Yesterday, Prof. Dr. Michael Kreuzer of North-South Center opened Tropentag 2010 with a speech “About World Food System” together with 1,228 registrants from 83 countries. This was immediately followed by interesting and thought provoking speeches by experts such as Christian Nelleman from UNEP entitled “Ensuring food security while safeguarding the environment” where he said, “while agriculture surely has impacts on the environment, but more important to understand is how the environment provides the platform for food production”. Moreover, Jimmy Smith of World Bank Institute delivered his speech entitled “The role of livestock for the world food system” indicating that “problem is the availability and accessibility of those foods in developing countries as feeding people does not necessarily nourishing them”. Right after the break, Foundation Fiat Panis awarded 3 recent graduates with Hans H. Ruthernberg-Graduate-Award together with 3 research professionals with Josef G. Knoll-European Science-Award as they managed to produce excellent scientific work meant to contribute to the reduction of hunger in developing countries. The keynote programme was then continued by Paul Collier of Oxford University with his speech entitled “How to feed the bottom billion?” which actually inciting an out-of-comfort-zone discussion pushing for a more pragmatic approach in solving the big question, as his title proposed.

This year's Tropentag features a brand new innovation: Student reporters who will document the conference in real time online. Twelve international students were chosen to write a blog, do interviews, shoot videos, take pictures. By doing so we hope to increase the outreach of the Tropentag, to make the event accessible for those who cannot join the conference and to familiarize the larger public and e-community with issues of agricultural and rural development.

We, the twelve student reporters, arrived at the ETH Zurich on Monday, September 13, and were briefed in a workshop by a team from the School of Communication Sciences of University of Lugano, Switzerland. Yesterday, we focused mainly on various Web 2.0 applications and organizational matters, today the briefing continues and we deal with technical issues of using this blog, Twitter and handling Flickr for pictures taken at the conference.

The conference will start at 13:00 GMT, so stay tuned!