I will be attending the “Dialogue on International Food Security 2014” in Edmonton, Alberta 30 April to May 2 and will have the pleasure of delivering one of the keynote addresses.

There will be about 50 speakers, and 50 poster presentations and I look forward to learning from them all. I will write in a subsequent blog about what I learned at the Dialogue, but for now I will leave you with the summary of my talk.

"Eating is an agricultural act: On the Edge of Understanding Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture"

Wendell Berry famously wrote “...eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth.” Despite the direct links between agriculture and nutrition, specialists in the two fields have had difficulty working together and learning from each other. In this talk I will review our understanding of the impacts of agriculture interventions on human nutrition, focusing on what we know (interventions should be broad based), what we don’t know, but need to know (how do we make nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions sustainable and replicable?) and what we don’t know, and don’t need to know (what are the nutrient-specific benefits of various nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions?)