Dear friends and colleagues,
Greetings from the Australian National University, IBFAN Global Council, BPNI India, Alive &Thrive, Southeast Asia, World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative Australia and the Australian Breastfeeding Association.
This email invites you to save the date for the webinar and dialogue “ Breastfeeding: Where Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems Begin” on Thursday, 9 September 2021. Registration for this event is open via the ANU Gender Institute website.
Event Time: 10:00 am GMT or equivalent to: 06:00 am EDT (New York), 11:00 am BST (London), 12:00 noon CEST (Geneva/Rome), 03:30 pm IST (Delhi), 05:00 pm WIB (Bangkok), 07:00 pm AEST (Canberra) 7:00pm
The event:
Today’s food systems are contributing to several intersecting health and ecological crises of global concern. Recognising this, many are now calling for transformative, and some even say radical, food systems change. The United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) seeks to transform how the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food. However, many scientists and civil society networks are questioning what this will mean in reality and where the mother-child breastfeeding dyad, breastmilk, and the rights of mothers and children, will fit within the food systems transformation agenda. This Dialogue will show how and why breastfeeding – as the biological norm for feeding human infants and children – is where healthy and sustainable food systems really begin.
The objectives are to:
Bring together advocates, specialists and policy-makers for food systems, food security and nutrition, human rights, and environment, as well as members of women’s and community support groups, to share transformative ideas and positions on breastfeeding as foundational to sustainable food systems thinking and action, with the right to breastfeed as a guiding principle and in doing so, identifies the most powerful levers for generating systems-wide change.
Increase awareness and understanding of the pivotal role of breastfeeding as the most sustainable, localised and normative food system for delivering food security and nutrition to infants and young children, and one that is universally available and accessible optimises nutrition and health outcomes, supports resilience during crisis through local and diverse supply chains and gives agency to mothers and children.
Build alliances and discuss the importance of aligning actions to protect, promote and support breastfeeding across the five Action Tracks of the UNFSS, considering a) the strengths, opportunities, risks and challenges of framing breastfeeding in terms of food systems, and b) identifying strategies to ensure breastfeeding, breastmilk and the rights of mothers and children, are integral to future food systems thinking, research and action.
International experts in children’s and women’s rights and breastfeeding, corporate political activity, food systems and food marketing and the political economy of breastfeeding will provide informed commentary on the need to protect and support women and their children and their right to breastfeeding and to ensure that breastfeeding is acknowledged as the foundation of a food system.
Please join us, and please share this invite with others in your networks.
For more information on the programme and the speakers and to register for the event, please click on the following link:
ANU Gender Institute
https://genderinstitute.anu.edu.au/breastfeeding-where-healthy-and-sustainable-food-systems-begin
Sincerely,
Dr Julie Smith Naomi Hull
Australian National University WBTI Australia
Australian Breastfeeding Association
Dr Arun Gupta MD FIAP
Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI)/ (IBFAN) South Asia
Patti Rundall
IBFAN Global Council Member
Roger Mathisen
Alive & Thrive Southeast Asia