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| 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.
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