In its inaugural year, a workshop titled Debating a Sustainable Food System convenes in 2009–2010 to consider the phenomena of food and farming in their global context. Workshop participants are considering five broad food-system dilemmas:

• Can food production keep pace with population growth and escalating dietary demand at an acceptable cost to the natural environment?
• Are there ways to address the growth of the human population and food production that will not exacerbate social-justice concerns such as land dispossession and politically-induced famine?
• To what extent is human health dependent on the way in which food is produced and marketed?
• To what extent is the world’s food system becoming integrated under the control of global seed and chemical companies, food-product companies, retail supermarket chains, and fast-food franchise restaurants?
• How is the world’s food system governed today?

Because responsible treatment of these topics requires a multidisciplinary perspective, one dozen or so invited participants are drawn from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, as well as from medicine, law, business administration, and engineering.

The workshop meets up to eight times during the academic year over dinner in the Harvard Faculty Club. At the conclusion of the series, the group plans to assess its progress and consider plans for future work.

Workshop conveners are Rob Paarlberg, Betty Freyhof Johnson Class of 1944 Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs; John Briscoe, Professor of the Practice of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health, and Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Health, School for Engineering and Applied Sciences; and Missy Holbrook, Professor of Biology and Charles Bullard Professor of Forestry, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. The workshop is co-sponsored by the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard's Center for International Development.