Science and engineering of living systems for food, agriculture and environment
Source AgroParisTech
The issue of global food security – to feed 9 billion humans in 2050 – raises a major challenge to French and European agricultural production, which already ensures a strategic portion of worldwide production. Research efforts, building expertise and innovation are necessary in a context of global change: demographic growth and food transitions; depletion and degradation of natural resources such as energy, water, and soil, biodiversity, climate change, etc. The Paris-Saclay Campus “Food – Agriculture – Environment” project seeks to meet these challenges by favouring design and procedures for healthy food management systems, adaptive and sustainable, making use of the latest knowledge in basic biology and the most modern and environmentally friendly agronomic techniques.
As part of the Paris-Saclay Campus, AgroParisTech and INRA will develop interactions between research, training and innovation in terms of agricultural and sustainable food systems, with a wide range of disciplines, from basic biology, especially plant biology, to agro-ecology and including the humanities and social sciences. This opportunity will be better developed the more it is associated with advanced technological research, involving all the players in the knowledge and innovation production chain in a cohesive and systemic approach to the issues (reasoned changes in land management procedures, changes in practices or organization in the service of farms, businesses, agribusiness chains, etc.).
Associated building projects
The project common to AgroParisTech and INRA on the Palaiseau site is expressed in terms of combinations:
- On the one hand, the combination of all the teaching and training activities of AgroParisTech1 are currently spread over four sites between central Paris and the outer ring.
- On the other, the arrival of laboratories spread over sites from either of the two institutions in Île-de-France. From this second perspective, the operation, either directly in Palaiseau, or by rearrangements pertaining to INRA sites nearby, constitutes in one location a critical mass of expertise and concentrations of scientific equipment, endowed with a strong governance.
The variety of disciplines supported and the academic production of the players makes the ambition of the project shared by AgroParisTech and INRA within the Paris-Saclay Campus credible. An insertion of this type is found in a very few major American universities (UC Davis, Cornell, Georgia, etc.), which are all top global players in the field, particularly in terms of scientific production.
