Professor Lohrberg visits FAO
On October 25, Prof. Frank Lohrberg visited together with Prof. Makoto Yokohari from the University of Tokyo the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome. They followed an invitation by Guido Santini, coordinator of the City Region Food Systems Program, to report from the first global conference on Urban Agricultural Heritage, which Prof. Lohrberg conducted this year in May in Hanover with the support of the Volkswagen Foundation.
The meeting made clear that a heritage perspective is helpful to give urban agriculture a better footing, to identify all the long-term knowledge it contains and to unfold its multiple potentials for urban communities. Hence, Makiko Taguchi – on behalf of Guido Santini – underlined FAO’s interest in further cooperation, especially in the field of research and innovation.
A day before this meeting, Prof. Yokohari and Prof. Lohrberg met Prof. Koohafkan, President of the World Agricultural Heritage Foundation at FAO. They figured out manifold linkages in their work. Particularly the format of “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems” (GIAHS) was identified as a field of further cooperation and all partners agreed that it is quite useful and timely to also setup a GIAHS in the field of urban agriculture.
Before, on Oct., 19-23, Prof. Lohrberg presented the Herrenhausen Conference's results at “International Academy on UNESCO Designations and Sustainable Development” in Turin, Piedmont region and Milan.