Alliance interdisciplinary research tackles critical issues around food insecurity

Ms Sue Kleve, Dr Claire Palermo, Dr Martine Barons

Access to a safe and affordable food supply is a basic human right under numerous covenants of international law, and yet many households in high income countries are unable to feed themselves or their families or experience stress and anxiety about their ability to put sufficient and nutritionally adequate food on the table.

In May 2016 the Monash Warwick Alliance funded Dr Martine Barons, Director of the Applied Statistics and Risk Unit (AS&RU), Warwick University and Associate Professor Claire Palermo and Sue Kleve, Lecturer, Nutrition, Dietetics and Food, Monash University to bring together a team of expert researchers who were working in disparate yet complementary academic fields on a common theme of food insecurity. Leveraging their complementary expertise, they were able to establish an international research agenda to assist in gathering evidence to address food security in high income countries.

Dr Barons, explains, “Over the last year the team have been able to pool research from a wide range of disciplines to find commonalities and differences between the manifestations of household food insecurity in high income countries. We have been able to collectively enhance our understanding of the structural and societal challenges which lead to household food insecurity, as well as some of its consequences and the interventions that have ameliorated these. We are now in a position to leverage this understanding to help policymakers in their decision-making.”

The team are committed to translating their work into teaching and learning to ensure that students are equipped with the latest evidence on food security and strategies to address this priority issue. Next month Dr Barons will be visiting Monash University as part of the Monash Warwick Alliance Visiting Educators scheme to deliver a series of masterclass lectures to Monash University Bachelor of Nutrition Science students and Masters of Dietetics students across year levels with a focus on transferring technical skills of modelling to public health nutrition issues.

Ms Kleve explains, “During Dr Barons’ visit to Monash we would like to develop a model for Australian Food Security based on the novel methodology developments that Dr Barons and colleagues have recently published. This will enable policymakers to compare policy options and to select those most likely to be effective in tackling this important issue. Currently, it is difficult to bring together the vast streams of data in a coherent way and to deal with the inevitable uncertainties robustly to support decision-making, but this new methodology has overcome these problems and we look forward to taking steps to put it into practice.

Our students will have the opportunity to identify key determinants of food insecurity and data sources which will be a valuable contribution to the development of this model.”

Story courtesy of Warwick University.  Originally published HERE.