Marketing of food to children, land use, Brexit, agritech and food systems will be debated by the UK’s food systems experts during a major week of food policy, 10th-14th June.
Policy Focus Week
Led by N8 AgriFood, Policy Focus Week 2019, will showcase how research has played an important role in influencing evidence-based policy making.
Policy Focus Week will highlight N8 AgriFood’s broad expertise across food systems and demonstrate how its expertise and knowledge can and has been used to produce evidence-backed policies in government, corporate and NGO sectors.
Policy Focus Week will start with a free-to-attend event on Monday 10th June at Cloth Hall Court, in Leeds. Entitled ‘Policy Engagement in Practice’ the event will bring together N8 AgriFood academics and government representatives to share their knowledge and experiences about how to influence policy.
The day is aimed at those working under the broad theme of agri-food who have an interest in engaging with policy, such as academic staff, research team staff, PhD students and associated industry partners of any of the N8 Universities.
The rest of the week will include a social media campaign, driving debate over a diverse range of policy topics including, marketing of food to children, land use, Brexit agritech and food systems, using the hashtag #N8AFpolicy
Anthonia James, operations director for N8 AgriFood, said: “Creating impact through policy engagement is a strategic goal for N8 AgriFood, and as such our programme has been working to support and inform policy debate across the food system.
“The purpose of N8 AgriFood Policy Week is to highlight the influence our academics and external collaborators have had on agrifood policy – regionally, nationally and internationally. We want to raise awareness of the opportunities and potential for combining evidence based science with policy making.
“Policy Week will showcase the contribution we are making to the challenges that the food system faces and the vast expertise we have across social and natural sciences through our unique collaboration of eight institutions working together. We want it communicate that our work is available and our doors are open to those looking to make evidence-based informed policy decisions.”
N8 Agrifood is part of the N8 Research Partnership (N8) which is the collaboration body for the universities of Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, and York. The N8 universities form the largest research-pooling partnership in the UK and create programmes involving a critical mass of world class academics which form networks of innovation excellence with partners in other sectors – to drive investment and economic growth.