YPARD shared in ETH WFSC Summer School 2013

ETH Zurich World Food System Center (WFSC) successfully organized Summer School “Sustainable Agriculture and the World Food System” in August 10th-25th, 2013 in Rheinau, Switzerland. 24 graduate students and young professionals from 14 different countries, and a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds relevant to the world food system participated this summer school.

YPARD Switzerland Representative Rahel Wyss and YPARD China Secretary Huang Jiaqi joined both the summer school. They gave a presentation of YPARD, sharing YPARD’s objectives, distribution, organization, activities, and showing YPARD website’s homepage to all participants to welcome them to join YPARD - a useful platform and warm global family of young agricultural researchers.

Picture: YPARD Switzerland Representative Rahel Wyss (left); YPARD China Secretary Huang Jiaqi (middle) Indian young researcher and new YPARD member Raman Babu Killi (right))

All participants of WFSC Summer School showed great passion to ARD. ETH WFSC arranged a unique learning process and an exciting program for participants to explore the issues and challenges of food security and sustainable agriculture. Lectures given by 23 speakers specialized in different aspect of food value chain helped students build a comprehensive understanding of world food system as well as potential benefits and challenges of it.

Field trips to farms, farm works, and art works related to agricultural researches gave students fantastic experiences to understand and feel what agriculture is in a more creative way. Group work guided by TD Lab of ETH Zurich gave opportunities to participants to apply a new framework developped by ETH WFSC to analyze the complex world food system.

As one of the participants, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to ETH WFSC for organizing this wonderful and meaningful summer school. I learned a lot of new perspectives, methods, and ideas of food system analysis from the speakers, farmers, and other participants. Moreover, I was deeply touched and inspired by passions for ARD of young researchers from all over the world.

As YPARD China secretary, I would be very much willing to make more efforts to encourage and help Chinese young researchers to get information and participate more into such kind of international exchange and learning. Let’s work together for a brighter future for ARD!