SPE Café: Building a Sustainable and Inclusive Food System in Canada

Registration link.

Our food system faces multiple challenges, ranging from climate change to inflation to unequal accessibility and systemic discriminations. Our invited speaker, Dr. Alison Blay-Palmer, current holder of the UNESCO Chair on Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies and founding director of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems, will discuss ways to improve the Canadian food system with our moderator Dr. Monika Korzun, a postdoctoral fellow in sustainable agriculture at Dalhousie University. This talk will be followed by small group discussions (in English and French) where you will have the opportunity to exchange with other members of the audience on the Canadian food system. A report will be written to highlight the key policy recommendations to improve our food system that will have emerged during the Café.

To help with the discussion, we wrote a policy brief that provides some context and key questions on the topic. Feel free to have a look at it before the event! Check out the policy brief here!

Live interpretation in French will be provided.

Meet the speaker - Dr. Alison Blay-Palmer

Alison Blay-Palmer, the UNESCO Chair on Food Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies, is the founding Director for the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems and a Professor in Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. With more than $9 million in funding as PI and Co-I, she has worked with communities and academics in Brazil, France, Kenya, South Africa, and the United States. She has served as an Expert Advisor the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and has been a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists since 2016.

Meet the moderator - Dr. Monika Korzun

Monika has been working in the Canadian food system space in various capacities since 2010 including academia, non-profit sector and private sector. She is currently pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University exploring the social aspects of sustainable agriculture in the agri-food industry. She also completed a Mitacs Accelerate postdoctoral fellowship at St. Paul University where she worked closely with the Food Communities Network – Réseau Communautés Nourricières (FCN-RCN), exploring food security and the role of civil society organizations in food systems governance. She has been teaching food-related courses at various universities since 2012. Monika completed a PhD in Rural studies at the University of Guelph, exploring the experiences of farmers participating in food value chains in Southern Ontario. Monika's work has been published in several journals including Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development, Sustainable Production and Consumption and the African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development. She has also published several book chapters and reports.