ZJU Food Systems and Policy Lab officially launched

On October 18, the inauguration ceremony for the Zhejiang University Food Systems and Policy Lab (FSPL) was held on Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University. Present at the ceremony were about 200 scholars from universities and research institutes both at home and abroad.  

YE Min, vice secretary of the CPC Committee of Zhejiang University, delivered a speech at the ceremony. “Zhejiang University will lend generous support to the FSPL and make every endeavor to promote the sustainable public health and food system,” said YE Min.

The first batch of FSLP experts include WANG Hong (a professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University and foreign director of the FSLP), Johan Swinnen (the next director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute and a professor of Development Economics at the University of Leuven in Belgium), Hermann Lotze-Campen (a professor of Sustainable Land Use and Climate Change at Humboldt University in Germany) and Christoph Müller (a researcher from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research).

With the acceleration of economic development and urbanization, the proportion of the traditional agricultural sector in the global economy has been constantly declining, and a massive modern food system has derived from primary agricultural producers to final consumers. According to statistics, China’s primary agricultural products account for 7% of the country’s GDP, but the entire food system takes up nearly 23%. Meanwhile, the whole society is increasingly concerned about a host of relevant issues, such as food quality and safety, nutrition imbalance, environmental pollution, sustainable development. The FSLP will focus its research work on the construction and development of the nutrition-oriented agricultural system, the demand analysis of safe and high-quality food, the modeling analysis of the environment and food system, the construction and efficiency analysis of the food value chain in order to find feasible solutions to a series of problems, such as food security, food malnutrition, food safety, the food value chain, and the sustainable development of the food system.