TWITTER CHAT | Food, migration, & sustainability: ensuring policy coherence

Million Belay is the founder and coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and a researcher at Stockholm Resilience Center. He is also the founder and director of MELCA-Ethiopia, an indigenous NGO working on agro-ecology, intergenerational learning, conservation of forests and improving the livelihood of local communities and indigenous peoples. He was a nominee to the International Forest Hero Award in 2011 and won the National Green Hero Award for both Ethiopia and Addis Ababa, the capital city, in 2008. Belay has a BSc in Biology from Addis Ababa University, and a MSc in Tourism and Conservation from the University of Kent.

Iris Bouwers is a Vice-President at CEJA, the European Council of Young Farmers. She is a young farmer from the Netherlands, actively farming in a partnership with her parents, in the north-eastern part of the country. They have a mixed farm, with arable land and fattening pigs. She is most passionate about the dispersed crops they grow, such as valerian and gluten-free oats. Over the past years, Bouwers has been actively involved in both national and EU agricultural policy and politics as the international representative of NAJK, the Dutch Young Farmers’ Organisation. She is also involved in local politics as an elected councilor.

Jan Huitema is a Dutch MEP for the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie party, which belongs to the Renew Europe political Group. Huitema was re-elected to the European Parliament in 2019, having firstly been elected in 2014. He is a member of the committee on environment, public health and food safety (ENVI) and is the rapporteur on the Circular Economy Action Plan for this committee from 2014 to 2019, he was a member of the committee on agriculture and rural development (AGRI), where he acted as a rapporteur on fertilizer products and water reuse. He holds a bachelor’s degree in animal sciences and subsequently obtained a master’s degree in animal production systems in 2008 from Wageningen University.

Leonard Mizzi is Acting Director for Planet and Prosperity in the European Commission’s department for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO) and Head of Unit for Rural Development, Food Security, Nutrition in the same Directorate since January 2017. Prior to this post, he was Head of Unit for 10 years in DG Agriculture and Rural Development, most recently on inter institutional matters (European Parliament, Council) in 2015-2016 and earlier on agriculture, trade and development issues from 2007 to 2014. Before working at the European Commission, Mizzi had a broad working experience in the Maltese public administration and the Maltese private sector. His areas of specialization are governance, agriculture and food and nutrition security, the Mediterranean area, Sub Saharan Africa. He holds a BA in Public Administration from the University of Malta, an MSc from CIHEAM-Montpellier (France) and a PhD in Agricultural economics from the University of Reading (UK).

Riccardo Valentini has been Director of the Division “Impacts on Agriculture, Forest and Natural Ecosystems” at the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change (CMCC) since 2007 and is full professor of Forest Ecology at the University of Tuscia, Italy. His expertise lies in the role of land use changes and forestry in the carbon cycle, biodiversity and bioenergy. He is also involved through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and governmental bodies on policies about the global carbon cycle and the role of land use changes and forestry. He is coordinator of several EU projects aiming to understand and quantify the terrestrial carbon budget and greenhouse gases emissions. He was a Nobel Price for Peace laureate in 2007 as member of the IPCC board. He was also Member of the Biogeoscience Committee of the European Research Council in 2008.