The Transatlantic Partnership (TAP) held its final conference at the College of the Atlantic, Maine, USA on the 20-22 April. The Food Connections: Reconnecting Hands, Mouth & Mind Through Food Systems Education conference attracted 140 participants (students, researchers, farmers, policy makers and NGOs) from the USA, Canada and Europe. Eric Holt-Giménez from Food First, Oakland started the conference off talking about his work on how food systems are changing toward food justice and sovereignty. Other speakers included John Piotti (Executive Director) of the Maine Farmland Trust who talked about the trusts work to help preserve farmland and farming in Maine and Gary Nabhan, University of Arizona who gave a talk on Redesigning Local Food systems for Land Health, Human Health and Community Economic Health. A discussion session with representatives from the Campus Food Teams from Yale University, Unity College, Green Mountain College, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and McGill University called “Bringing Sustainable Food Systems Home” demonstrated how the different teams were striving to improve the food supplied on their own campuses. ORC were represented at the conference by Nic Lampkin and Bruce Pearce. Nic was part of the TAP panel that discussed “Going Global with Food Systems Education” and contributed his experiences and expertise to the session on agricultural policy that covered both the US Farm Bill and CAP reform. Bruce and Nic also presented the ORC work on Public Goods assessment.
The TAP project will be ending later in 2012, with ORC involved in a number of planned research and student/producer exchange projects.
