This event featured panellists Professor Dr Meerjady Flora, Professor of Epidemiology; Additional Director General of Health Services (planning and development), Directorate General of Health Services, Bangladesh; Former Chair, One Health Secretariat, Bangladesh; Joint Coordinator (Public Health), One Health Bangladesh and a member of the One Health Poultry Hub’s Advisory Board; and Professor Ortwin Renn, Scientific Director at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Germany. It was moderated by Professor Dirk Pfeiffer of the City University of Hong Kong and Deputy Director of the One Health Poultry Hub, and took place on Wednesday 7 July 2021.

Watch the recording here:

PANELLISTS' KEY MESSAGES
  • Food system governance is a complex and multilevel issue involving multiple interactions between different actors and stakeholders at different stages of the food value chain.
  • Food policies should avoid being fragmented and dispersed over different policy domains and should not be dominated by a ‘productionist’ paradigm.
  • Food policies should integrate different policy domains driven by ecological, health and food security concerns integrating across discrete sectors, domains and actors; One Health approach can play an important role in this respect.
  • Human and environmental health is not a one-dimensional issue, necessitating a systemic approach to risk assessment and risk governance.
  • Scientific knowledge for both assessment and governance is crucial but not sufficient for understanding the complex impacts of human actions and natural events. Experiential knowledge and often tacit knowledge are required to learn more about the context in which the risk manifests itself.
  • Many risks are interconnected or operate in cascades. Risk governance relies on multi-disciplinary contributions and an ethical appraisal about the level of interventions in the natural and social environments that are deemed acceptable for the people affected.

Further reading