SLU Youth Institute at the World Food Forum

This blog post is written by Kristina Karlsson Green, project coordinator at SLU Youth Insitute. 

Engaging discussions about some of the most crucial challenges of our time, global leadership, and friends for life. That could summarise the experiences that we, coordinators, and the nominated high school students from SLU Youth Institute had at the World Food Forum in Rome earlier this autumn. Add a bit of the vibrant atmosphere of Rome with its history that permeates the city, as well as delicious food, and you could tell that the event was a highlight of the year for all of us. 

If you haven’t heard about SLU Youth Institute before, as a short recap, it’s a programme in collaboration with the World Food Prize Foundation in U.S. that engages high school students in global food security. Each year, high school students across Sweden write an essay about challenges and sustainable solutions for reaching food security in a country other than Sweden. Of all students, one from each campus is nominated to participate in an international event where they get to present their essays for experts working with questions related to food security, and to take part in other immersive activities. 

This year, we went to World Food Forum in Rome, organised by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, and participated in their Global Youth Action – a track of the programme specifically addressing youth perspectives.  The intense programme offered a wide variety of sessions including topics such as agroecology, clean water, innovations, climate change and youth empowerment. In addition, there were exhibitions and interactive activities that showcased a diversity of actions that put food and agriculture at the top of the agenda. As ’youth’ may represent a wide age span, our high school students were probably among the youngest participants, except for the last day when they attended a high school assembly with Italian and Chinese students. Still, they soaked up the information and actively participated in the different sessions with questions to the speakers. Our students particularly enjoyed visiting the interactive exhibition area - and just being in the same context as the Pope, Ban-Ki Moon and royals was probably not too bad either.

Another gem was to visit the Swedish embassy and meet their staff working with UN organs FAO, World Food Program, WFP, and International Fund for Agricultural Development, IFAD. This visit gave a lot if insights in how UN organisations work, challenges and opportunities with different foreign aid approaches as well as how working with food security could be an international career path.  The major programme point for all of us was, however, when the students presented their essays for several experts that FAO staff kindly had engaged for us. We may be biased, but we were deeply impressed by the students’ performance as their presentations were both pedagogic and had an engaging common thread; listening to them made us reflect on the power of storytelling to convey a message. 

We returned to Sweden with new insights, contacts and memories to cherish. We hope that the experience also have opened new doors into the future for the students. As one of them reflected on our way home: I did not know before that there are so many different ways to work with these questions, I did not know that this (food security) could be a real career path. For now, the final year of high school awaits for the students, with the high school thesis work, parties and the graduation coming up. Thereafter, the future seems bright for them, having already accomplished presentations and discussions in a high-end international environment. And who knows, perhaps we will see them in our educational programmes at SLU one day!