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By 2050, the world's population
is expected to be 9 billion people,
and most of these people will be living in large cities.
Experts estimate that the demand for food will increase
by nearly 100%, yet there will be fewer agricultural workers
and a decrease in arable land.
These predictions highlight the challenges in producing
and distributing safe food throughout the world.
They also raise questions about how we maintain our environment
while trying to feed a rapidly increasing population.
We'll be talking about these challenges on today's episode
of "A Public Health Journal;" please stay tuned.
(male narrator) Welcome to "A Public Health Journal,"
a program that explores public health issues
facing our society today and tomorrow.
The host of the show is Dr. Ed Ehlinger,
Commissioner of Health for the state of Minnesota.
"A Public Health Journal" is sponsored by
the Minnesota Department of Health,
and the Hennepin County Human Services
and Public Health Department;
all working together towards the goal
of healthy people living in healthy communities.
Welcome to "A Public Health Journal."
With a rapidly growing population,
an increased demand for animal protein,
and climate changes that are affecting
the amount of arable land,
world food supplies are becoming increasingly vulnerable.
Unless we plan carefully and change our approach
to food security, the possibility exists
that we will not have enough food to meet the dietary needs
of a large percentage of the world's population.
This has major implications for the health
of the world's population, but also for the political
and economic stability of societies around the globe.
Joining me today is Dr. Will Hueston,
a veterinary epidemiologist who has worked with government,
industry, and academic organizations
on issues of food supply, human health,
animal health, and the environment.
Will, welcome to our program. (Will) Happy to be here.
You're the first veterinarian on the show.
Why should I have a veterinarian on the show
talking about public health?
Well, thanks for the honor.
Every veterinarian in the United States takes an oath
to protect animal health and to promote public health,
so every veterinarian in the United States
is a public health official in the sense that
that's part of the professional oath they take.
So how does a veterinarian influence public health?
Well, remember that a lot of the diseases that we study,
as an example, also are diseases of humans.
You think of rabies, or you think of a lot of the issues
that cause foodborne illness, or you think of influenza.
All animals and humans share
many of these infectious diseases.
So there's one example of the connection.
A 2nd would be, I like to say that everything we do
in veterinary medicine involves public health.
It's either providing for an abundant, affordable,
and safe food supply for the nation,
preventing, controlling, and responding to outbreaks
of diseases shared by animals and man,
or promoting the psychological well-being of the nation
through the care of companion animals,
that human/animal bond, and lastly, not to be forgotten,
is the role that veterinary medicine plays
in advancing medical knowledge for everyone,
whether it's surgical techniques,
the development of new therapies and drugs,
vaccines and strategies to prevent disease.
(Ed) That's right, a lot of animal testing
for different drugs and vaccines. (Will) Exactly.
Now, you also are the executive director
of the Global Initiative for Food Systems Leadership.
Tell me a little about that, food systems
and the leadership that's required for that.
Increasingly we benefit, especially in the United States
and in Europe, we benefit from a food supply that is sourced
around the world, and that system that delivers to us
our coffee in the morning, the bananas that we enjoy,
or all of the variety of foods that we have in everyday
means that on a daily basis, we're consuming foods
from 20 to 30 different nations.
So the opportunity is how can we work together across boundaries,
across disciplines, across sectors,
public sector/private sector,
to ensure that we have an abundant, affordable,
and safe food supply for everyone in the world.
We're going to be talking about food supply, food security,
and I've got a slide here that shows what people eat,
where they get their calories, throughout the world.
We'll put the slide up.
We've got 1/2 comes from cereals;
next is roots and tubers, about 5.3%;
meat and fish, the protein things, about 13%.
What does this slide tell us
in terms of looking at food supply,
some of the issues that we have to be aware of
with a food distribution like this?
(Will) The first thing this tells us
is that the food supply is very diverse.
Everyone in the world eats, and people in the world
eat everything they can possibly eat,
so there's a huge variety, but for many parts of the world,
they depend on some very basic grains for their diet.
As their income, as their economic well-being increases,
they search for more and more protein options,
and that's the meat and protein.
You talked as you began the show
about the rise in the demand for food,
and we anticipate the rise in the demand for animal proteins
to be even faster than the need for the total volume of food
because we have China, Africa, Southeast Asia.
As their economic status increases,
they want to be able to enjoy meat, poultry,
fish, eggs, milk, in the same way
that we enjoy on a daily basis and don't even think about.
Is it more resource-intense to create those proteins,
the animal sources of calories?
It's a more complex system.
Remember, in some areas of the world, they have abundant grass.
Well, humans can't eat grass.
They can eat it, but they can't digest it
and meet their energy and protein needs.
But ruminates can.
So in some parts of the world, the animals play a role
in converting nonhuman type of foods
to something that's edible for humans.
The other is that animal protein provides
a very high-quality protein and meets a number of the needs
that humans have for growth and development.
So I think it would be safe to say that the complexity
of the food supply will continue to increase
because each part of the world has, if you will,
a distinct advantage in producing some type of food.
I've got another slide here that looks at the people
who are undernourished throughout the world
and what's been happening over the course
of the last several years.
I want to take a little look at the challenges,
the people who are undernourished.
What's going on here?
Over the last several years, it's been stable,
and then it dropped down in 1995 to '97,
and now it's really going up.
It seems to be an increasing number of people
who are undernourished in our world.
(Will) Indeed, and part of that reflects
the growth in population, a large part of it reflects
the variability in prices of food.
We have a significant number of people in the world
that live with incomes less than $1 a day,
and so a very small increase in the price of food
can have a dramatic impact on their ability
to feed themselves.
We also have weather issues.
The drought in southern Somalia,
the people have been hanging on through this drought
as far as they can, and finally, to protect their family,
they're fleeing from that drought area to another area.
And so it's very hard to establish, if you will,
a food system that is resilient enough
and flexible enough to meet all of those needs.
So does the economic climate, the political climate,
and the physical climate all affect food supplies?
It all affects it.
So with climate change and climate variability,
with changes in regimes, with wars and civil strife,
with political posturing-- all of those contribute.
For instance, if prices go up, let's say the price of rice,
which is a tremendous commodity in some parts of the world,
some countries have said okay, we're gonna stop exporting rice.
We're gonna keep that rice for our own people.
Well that distorted the whole system,
where other countries were dependent on the trade in rice.
And so it creates a very complex series of consequences,
many unintended, but they have negative public health outcomes.
You talked earlier about the fact that we have
a global marketplace for food,
and yet, on that first slide that I showed,
about 51% of calories come from grains,
and I understand that about 60% of all of that
comes from 3 things-- rice and corn and wheat.
Does that raise some risks that we're so dependent
on 3 crops throughout the world?
Well, yes and no.
One thing, remember that whether you're talking about
corn, wheat, or rice, there are a lot of different types.
At the same time, if we have a new disease that develops
that affects wheat, then we've got to be concerned about
the impact that can have in distorting
the world food supply and these prices we talked about,
the availability of food.
What it comes down to, Ed,
is this is why we talk about food systems leadership.
It means that we need to have leadership, a shared leadership
that crosses disciplines-- physicians, veterinarians,
that crosses sectors-- public sector, private sector,
crosses geographic boundaries
between the developing countries and developed,
to develop this more robust and resilient
and flexible food supply to meet the needs of everyone.
I want to talk about some of the particular risks
we've identified, a couple of them,
but first we need to take a little break.
We'll be back right after this message.
[acoustic guitar plays]
00:10:22.93,00:10:26.60
Keep your family safer; check your steps at foodsafety.gov.
Welcome back; we're talking about food distribution,
food safety, with Will Hueston,
a professor in the College of Veterinarian Medicine,
and an adjunct professor in the School of Public Health
at the University of Minnesota.
It's really nice to have you in both of those colleges
and schools at the university.
We're talking about food security,
and that may be a term that people don't understand.
How do you define food security?
Food security involves the availability and access
to safe, affordable, nutritious food that allows individuals
to express the full opportunity of life.
It says it's available to everyone
in the world at all times.
This is not just an issue in developing countries
from what I understand because I know
even in Minneapolis/St. Paul, we have areas
where there are food deserts and food insecurity
because of economic issues.
Absolutely, so that's the access part of it.
We also have situations in which people cannot
fulfill their nutritional needs.
They may have availability of certain types of food,
but not all the variety of foods to meet their needs for energy,
for protein, and for some of the micronutients
and vitamins that we need.
Now I've got a slide that lists some of the issues
related to food insecurity, and we've talked about
some of these already, but I want to make sure
we hit the things that you think are the biggest threats
to our food supply or our food accessibility.
Certainly we've talked about population increases.
The growth in cities, how does
that reflect food insecurity?
(Will) Let's take the situation in Minnesota.
Among the listeners to this show, there'll be many people
who can go back one or 2 generations to the farm.
We go back 100 years ago, most of the people in Minnesota
lived out in the countryside.
They had farms; they produced a portion of their food.
Much of that food was traded locally.
Well with the growth and changes in the development of America
and development of industry and trade and the economic status,
people moved to the big cities, and the larger the city,
the greater the food demand in a very small area,
so that you can no longer meet those food needs
within a very close distance.
We couldn't feed the people of the Twin Cities within 10 miles,
within the distance you used to be able to
drive with a horse and buggy.
So the challenges around the world
with this huge population increase,
we have a rapid expansion of megacities.
Go on the Web sometime and Google the number of cities
in Asia now that have more than 1 million people.
It's absolutely mind-boggling.
So we have people moving to the cities.
We have displacement of people.
They're coming from the rural areas to the cities.
It creates increased demand for the movement of food stuffs,
for the storage of food.
And then there are fewer agricultural workers,
but we're getting much more productive
in the workers that we have?
We're getting more productive, indeed, and we're developing
new strategies for preserving and treating food.
The trouble is that isn't available
everywhere in the world.
I had a very poignant moment earlier this year
with a colleague from Africa, and he pointed out, he said,
"In our country," he said, "there are farmers 10 miles
from where I am now that can grow more food
than what they need, but that food spoils
because they have no mechanism to get them to the cities
where the people need to have food to eat."
So that's the whole driver for coming up with more flexible...
(Ed) So it's not just production.
It's not just production, exactly.
It's also transportation and ability to purchase.
Your and my parents probably said,
when you had a plate of food, they said,
"finish everything; remember the starving children,"
in pick your country.
Today, in the United States, we have an amazing amount of food,
and we in fact waste a great deal of food,
where in other parts of the world,
the amount of food that we waste would meet
the nutritional needs of a number of people.
Now that's not easily addressed.
So again, it takes a very dynamic type
of shared leadership to look at how we're going to
develop this system to pull that all together.
Now I didn't research this, and you may know the exact number,
but I understand that our food system throughout the world
creates about 2700 calories per individual per day,
that's what we produce, and people need about 2500 or less.
So we're actually producing enough calories for folks,
but we can't distribute it as well?
Can't distribute it, can't store it,
and we have loss at different places.
You grow the food in the field, or raise the animal,
and then as that animal or grain moves through the food system,
there is loss of some of that along the way.
I'll give you an example.
When our grandparents were around,
if they butchered a chicken for Sunday dinner,
they ate about everything of the chicken
that was possible to eat,
but the average American no longer likes dark meat,
and they certainly don't want to eat the organ meats,
and nobody wants to eat the neck,
and so we end up now, a part of that animal protein
that we've just raised no longer fits with our interests,
our food preferences.
The poultry industry in the United States,
the fact that we can go in and get breast meat of chicken
at such a reasonable price depends in part on our ability
to export the dark meat and parts like chicken feet
to Southeast Asia.
Our ability to export chicken feet to meet nutritional needs
of Southeast Asia helps us have an affordable food supply
and be able to buy the breast meat.
Interesting. Now one of the risks that was identified
was the increased demand for animal protein.
How is that a risk, a food risk?
Well what happens is as there's a demand for animal protein,
then there is a redirection of some of the resources
to raising animals to meet that demand.
So the issue we were talking about, the United States,
as countries get more affluent, then they pull more and more
of the feed stuff, food, to that country to meet the needs
and to provide the choice around the year.
One of the issues that wasn't on that list
is using grains in plants for energy;
corn for ethanol.
Is that a risk for our food supply?
Everything that we do in terms of agriculture
and the food supply has implications.
The challenge is how do we balance those implications?
We know that we can take the residue, if you will,
from some of that energy production,
those grains after you've made the ethanol,
and that can be a food stuff for animals.
So it's not the complete loss that some people think about.
At the same time, we need to look at
how all this fits together.
How do we meet our energy needs while meeting our food needs,
that's an ongoing discussion, an ongoing balance.
All right, we've talked a lot about the problems,
and I want to talk about some of the solutions.
I know you've been talking about this whole issue of One Health,
and I want to get to that in the last segment of our program,
but we need to take a break before we get to that.
We'll be back right after this message.
[clucking]
[clucking]
[finger snap]
[clucking]
Three thousand Americans will die
from food poisoning this year.
Keep your family safer; check your steps at foodsafety.gov.
Welcome back. We're talking about food security,
food distribution systems, nutrition,
throughout the world with Will Hueston,
professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine
and the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.
Will, let's use this last segment to talk about solutions.
We've talked about the problems, and there are multiple problems,
but I hope there are some solutions.
One of the things I noticed that you talk about is One Health.
What are you talking about when you talk about One Health?
One Health says that we need to broaden our lens.
While our training is pretty narrow,
you were trained to look at human health,
I was trained, largely, to look at animal health.
We have others that are trained to look at plant health.
We have people who are trained to look at the economic health
or the societal health of countries.
All of those are interrelated.
As you mentioned earlier, our ability to have a safe,
affordable, accessible, food supply depends on
the societal stability of our country,
and the economic stability.
So we need to look across all of these components of health
that are interdependent at the same time.
So that's the One Health.
It's a single vision that takes into consideration
the health of people, the health of animals and plants
and the environment, as well as the health of the economy
and the health of the society.
It strikes me that we've been talking, in state government,
about the fact that there's health in all policies,
transportation policies, housing policies, economic policies,
tax policies, all impact health, but I've been thinking of it
more just in terms of health impact on individuals.
I suspect there's food security health,
there's veterinary medicine, animal health
in all policies also, I suspect.
Indeed; let me give you some examples
that I want to congratulate the department of health on.
In Minnesota, we really have a unique situation
in which a number of the departments
have very comfortable working relationships.
Some of the issues we work with pull together the departments
of health, natural resources, the board of animal health,
the department of agriculture
all sitting down and working together and saying
we recognize we all have a part of this issue
and we must coordinate and work together to make the greatest
positive impact on the lives of Minnesotans
and people everywhere-- that is a One Health approach.
So how are you trying to get at that One Health approach?
Are you doing that through your Global Initiative on Food Systems Leadership?
Is that sort of the approach you're taking with that?
Yes, we're doing it in the training we do at the University of Minnesota.
We're doing it in the work we do with organizations
and with individuals around the world.
It says that as you're training the next physician
or veterinarian that we expose them during their training
to other professionals so they develop a comfort level
and an understanding of what each profession
brings to the table, an ability to sit down and say
how can we work together, how can we leverage our
individual strengths to make progress.
A lot of what I do is helping to build
public/private partnerships.
Government alone cannot address all of this food system,
this food safety, global food security problem.
It has to be government and the private sector
and the individuals, the society itself.
We must do that together.
If we bring together these different sectors,
public and private sector, it takes a while to learn
the language of each other, to develop that relationship,
so a lot of what we do is help develop relationships
between countries, between sectors, between professions,
so that we can work more effectively
to make incremental positive progress.
What kind of professionals are you working with here
at the University of Minnesota, in particular,
to work cross-collaboratively, cross-disciplinary?
We have the folks that work in the College of Agriculture,
food agriculture and natural resource sciences,
folks that work in the College of Biological Sciences.
So there may be a virologist or a microbiologist,
or an ecologist.
I'll give you another interesting one--
people in design.
The folks in design, rural design, have a fascinating way
of saying we need to look at how we design the world we live in
so that we can support the public health goals
that we all share.
We work with the School of Public Health,
we work with the School of Medicine,
so it's a wide range of schools.
Oftentimes, we hear about big industry, agribusiness,
with profit motive and monoculture;
how do get them to work with the government,
with the not-for-profits, and internationally
to say we need to do this more collaboratively
as opposed to our little cylinders of excellence,
as I call them?
First and foremost, we developed a shared interest.
I don't know of a single large food company whose goal it is
to make people sick.
I don't know a single large food company whose goal it is
to actually alienate the very people
who are the consumers of their products.
So these large companies share the goals that we have
in public health, whether it's at the university
or in the department of health.
They would like to see an affordable, accessible,
nutritious food supply for everyone in the world
because everyone in the world
are their workers, their consumers.
They depend on it.
So the stability of the company, the life blood, if you will,
of a food company is to have healthy consumers
and healthy workers.
It's all interconnected.
So we focus on the areas in which we can agree,
and then we find opportunities, which we can make
incremental progress in the areas in which we agree,
and part of that says instead of waiting till there's a problem
and reacting to the problem, let's sit down and anticipate
the implications of some of the changes that we've talked about
and see how we can steer, guide the future, so that we can avoid
some of these calamities, these challenges, these outbreaks.
One of the other areas that is public policy,
and I know the farm bill is coming up, it's every 5 years,
and it's a huge public health bill called the farm bill,
but it has a lot of public health implications.
How are you getting involved, or how do people get involved
in making that farm bill one of these One Health kinds of bills?
Well we're actively developing, and this is in conjunction
with the Center for Integrative Leadership--
now here's 2 more schools at the University of Minnesota,
the Humphrey School of Public Affairs
and the Carlson School of Business.
We've developed a program called Finding Common Ground,
where we bring a broad cross section of citizens together
and discuss some of these complex issues,
and how do we balance the paradox
of some of these complex issues,
whether it's antibiotics in agriculture,
or whether it's the way we respond to emerging diseases
of animals, or plants, or humans.
And so in developing that policy,
the most powerful opportunity we have of developing better policy
is to broaden the level of engagement
so we get more perspectives represented
so we can better understand not only the intended,
but the unintended consequences
of what we do through public policy.
Well, it's been a great conversation.
We've covered lots of ground.
There's many, many more items we need to cover,
but we're running out of time.
So thanks for being with us, Will, I really appreciate it.
I thoroughly enjoyed it; thanks so much, Ed.
We'll have you back again, I'm sure.
And I'll be back with a closing comment
right after this message.
[hissing]
[snorting]
Three thousand Americans will die
from food poisoning this year.
Keep your family safer; check your steps at foodsafety.gov.
[pig snorting]
Today's discussion highlights the fact that we need
new solutions to the current and future food security problems.
Simply doing more of what we are doing today
will not get us to where we need to be
and may even be destructive to our health
and the health of our environment,
and no single solution will be sufficient.
Wendell Berry, a poet and farmer, stated this well.
He said, "A bad solution is bad because it acts destructively
upon the larger patterns in which it is contained.
A bad solution solves for a single purpose or goal,
such as increased production.
And it is typical of such solutions
that they achieve stupendous increase in production
at exorbitant biological and social costs.
Good solutions recognize that they are part of a larger whole.
They solve more than one problem and don't create new problems."
And one of my public health heroes, Norman Borlaug,
who was responsible for the green revolution
which dramatically increased production,
echoed that perspective when he said,
"For more than half a century, I have worked with the production
of more and better wheat for feeding the hungry people,
but wheat is merely a catalyst, a part of the picture.
I am interested in the total development of human beings.
Only by attacking the whole problem can we raise
the standard of living for all people in all communities,
so that they will be able to live decent lives.
This is something that we want for all people on this planet."
As these 2 gentlemen suggest, to enhance food security
we need good solutions that affect a broader goal.
We need to get out of our silos, or our cylinders of excellence,
and work with people in other sectors and other disciplines
and other institutions who have differing perspectives
on what needs to be done.
Only then will we come up with good solutions that benefit
all humans, all animals, all plants, and the environment.
That will be a good solution.
That's all for today; thanks for watching.
I hope you can join us next time on "A Public Health Journal."