Workshop2: Food & Water

March 21 13:30 - 17:30
Session2: Food and Water
Reporter: T. Yamazaki


Facilitators Kensuke Fukushi (UT),
Sébastien Rauch (Chalmers),
Yang Hong (EAWAG/ETH)


This was a joint session of “food and water” and “risk governance”

Sub-session1: Food safety, stable supply and governance
Extra-Scientific Dimensions of Science-Based Decisionmaking
Hideyuki Hirakawa
Policy decisions are synthetic judgments comprising extra-scientific factors(ESFs), as well as scientific one. ESFs affect not only policy decision but also on scientific judgments. In Japan-US BSE conflict, scientific question was unique in the sense that it was based on a highly disputable and shaky presumption and run short political legitimacy like accountability or openness. In this way, extra-scientific considerations enter science through problem framing, which sometimes leads to biased political manipulation of science. To avoid this, we need to scrutinize questions from a point of view of political legitimacy of scientific questions in addition to scientific answers and new understanding of value-neutrality of science as political legitimacy of scientific questions.

Makiko Matsuo
Setting International Food Standards
-the Case of Genetically modified Organisms
At the CODEX Alimentarius committee, science, power politics and the roles of market power is important in the decision, but there are other decisive factors like procedural character historical character agenda setting, the leadership of the chairman, and funding expenses. The challenges are lack of enforcing authority, the problem of compliance.


Sub-session 2: regional food issues in Asia

Michael Ernst
Sustainability science and food security in Asia
He focuses on Ganges and Mekong basins. Major risks such as floods or droughts are threatening food security. Application of sustainable science is necessary, but there are some barriers to sustainable sciences such as multi-disciplinary fashion, not reward, lack of government support, disciplinary cultures, and resistance of bureaucracies to changes.
Hisashi Kurokura
Small scale fisheries by farmer in Cambodia
Cambodian people obtain 75% of total protein intake from fresh water fish. Because of over catch by small scale fisheries, several important fish species are depleting. As a result of the household survey, it is found that the small-scale fishing was commercially conducted and fishing played an important role as an income source because rice production was not enough and most of farmers should obtain rice from market using the income from fishing. We should take holistic approach to know backgrounds of problems such as the fact that poverty often causes unsustainable use of resources.

Kou Ikejima
Coastal Zone Management: an integrated approach for sustainable development in the complex resource system. Coastal zone has productive and valuable habitats. This implies, in turn, that users’ demands are complex, and competition and conflict between users are often severe. Because of unclear jurisdiction and common property resources, coastal zones are also governmentally complex. We should apply integrated approaches such as Costal Zone Management CZM to solve the complicated issues that cannot be solved by traditional single sectoral method.

Session3: Discussion
After session2, there was the introduction of the food and water flagship program, which objects. We discussed various agenda such as how to change the structure of Food and water flagship program.