problem I faced when we were trying to like promote agriculture was the agriculture producers telling us, OK, you want to promote agriculture, you know that we in agriculture use a lot of veterinary drugs, like, for example, antimicrobials and We have no veterinarians. I mean, we, we, we really do have small group of veterinarians working in aquaculture right now. So we need to train more veterinarians in that.

Because it's a big challenge and we've seen it's sustainable. It can be, it is worth it definitely. Something veterinarians are addressing here in Peru is the fact that when you in, back in 2015, when I used to type food security in Peru, of course, in Spanish, I used to find these pictures, potatoes, more potatoes, and quino.

And also we have this document of food and security in Latin America of the IABD and we see fruits, we see cereals, but we don't see meat. And actually, this has been part of our work, like, OK, part of our work and of course, because Peru has become a gastronomic destination, right? So we're looking for more kinds of meat to offer to the, to the tourists and to the consumer.

So, And this effort has become like very, very strong here in Peru and for example, these pictures from the guinea pigs. I'm sorry, I know some of you guys don't even think about eating guinea pigs, but here in Peru, they're important because they grow in high altitudes and they're like part of the food security plan of our country. These pictures, the guinea pigs and the eggs are part of the food security plan site of Peru.

So we are very happy to be developing this and how do we get there? It's by building capacities, by teaching people how and giving them the skills and the tools in order for them to have their little farms, and of course, making them aware of the importance of adequate use of veterinary medicines and also telling them that they have to talk to the authorities every time they see and A disease that is emerging in the farm. So it's, it's a very complex work because we have multicultural, environments, but it's worth it.

Perfect. Thank you. We are part of the multi-sectoral commission of antimicrobial resistance, and we're tackling it by banning some antibiotics that are used in poultry production.

The Peruvian College of Veterinarians also, makes Get together all the deans from the faculties every year, from veterinary faculties of all the countries in order to improve ways of educating vets. The most important role we have is to It is to prove to fact-check, to fact-check information. We get messages in WhatsApp and other media, and we as veterinarians should inform people about the truth.

This is our big role. We work in teams, so we, we must make our communication like easier for others to understand because sometimes we use fancy words and very technical terms. Others must understand our information in order for communication to flow and things to work.

I'm gonna skip this and I must, I'm gonna end with what Jose Graciano Sillo said once, there is no food security without food safety, and I must tell you, as a Peruvian, there is no ceviche without food safety, and I've been part of the food inspection authority of fisheries, and I'm telling you it's a big, big challenge, but it is completely worth it. Thank you very much for your attention. This is the end of my presentation.

Carla, that was fantastic, and what a great way to finish it off by saying food security and safety go together. So, I, I've, I've loved all the presentations, so much information there. The good news is that these will be available tomorrow on recording, so, people can go back to re-study the slides, that the graphics were amazing on everybody's slides, so I think they'll be well worth going over again.

. I'm gonna be quite strict because I'm really keen for us to get into the question, so we're gonna have a 5 minute break for people to go and make a cup of tea or a, a, a comfort break, and then we'll come back at 20 and we're gonna be joined by Doctor Miller Raakkovic, who's an advanced practitioner in veterinary public health from the University of Cambridge, who's gonna join us. In the round table, where we've got some great questions to ask our erudite group and hopefully we'll get some fantastic answers. So looking forward to everybody coming back at 3:20 when we'll start the, the round table.

Thanks everyone. I will quickly, thank you very much. My name is Miloradraakovic.

I'm originally from Croatia and I've been to England for many years and worked all possible jobs from practical veterinary work to online inspection policy and in the last 5 years being involved in academia. I'm actively involved with the British Veterinary Association, Veterinary Public Health, and the, and the Federation of Veterinarians in Europe. And thank you for the organisers for inviting me and thank you for a fantastic presentation.

So far, Carla has already mentioned many things that I wanted to say. This slide just illustrates that it is well known what we do as a veterinarian. With one hand, we give injection and we Help help animals, and we treat them.

In another arm, we keep a captive bolt gun if necessary to help animals and to promote welfare. We sometimes do kill and euthanize animals. And sometimes we don't explain very well to people in public what we do, to politicians, to public.

And these are buzzwords all around going now from top right corner. We treat animals, we collect and analyse data. Basically, we protect, contribute to the protection of animals, people and the environment, inspecting, and now moving on to the left, you will see more and top left corner, we contribute to the trade in animals and animal products around the world.

And if there was no vets, there would be no trade of animals and animal byproducts. And maybe we are not good in explaining. Maybe if we simplify everything, it would be much easier for public and for everybody to understand how we actually contribute to, to, to, to this world with our activity.

This is all what I wanted to say from the beginning. I'm happy to try to answer any of the questions. That's fantastic, Mina.

Thank you so much for your introduction. So fantastic presentations and just let me get the. First question up.

We've got a a a number of questions that we're gonna talk at the round table to. So the first question, who should be responsible for addressing hunger and food insecurity, so I, I will I will not pick on anybody, I'll let you unmute and and, and go for it. So whoever fancies taking that first question.

Go on, Evan, go for it. I can, I can jump in if you want, Anthony. So I, I mean, it's a superb question and I, I mean I think I'd come back to some of my comments earlier on that hunger to a large extent is a function of a lack of ability to access food.

That is available on the market. I mean, the, the, the role of poverty in creating famines as opposed to the role of drought in creating famines is, is well articulated, well studied by the literature, and to a large extent it's issues are linked with poverty that cause people to have access, lack of access. Also, of course people in civil war.

Conflicts or areas of civil unrest typically experience the worst hunger. So the, the, the causes of hunger are much more complicated than simply availability of food or the ability to produce food or even the ability to distribute food and are linked with poverty and conflict and whatnot. So if that's the driver of hunger, then the the answer then is who.

Who's responsible for addressing poverty and who's responsible for keeping civil society or politics stable and that then becomes to a large extent the role of government in one part, but the programmes aren't necessarily agricultural focused, they're really focused on on poverty and, and certainly in a in a developing world context and in the developed world context I use those words very carefully. You know, reducing poverty, programmes is critical. Increasing the enrollment of, of girls in primary schools is well known as a way of, of over the long term addressing hunger and mal malnutrition, and so it's those sort of policies that will get at the root causes of this.

Of course, Evan, it's, it's good to see, I think it was in case's er presentations that actually poverty and, you know, extreme hunger. Are reducing, albeit we've just had the COVID, or we are in the middle of the COVID pandemic and that may worsen things, but, you know, over the last 20 or 30 years, there's been massive progress in in those areas, hasn't there? So Anthony, I, I agree with you, and I'd like to hear other panellists as well.

My reading of the United Nations literature is that between about 1975 and 2015. There were year in, year out declines in poverty and hunger, both as an absolute number and as a proportion of the world's population. But starting in 2015, we've now seen five years of continual increases in poverty and hunger, linked to a large extent with civil war and and worse poverty.

Now climate change then undermines agricultural productivity, which exacerbates poverty for small scale farmers. That's the link, . But, but yeah, we've, for the last 5 years, unfortunately, we've started to move away from that continuous decades-long movement of progress.

It's very depressing, to be honest. Yeah, no, that is. Does it, does anybody else want to just make a comment on that?

I think I can confirm. I could confirm that indeed the the figures in Ethiopia are still improving, but they are also sliding off now. We, we are not achieving the same level of improvements that we that we managed, let's say from 2000 to 2015.

So it is levelling off, and moreover, we can see that the amount of animal sourced foods that are consumed by the general population is infecting, decreasing. The the amount of meat in Ethiopia in the 60s was something like 20 kg a year. Now it is only 8 kg a year.

So, and that shows that, you know, food access, access to to, to enough resources to buy and also source food is an important aspect. I, I think, you know, the, the, the, the, the question is as well that we have to sort of restructure the world if we want food security in the world. We, we, we, we need to rethink maybe even capitalism, because I think it automatically creates rich countries and poor countries and poor countries, in the poor countries, we see the, the difference between Rich and poor rapidly increasing, that is what capitalism brings.

So we also see, a lot of the rural people, in fact, dropping out and we, and in just in my time in Ethiopia, I've seen the number of poor people increasing in by, by a million a year about and also a very small group of very rich people that have the obesors, of course, over. Do you think The people are on, on the, the, seminar, do you think that there's also a responsibility of government, you know, rich governments, the UK has, has actually decreased its commitment to give 0.7% of its GDP.

Is that something that we really need perhaps to, to relook at, you know, as, as rich nations to actually make sure that we're doing that and, and maybe a, a larger percentage? Anybody want to make a comment on that? I, I clearly it makes a difference, but it shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't depend on donor money only, you know, there's also within countries themselves and I just, I was trying to to contribute earlier.

I mean, as, as, as, as Hayes and Evan I said, it's, it's terribly complex, but I think that, you know, livestock and all of us working in, in, in animal health and animal production and so on, we do have a role to play. If you think of the sustainable, the UN sustainable development goals. The livestock contributes directly to 8 of them and indirectly to all of them.

So we are right there. It's, it's, it's, you cannot, you cannot, you know, work towards achieving those sustainable development goals if livestock is not considered. So, so I think we, we can and we should really perhaps be, be more involved and, and I agree with, with, with my predecessors, you know, access is such an important aspect that many of us in this part of the world, you know, take for granted, but we really, and, and that is part of the research also that we are conducting that for many may seem so obvious, but there is still a lot of need to Really reduce the animal source production costs.

So, you know, we know that feed can take up to 80% of, of, of production costs. So as much as I think as a vet that animal disease or livestock disease is important, you know, it is, of course, but feeding livestock feeding is also incredibly important if we want to reduce the cost of, of these animal sourced foods. So yeah, that is.

That's great, thank you so much, Sasko. Maybe move on to the second question. We've got a few questions to cover.

What are the methods and tools to measure food insecurity? Could similar indicators be used to measure food security in countries living at different economic statuses? Again, please feel free to unmute and have a crack at the question.

I mean he mentioned in his presentation, the Global hunger index, I think that that is, that is a widely used index that, that can be applied to many settings and there, there are really, I think about 5 methods or so that I use. So estimating the calorie intake per capita that FAO uses so that it is more at national level, then you can also look at Household incomes and expenditure. You can also, and this is something that, that in, in our line of work looking at, at, at, at young children and so on, we use all these anthropometric things of, of heads and conference and, and And, and the stunting the height for age and so on.

So there are different, different methods. I don't think there's a need of, of, there's a lack of, of, of, of methods to, to, to assess it also, you know, if you do that, then what, what are you going to do about it, you know, measuring is important, but then what? So, that's.

Maybe in support of that. There is also a system developed by FAO on IPC integrated face classification and in that way, we identify, I showed one map in my presentation where we have these 5 different levels of of, of crisis or from no crisis to, to, to, to crisis, to, to famine. So I think I agree we have got enough systems in place to measure.

It is more how are we going to deal with it over. Thank you, Kate, that's, that's fantastic and Saskia. Our third question is, what are the best approaches to substantially alleviate hunger and food insecurity globally, you know, we're beginning to see those gains being lost as, as, you know, over the last 5 years, things have deteriorated.

How can we, how can we turn that around again? Tonight. In place and can you hear me?

I don't think that Raj, you're coming loud and clear. That's great. Is my camera working?

I don't think that I'm on. No, I think for some reason your camera isn't working, so I don't know if there's an issue there, but please feel free to answer the question. .

I think what we as a profession could do here, we could do our best within our abilities to contribute to the food security and to each country and each society. It is a very Very difficult to, to, to give what is the best approach. There are differences between developing and developed worlds and distribution and we have heard from our fantastic speakers and there are a lot of waste foods and then, and it's enough food basically.

It's, it's, it's, it's a little bit about distribution of that food, maybe, maybe we could do better. And I, I think that that could be a good starting point without going too much into details. No, I think that's a really great point, Milorad.

Anybody else want to, maybe a little bit, I would like to go, may, may we, we need a change in. In, in the world. We, maybe people have read read the book Donut Economics, and I think we, a lot of the questions are raised in, in, in, in that book, you know, we People in Ethiopia before they can have access to food that needs to be major changes in the, in the economy, in the household economy.

I, honestly, I've got people working in my house. I would not know how to live off the money that I'm paying, and I'm paying almost triple what They are paid by, by non foreigners, but I, I would, I would not be able to live a day from that money. So, you know, I, and I think that's to, to, to establish a change in, in, in that, having enough money to have access.

Requires much more than just distribution of food. You know, it is, it is distribution of wealth as well, exactly. We see distribution of wealth in the world.

We see now, a small portion of the people becoming very rich and, and the majority of the people in fact poorer. And I think this is what needs to change and that's why I mentioned in the former thing capitalism. I think we, we should see the end of capitalism and create a different kind of, of of situation in the world over.

OK, so that's a really great point. I think there's also a book called Conscious Capitalism, maybe, you know, businesses, because I, you know, will government solve this problem, or is it purpose centred businesses coming up with ideas, you know, some of the great innovations that Evan was showing, is, is that part of the solution as well? I don't know if you want to comment on that Evan or or Saskia or Carla.

Sure, I mean, for me it's, it's, it's a portfolio of strategies that will need to be embarked on, because there's no such thing as a as a free lunch and there's there's lots of trade-offs. I would start with, poverty alleviation strategies that focus on the most marginal, so, you know, education programmes for, for, for little girls in the developing world would be would be a one place that I would, I would really, really start on, but that wouldn't exclude the importance of I think creating. National, international frameworks that pay farmers for, environmental goods and services, and we've got beginnings of those sort of programmes through the United Nations REDD programme that's the reduce emissions through avoided desertification and deforestation programme, basically carbon credits for for for lower greenhouse gas emission.

Farming practises, so providing income streams to protect the environment is, is, is a crucial part of the policy portfolio, as is basic R&D and in in the new technologies that would might be. AI driven, planting systems through to alternative protein systems, you know, we're, I, I'm increasingly of the opinion, and I think this probably came through in my, in my remarks that the digital agricultural revolution is upon us. The level of disruption will likely be huge, but it's a question of For policy makers in society to decide whether that that this new wave of revol this new wave of innovation that's upon us does more than just breed a new generation of tech billionaires, will it actually serve public and and global environmental goods.

So innovation is the third part of the portfolio that I would say. And COVID has been helping and been a catalyst for that digital decade that we've now begun at the 2020s, hasn't it, to really it's throwing gasoline on the fire. Any comments from Saskia or Carla about that before we move on to the next question?

Yes, actually, I would like to comment that it is something that's happening here in Peru and I see that happens in every country, in many countries, that we should understand we're part of, of a whole system and we must see the system as a whole, as, as, as a whole, I mean, in, in, in its integrity and each stakeholder of the system must have its role, like very clear, and that's a problem we have here. The stakeholders, for example, the private companies don't have the role clear in, for example, a food safety system. I know it's food security system, but I, I, I, I'm telling you about the experience I had here.

So, the academia is not a fulfilling its role to I mean, to, to its best. So, of, of research and, and, and educating more people in order to tackle food safety problems. So, I think that it is very important for, for governments and for also other stakeholders from private sector, from the civil society to understand that they have a role and we have to fulfil it, right?

Thank you, Carla, that's great. Just moving on to the next question, which I think is, is one that's been really well covered within the presentations. It's, it's great to to have so many vets in, in the as the speakers.

No offence, Evan. What is the impact of widespread livestock disease on food security at the different production systems, agrarian, agro pastoral and, and pastoral? Or is that something that we, you know, we are beginning to sort out with, with our technology and with our, with our knowledge?

No, I think I, I saw some recent data, so we, I managed a project in the pastoral areas bordering Uganda and Kenya and East Africa. And because of the COVID-19, travel restrictions and, and, and impact on society, so the normal dipping of, of animals against tick-borne diseases, couldn't, couldn't happen, and we clearly see, you know, an increase in, in, in, in disease, . In tick-borne diseases, but also death of, of, of these, you know, tick-borne relatively, I would say preventable diseases.

Of course, you know, if you only have 4 or 5, you know, maybe goats and, and, and 2 heads of cattle or, or more, you know, and you lose one of them. Of course it's going to impact severely on, on, on your household wealth and, and, and, and so on. And as he has also explained, you know, these are, this is the buffer that these families have.

And again, also because of these restrictions, many were not even allowed to go to the field to plant. So harvest. All over the world have been severely impacted and, you know, what do you do if, if you, if the harvest fails, you sell the goat or you sell, you know, selling the cattle is, is a head of cattle, is a much bigger thing, but you know, the goats and, and, and the, so I think it has really, really impacted and also, you know, the disease itself, but also why the disease happened because of these external factors that, that occurred.

So yeah, unfortunately, we We will see, you know, things go worse before they go back again. So COVID's had a really. Bad effect on, on that whole kind of food security.

By by stopping people just being able to get on and do their work. As well, yeah, yeah. Does anybody else want to make a point on that?

I think yeah, I mean it is it is an issue that is close to my heart indeed. You know, in pastal areas of Ethiopia, we still have got huge junk stock mortality, up to 25% of the sheep and goats and up to 15% of the calves from cattle now. Diseases like PPR CCCP, CPPP, whatever, lots of diseases have a major impact there on the young stock.

So to have vaccination programmes that are in fact relatively cheap could prevent a lot. Of course, on the other side, there is the environment, there is the droughts and whatever. How do we bring pastoralist into more and, and yeah, let's say economic or in the mainstream economy is that they can sell and also you need infrastructure and and I think the major thing as well in the parcel areas is that we need to they need to secure the core dry season grazing areas and what we see is, agriculture expanding into the core dry season grazing areas, making pastoralism less viable because in times of droughts, they are harder hit.

So I think there is an environmental issue. We have to have much more a landscape approach in, in developing livestock in these areas. This, this animal disease control integrated into that.

Yeah. I think that's yeah my contribution. I, I have seen how, let's say rinderpest eradication, I have seen that in the Basel areas, it was killing 20% of livestock every year and taking that one course away.

Gave a boost, but then there are many other diseases, so we need, and, and far better veterinary service delivery addressing many diseases at the same time over. Does anybody else want to make a comment on that because it's obviously a, a, a huge problem. Yeah, I must add, I, I belong to an authority and actually diseases also over all the impact economical impacts that has to people that work with animals, also, limits the exports of countries, of whole countries.

So when we detected, for example, some disease, it was impossible for us to export any specific or different products to other countries. So it also makes an impact in the whole. Nationwide, I mean.

No, that's a great point, Carla. . Moving on to our next question, there may be insufficient recognition among educational institutions about this topic.

Are there some resources educators could use to enable them to easily insert food security into the curriculum? Is that something we should be thinking about or? I couldn't Definitely I think if I may start, you know, working at a university, this is a a topic that we try to also influence our colleagues and again for some colleagues it's, it's so, you know, many, and this is not a criticism, but many don't think beyond Florida or think beyond the US so, so really we need to also broaden this up and, and.

I think again that the pandemic has, has shown that also in the US there's so many food insecure people that, that, you know, it's, it's, it's really not business as usual and it has brought it home for many people. I've, I've, uploaded some resources in terms of food security. There is something from FAO, a 1.5 hour session.

That is, I thought was very interesting. USA also has many, many materials. And then I think what is also important is, you know, making the link and we didn't really touch upon that, today, but food security and gender.

So, so really we need to also consider and, and when, when in terms of educational materials, that is also something that we should address in, in whatever we, we include in our curriculum because that, that does have a major impact on, on household food security. It's fantastic, we've had some great resources being put into the chat box, which I would advise people go into, click on the links, you've got them saved on your computer, you can look at them, but what we'll also do. I'm, I'm gonna be unpopular with Dawn now, but I'll ask Dawn to bring those together at the end and make sure that we, we get those out to the people who have registered for the talks as well.

So, but Milleradd wants to make a comment. Yes, thank you very much. I, I wouldn't just use this word that is insufficient recognition.

I would rather say that one way or another, we don't articulate well our contribution and we, we always teach about food security. If we take food security as a combination of quantity, quality, and safety, each of our core curriculum, veterinary curriculum, and each veterinary school around the world is, is. Aiming to teach students how to protect animals, how to protect through animals, protect people and environment.

And, and, and that is maybe at the beginning, the way how I tried to articulate in para and everybody mentioned one way or another what I'm saying now, all speakers in, in the summary, but what Could be even more focused and more articulated on undergraduate level, but there is a big problem here. In the developed world, the most important problem or worry is used by date. If it is one day over whether food is going to be thrown, is it safe or unsafe?

But what Saskia says and yes in, in, in, in Ethiopia and some other countries that may not be the most important issue to teach and how to find the balance, balance for us educationalists here, it is not easy. I, I like the idea from Evan that the food changes colour, I think it was to, to sort of stop us having to waste all these potatoes and eggs that we're wasting, because of course this is criminal when we're throwing food away, . Maybe we need to come to the final question, how does the veterinary profession and professionals play a role in the national and global efforts to ensure food security?

I mean, I think the first thing I would say, obviously, including Evan in this as well, you know, as an agriculturalist, as well as veterinarians, all of you are doing such a fabulous. Work in, in, in your different fields. So from me as, as kind of the audience, thank you for the fabulous work you're doing, but perhaps in, in a couple of sentences, how can we as a global profession, actually, you know, improve and do better than we are doing at the moment.

So, a, a couple of sentences for everybody who wants to comment on that, and then we'll be moving over to Patricia to give us her final thoughts on the topic. Go on, Evan, you go first. Sure, so I mean, the biggest issue facing the food system in my opinion, prior to the pandemic, well, the biggest two issues were distribution and poverty on one side and the environmental impact of production on the other side.

So where animal agriculture and the veterinary professions, rubber hits the road on those two issues is on the poverty side, where animal agriculture is a vital component of a livelihood for poor farmers, that's, that's crucial and so supporting that, that those people, to make sure that they are as profitable and financially viable as possible. And then the other side of the coin, addressing the disproportionately large effect that many forms of animal agriculture have on the environment today. And, and for me, focusing on those two big issues is is the really crucial part of the this big project of of feeding the future.

And I will just give a little plug again the the email there feeding nine billion.com. I, I haven't heard of it before, Evan, but I will have a look at that, after the talk.

Does Millerad want to go next? I just want to say, and I'm sorry for repeating myself, we haven't articulated well so far how we contributed to the current situation and food security. And in order that would be a benchmark for for an improvement then we haven't articulated it nationally and internationally.

We could do better in explaining what we do and how we contribute. No, I think that's a great point. Well I think Carla did an excellent job with her presentation.

It's really, you know, with that initial figure from the World organisation for Animal Health and then going step by step and also, you know, that. You know, the, the assumptions of colleagues, you know, why do you have as a better a role in this to play, you know, we, we, I agree that we need to do better, but I think today was, was at least a, a very good presentation. I really enjoyed that and, and I will use some of that, you know, in future, in future presentations myself.

Thank you, G. I think there was also a great point from you, Saskia, of, of how involved animals are in, in fulfilling those UN goals of sustainable development, and they are, I think a fabulous resource that the UN have put together to make us, You know, help us be clear about where we can contribute and, and make a difference in the world, so thank you for, for that within your presentation. .

Maybe, oh yes, yes, go on, you go next. Yeah, maybe if in developing countries, livestock is often under the Ministry of Agriculture. And livestock always has to compete with agriculture.

And if you look to the funding levels, Livestock is always pulling the shortest match. It's Underfunding of many programmes is an issue. And I think if we are living in one global world and we have diseases that can easily spread from Africa to other countries, we have seen Africans find fever leaving the continent to Asia and what it does, what impact it has.

I think it is, we, we, we have to look at diseases. From a global perspective and and funding for disease control might come from outside because In Africa, it's difficult to get the, the funds together to, to do a programme, let's say a vaccination programme for, for, for, for a, for PPR in the past, whatever. The funds is not there.

We are competing with, with health, with, with, with education, maybe because it was before mentioned in Ethiopia, 50% of the population is below 18 years and if you talk about education. And you have to educate 50% of the population how many teachers do you need, how many schools do you need? And so the funds are going there and, and livestock is pulling the shortest string, and I think the international community could assist in, in, in, in the control of these diseases over.

OK, so that's a great point. I know one of my friends is very involved in a charity called Send a cow. I, I think this is, you know, areas that we can really help in, but, Carla, I'm gonna leave you with the final words.

Yeah, thank you. No pressure. Thank you for the nice comments.

I think that something I've learned here teaching veterinary students is that we have to build a safe, well, actually, I was addressing food safety, but a food security, culture. It's, I think that if you do that in faculties, you can start like from the first year and all courses like focusing on in a way, of course, the, the ones are relevant, and focusing on this food security problem and telling veterinarians that that they are completely capable of tackling it, working with multi-sectional, multidisciplinary teams. So, I think that this is the, the, the best part of being a veterinarian is that we can like Enjoy being part of different teams and we can communicate with other people, but we really must learn how to work in teams and we really must understand our role in this, in this situation that is, of course, affecting everyone.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Carl, that's beautifully put together. I, I, I think, great to see all the veterinarians, but Evan, you'll be proud of me.

I've got my apple that I started to eat during the break. I'm conscious that I probably don't do 39% of fruit and veg. So that's gonna be my learning point that I'm gonna start trying to have a bit more of a balanced diet as well, so.

We're gonna pass over now to the World Veterinary Association president Patricia to give her thoughts and and to close the meeting, so thank you everyone and over to you, Pat. Thank you so much, Anthony, and I'm, I'm really not going to try to add anything to what individuals have said. I really want to thank our distinguished speakers and panellists for helping the World Veterinary Association to start a conversation on this critical topic of global food security.

It's a topic that will require active engagement of veterinary professionals around the world and as has been emphasised, it is really important that we be explicit about the role of veterinarians in this global challenge. I'd also like to thank the WVA Secretariat and the One Health Strategic Focus Group, as well as webinar vet. For, organising such an excellent group of speakers and for, this very smoothly, run seminar today.

As has been mentioned, all of this material will become available, . For, participants and others, on the website in the not too distant future. So thank you so much again, and thank you as well to our, our attendees and participants today for all of your great questions.

Thank you. Good Thank you. Bye-bye, everyone.

Bye-bye, everyone. Thank you very much.