Nordisk Afrikainstitut 50 år i Danmark

TIME: Thursday, 15 November, 15.15 – 17.00

VENUE: Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, Købmagergade 46, 4th floor, Copenhagen K.

NAI Cluster Leader Kjell Havnevik gives a seminar on ‘Food Security and Large Scale Agro-investments in Africa: are they compatible?’

The seminar will be followed by a reception.

TIME: Thursday, 15 November, 15.15 – 17.00

VENUE: Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, Købmagergade 46, 4th floor, Copenhagen K.

NAI Cluster Leader Kjell Havnevik gives a seminar on ‘Food Security and Large Scale Agro-investments in Africa: are they compatible?’

The seminar will be followed by a reception.

The presentation will introduce and reflect on various components of food security- abundance/provision, adequacy/nutrition, cultural acceptance, price stability and access ‒ and their changes over time. This will be juxtaposed with an analysis of the drivers and implications of recent large scale agro-investments in Africa for export of food and biofuels.

Can this new African and global land rush be compatible with the global MDG aim of reducing the number of hungry people in the world to half by 2015? The presentation will reflect on the missing perspectives in the conventional international conceptualization of food security and argue why the analysis has to move in direction of the concept of food sovereignty.

Kjell Havnevik, PhD, is head of the Nordic Africa Institute research cluster on Rural and Agrarian Change and professor at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. He has nearly four decades of experience from research, education and advisory work in Norwegian, Tanzanian and Swedish universities and research institutes.