At the same time, world leaders will gather in Kananaskis for the G7 summit, and international agriculture experts will meet at Olds College of Agriculture and Technology.
The first-ever Americas Agriculture and Food Security Forum is taking place at the college on June 16-17 and will mirror G7 taking place June 15-17.
The food security forum was organized by Canadian office of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), which is described as a specialized agency of the Costa Rica-headquartered Inter-American system for agriculture development, rural well-being and food security. The IICA consists of 34 member states in North, South and Central America as well as the Caribbean.
“There’s no way we would be able to feed the world like we do today if it wasn’t for global co-operation,” said Todd Ormann, Olds College vice-president of external relations and research, in a statement Monday.
“We’re moving into a period where we’re seeing very strong national viewpoints that are disrupting international trade in agriculture. My personal worry is we’re starting to see some consequences that are breaking down things we have taken for granted since the end of the Second World War.”
The forum is aimed at helping forge and maintain international relationships that are vital to agricultural trade, as well as the development and export of technology needed to tackle the problems facing the world’s farmers, said Ormann, who will be one of the speakers.
“There’s too much talk about putting up trade barriers these days, and not enough about reducing them.”
The forum is being supported by the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD), along with sponsorship by Canadian and international partners in the agri-food sector.
The forum will draw about 250 delegates, with another 1,000 attending online, from countries ranging from Canada to Argentina and Australia to Europe, said ICAA Canadian representative Jean-Charles Le Vallée.
Holding the forum in Alberta at the same time as the summit is an opportunity to not only underline the importance of agriculture to the world as well as this hemisphere, but also to celebrate how farmers benefit humanity, he said.
The next 40 years will be the most important in the history of agriculture, said Le Vallée. Farmers must feed what by some estimates will be a world population of about 11 billion people by the 2060s, up from about 4.8 billion in 1985, during an era of increasing land degradation, water scarcity and decreasing food system resilience.
“We’re seeing massive forest fires that are displacing Canadians, for example, so the world is heating up. Agricultural land is almost maxed out in many parts of the world, so we must sustainably intensify, which means we must be more responsible and smarter with the use of all our inputs at a time when labour is an issue everywhere.”
The theme of the Americas forum will be cultivating tomorrow’s agriculture today, which makes it a good fit with its location at one of the top 50 research colleges in Canada, said Le Vallée.
