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


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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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