March 5, 2021

Recent estimates suggest that 2 billion people do not have safe and sufficient access to nutritious food. In response to rising hunger rates, farmers, policymakers and researchers around the globe, including several at UBC, have been investigating alternatives to typical agricultural industrialization. One such expert is Dr. Hannah Wittman. She is a professor at the UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability.

Her research focuses on small-scale, resource-poor farmers and their positive – yet unrecognized – impacts on global food security and biodiversity conservation. One of the challenges is that much of what we know about agriculture worldwide is based on outdated census data and sales records of international exports. Professor Wittman is working with farmers near and far, primarily in Latin America, to connect them with tools and research applications to tell their stories.