The Workshop on the Sustainability of the World's Food and Farming Systems convenes in 2012–2013 to consider the phenomena of food and farming in their global context. Workshop participants are investigating several broad food-system questions:

• Taking into consideration the international grain price spikes of both 2007–2008 and 2010–2011, should we conclude that the long-term (twentieth-century) trend toward lower real food prices has finally been halted, or even reversed?
• Is the world's increasingly specialized and industrialized food production system fundamentally incompatible with environmental sustainability? Would it be better to revert to less specialized traditional systems, or innovate greener industrial systems?
• To what extent has obesity caused by over-nutrition (particularly in industrial countries) replaced hunger and under-nutrition as the world's most pressing “food problem”?
• To what extent can the problems of today's food and farming systems be adequately addressed by national governments, as opposed to intergovernmental institutions, private business firms, or civil-society organizations?

Because responsible treatment of these topics requires a multidisciplinary perspective, more than one dozen invited participants are drawn from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, as well as from medicine, law, business administration, and engineering. In 2011–2012, the workshop benefitted from presentations by a number of guest experts, including a senior research scientist in global health at the University of Washington; the director of global partnership development at the Monsanto Company; the president and CEO of an agroecology consulting firm in Washington, DC; a senior vice president of the World Wildlife Fund; and a prize-winning agricultural economist.

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

Workshop conveners are Robert 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 of Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.

Those seeking an invitation to the seminar should contact Steven B. Bloomfield.