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From:
Barbara Burlingame <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Barbara Burlingame <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 17 Mar 2015 14:25:08 +1300
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Dear John, Ruth, and all,

I am trying my best to fade from the mainstream food composition world, but
be as supportive as I can by advocating the importance of food comp to
other areas of nutrition, agriculture and environment sector.  But I will
comment here...

FAO's support for food composition has had its ups and downs. Nutrition in
FAO is currently ruled by economists, largely, who do not understand the
subject, and once the Nutrition Division was shuttled from the Agriculture
Department back to the Economic and Social Department a few years ago, this
outcome was predictable.  Instead of viewing food composition as a
fundamental underpinning to food and nutrition security, dietary
assessment, food regulation, sustainable food systems (all of which they
value), they see it as something quite detached and unimportant.  While
Nutrition was part of the Ag Dept, there was a far better appreciation of
its role, and we saw it nicely integrated into many relevant technical
initiatives (e.g., biodiversity for food and nutrition, sustainable diets,
plant and animal genetic resources).  UN's Special Rapporteur for Food
Security, Olivier de Schutter, spoke often of sustainable diets as a key
feature of global food security, and the importance of understanding the
nutrient content of foods in local food supplies. But even then, with the
whole, well-funded area of "food security" as run by the economists, the
role of food composition, and thus its funding, was not adequate.

The cost of running these highly valued and unique INFOODS' activities is
insignificant in the overall FAO budget, it is disingenuous (to put it
politely) for higher management to claim that their discontinuation would
contribute to any meaningful savings for the Organization.  But this is
what they do...

As for the solution -- I like the idea of John and Anders to take it back
to the relevant international players with a Bellagio-style conference and
invite big donors, the CGIAR ag research centres, along with the usual
participants.  Maybe attach a day to the next International Food Data
Conference.  If FAO is not supporting INFOODS, INFOODS can be supported by
another agency or through another mechanism.

Now, having said all that, I would like to make a plea to the food
composition world, regardless of what happens to INFOODS, to keep up its
efforts in biodiversity for food and nutrition and sustainable diets.  Food
composition tied to these areas has the potential to make worthwhile
contributions to some of the most compelling challenges faced by our planet
(as I see them, here:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnut.2014.00003/full).

Good luck, and best regards to all,
Barbara


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barbara Burlingame, PhD
Mobile, Italy: +39 340-699-9545
Mobile, New Zealand: +64 022 176 6016
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Skype: barbara.burlingame
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ResearchGate profile:
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On 17 March 2015 at 09:00, John C Klensin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Anders,
>
> Thanks for the kind words.  A few comments inline below.
>
> --On Saturday, March 14, 2015 10:20 +0100 Anders Møller
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Dear Ruth and John,
> >
> > Thanks John, you are too modest. Your memory is sharp and
> > bright. I have same memories and remember the meetings in
> > Belagio, Italy, and Logan, Utah, some thirty years ago. They
> > meant a turning point in international collaboration on food
> > composition.
>
> I think it was a turning point in two rather separate ways.
> First, they led to far more regional and international
> collaboration than I gather had been the case earlier, at least
> in part because various national administrations and the
> associated budgetary authorities could no longer say (or
> pretend) that anything that needed to be done outside their
> countries would be taken care of by FAO.  They also led to some
> very forward-looking work on methods, databases, data
> interchange, and food and data classification and nomenclature
> that probably was impossible as long as everyone was turning to
> a single, central, authoritative agency.
>
> > It seems like the support for food composition work comes in
> > waves both locally and internationally, but not at the same
> > time.
>
> I suppose that we should be grateful for the "not at the same
> time" part.  That is actually related to part of the suggestion
> I was trying to make.  If FAO is cutting back at a time when
> more local efforts are doing well, it may be possible to treat
> the FAO cutbacks as an opportunity to look again at some of the
> INFOODS ideas --ideas that started at those two meeting-- about
> focusing on easier (and data and metadata-preserving) methods
> for sharing data among national and regional centers and
> databases rather than focusing on what a body like FAO can do
> centrally (and do so in a way that inevitably loses some of
> those metadata).
>
> > I think it is important to emphasize that national/regional
> > food composition work cannot be carried out in an efficient
> > and qualitative way without the international collaboration.
> > Our foods travel around the world - often in strange ways. We
> > cannot all analyse all foods for all nutrients and need to
> > have information about the travelling foods from colleagues at
> > the origin of the foods - without the international
> > collaboration this would be impossible.
>
> Indeed.  But that is both an argument for continued FAO
> investment and for making better intra-regional and
> inter-regional collaboration plans that are not dependent on FAO
> or its budget (or that of any similar agency).  Perhaps that is
> too idealistic, but the other side of your "in an efficient and
> qualitative way" is that the collaborations ultimately save
> money.  The alternatives to collaboration and sharing of
> knowledge and data either involve doing without those values
> (putting the quality of the science at risk) or developing them
> locally (expensive, inefficient by any measure, and often
> requiring cutting corners on, e.g., sample sizes and number of
> analyses).
>
> > INFOODS - both before and after inclusion at FAO - has made an
> > enormous impact on the way we work by setting guidelines of
> > which we are still discussing some, some may have become
> > outdated, but also new have developed on the thorough
> > foundation laid by INFOODS and later FAO/INFOODS.
> >
> > In my opinion, it is important to maintain international
> > coordination of food composition work, and I urge all you
> > members on the FAO/INFOODS listserv to answer the few
> > questions in Ruth's survey,
> > https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9N5N6G5 - and get your
> > colleagues to do the same.
>
> Since I'm not part of any national food or food analysis agency,
> I cannot contribute much to that survey (and probably should be
> ignored if I tried).  But, if either of us are correct about
> what you describe as waves of funding, then I think the
> community should be simultaneously preparing for a period of at
> least some cutbacks at FAo and trying to figure out how the
> important collaborations and developments can continue without a
> requirement for FAO to either take the lead or supply resources
> at levels that would make all of us happier.
>
> With the understanding that I'm in the position of suggesting
> that others do work to which I cannot significantly contribute
> and that I've been away from things long enough that these are
> ideas to stimulate thinking that might be completely wrong as
> specific suggestions:
>
> (1) Would it be worth the effort to try to organize a conference
> to lay out a path for the future (much as the Bellagio meeting
> did), including a serious review of what came out of INFOODS,
> what is still useful and what isn't, and generally what we have
> learned in the last 30 years?   It occurs to me that, with this
> Internet thing we seem to have discovered, it might be possible
> to do much of that conference with virtual/ remote participation
> even though there are still significant advantages to face to
> face discussion.
>
> (2) Should the next Nutrient Databank conference (another
> institution that would probably not have evolved to its present
> form in the absence of the collaborations that were initiated 30
> years ago) or the next major Nutrition meetings include a review
> and brainstorming session about how to encourage regional and
> international collaborations in the presence of a reduced FAO
> presence or the absence of any well-organized and funded central
> organization at all?     I note, for example, there there is a
> long history in some other scientific fields of gradually
> rotating secretariat and related responsibilities.
>
> (3) Are there other opportunities or areas of critical need that
> need to be identified so it is possible to think about the
> resources that would be needed and how to get them?  If so, how
> might that be done?
>
> Again, just ideas, probably not quite right, in the hope of
> stimulating thinking and creativity, not just mourning
> reductions in FAO support or trying to fight them.  I still
> believe a little fighting and pushback, including via surveys,
> is worthwhile but my experience is that once the cutting back
> starts, the significant question rapidly becomes "how much" and
> not "whether" and it is therefore in the community's interest to
> start thinking about wha6 can be done outside FAO... perhaps
> even better than FAO can do it.
>
> all the best,
>    john
>
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