Q&A With DMI President Barb O’Brien On Dairy UN Food Systems Dialogue
May 2021 ACAM Dairy Video - Barb O'Brien, President, Dairy Management Inc.
This article was written by Nate Birt, Vice President of Trust In Food, a Farm Journal initiative. Learn more at www.trustinfood.com
U.S. dairy farmers and other dairy leaders recently participated in a dialogue designed to formally document the industry’s leadership on nutrition and sustainability issues as part of the upcoming United Nations Food Systems Summit.
Held on April 28, the event—titled “Advancing Food Systems Transformation to Nourish the Health of Future Generations and Enable a Sustainable Planet”—is one of hundreds of such gatherings happening globally in the run-up to the Food Systems Summit, scheduled for September 2021 in New York. The event was co-sponsored by the U.S. Dairy Export Council, the National Dairy Council, The Nature Conservancy and the Global Child Nutrition Fund.
The UN Summit is important because it is a “multi-year effort that’s looking at how to feed a growing global population, and at the same time protect the earth’s natural resources,” explains Barb O’Brien, president of Dairy Management Inc., and president and CEO of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy in a video interview with Trust In Food, a Farm Journal initiative.
“This meeting that we hosted, the dialogue, was an opportunity for us to narrow things to a regional level,” O’Brien explains. “It really gave us the opportunity to showcase U.S. dairy’s commitments and the contributions that we’re making to food systems here in the U.S. and importantly get that content entered into the UN as part of their official proceedings.
“It was also a really important opportunity for us to demonstrate to dairy farmers the work we’re doing through checkoff—not just DMI, but really a checkoff-wide approach to this global discussion. And as we continue to work to build relationships, to build our reputation as U.S. dairy on that global stage, as we all know, there’s this ongoing discussion around food systems, this debate around plant- versus animal-based proteins. So we’ve got to be at the table as governments and non-governments and international organizations are having the conversation.
Dairy farmers played an important role during the event. “The farmers, in addition to sharing their personal stories about their own operations, they also talked about what outside resources they needed to continue to make progress, to continue to adopt and adapt new practices and technologies on their farm, and more broadly, how we as a U.S. industry can scale those opportunities over time,” O’Brien says. “It’s clear it’s not a one-size-fits-all, the farmers were able to showcase the variations in size, in practice, in regionality or geography, and how that impacts what they do and what they can do in the future.”
Watch the video attached to this article to learn about what comes next for the U.S. dairy industry ahead of the Food Systems Summit—and about how the industry is preparing the next generation of American ag leaders and consumers.
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