Introduction

General Context
Particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, but also in Asia, the number of individuals afflicted with HIV/AIDS is rapidly increasing. The devastating consequences of this development are also increasingly being felt in rural regions. The vicious circle of ill health, insufficient agricultural production, and poverty is becoming more intense. For this reason we are increasingly facing the challenge of looking at food security in a holistic manner, rather than from a narrow agronomic perspective.
The international community has committed itself to achieving various Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Two of these goals concern food security and health: MDG 1 aims to halve the world’s population suffering from extreme poverty and hunger, and MDG 6 deals with reducing diseases such as HIV/AIDS and Malaria.
A holistic strategy dealing jointly with these closely linked areas will increase the chances of reaching these goals. However, cooperation to this effect between health and agricultural institutions is not very well developed as yet. The planned symposium is intended to offer a platform for exchange among the representatives of two sectors previously perceived as separate.

Subject of the Symposium
Every year the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) uses the World Food Day to make the general public aware of the struggle against poverty and hunger throughout the world. In this context, the planned symposium is intended to explore the rarely discussed relations between health and food security in developing countries: How do health conditions among rural populations influence agricultural production, and vice versa? How can agricultural production systems best be adapted to the specific problems in a population strongly affected by HIV/AIDS? How can the loss of agricultural knowledge be countered? How should rural development programmes deal with diseases such as malaria? These are some of the questions to be discussed at the symposium.

Target audience
The target public are Swiss and international development and humanitarian aid professionals working in the agriculture or health sector, including policy makers, project staff and researchers from South and North. The Symposium is also open to all other interested parties.

Objectives of the symposium
to facilitate networking between representatives of the agricultural and the health sector;
to identify interactions between diseases and food insecurity in developing countries;
to present and discuss strategies and projects for poverty reduction that successfully combine health and agricultural aspects.

Thematic focus
The Symposium puts emphasis on the interface between poor health and food insecurity in developing countries. Several major diseases in different agricultural production systems will be addressed. The geographical focus is on rural areas in Africa and Southeast Asia.