ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with a brief background on the challenge of food and nutrition security and the promise of a food systems approach to address this challenge. It tells the story of the Global Change Institute (GCI) Food Systems Program. The chapter describes the GCI Food Systems Program, emphasizing outputs from the program, including some ongoing research and teaching activities. Unfortunately for food systems research, the Australian Research Council is strongly based on disciplinary categories and themes, and the Rural Industry Research and Development Corporations are based on agricultural commodities. While the GCI more generally, and Food Systems Program specifically, can be viewed as an internal (The University of Queensland) attempt to facilitate interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, this attempt required supporting institutional reform with external stakeholders, including external research funding organisations. The term “food systems” refers to a specific approach to addressing food and nutrition security, and it is gaining considerable support in international literature.
