Seminar "Water, Food and Health Nexus in BRICS-PLUS: Problems, Progress and Prospects"

Seminar "Water, Food and Health Nexus in BRICS-PLUS: Problems, Progress and Prospects" will take place in the University of Free State on 1-5 September 2018.

Instabilities within water, food and heath complex interconnections are self-reinforcing and have direct and disproportional effects on mental and physical wellbeing and sustainable development across geographies and genders. These instabilities are exacerbating daily by various dynamics including but are not limited to climate change, urbanisation, inequality, inequity and population growth. Consequently, we live in the age of vanishing territories as well as disappearing landscapes, foodscapes, waterscapes and healthscapes. The grim statistics of water and food-related human sufferings, including illnesses, are not only on the increase; they are also characterised by starling paradoxes: Overweight and underweight now coexist in the same household; over seventy percent of the earth is water yet over two billion people lacked access to clean water and sanitation; 795 million people are food insecure but one third of all food produced in the world is thrown into dustbin per annum.

These problems and paradoxes are evidently seen in various waterscapes and foodscapes across BRICS-PLUS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and other African countries). This conference, therefore, calls for innovative, conjectural, ideological, theoretical and practical templates for unmaking unsecured and unstable waterscapes and foodscapes in BRICS-PLUS. The conference accordingly welcomes scholarly papers and invite pundits, scholars and policymakers to interrogate and ponder new ways of addressing practices, political economies, and power relations associated with the troubled waterscapes and foodscapes in order to build sustainability into water, food and health nexus in BRICS-PLUS.