In this post I will try to answer a few of the initial questions that I'm asked when I tell people I'm going to Vietnam for 6 months. Firstly is almost always "what will you be doing in Vietnam?" Well I will be doing an internship as a Food Security Specialist at Tra Vinh University in the Southern Vietnam. This internship is co-ordinated by the Marine Institute at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland and is funded by CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency). While there is a lot to be said of how CIDA runs its international development programs (and the concept of development itself) I feel that this will be a valuable experience and it is hard to be accurately critical of something you have only discussed in classrooms. So here goes my foray into mainstream development!
Now the next question I've been asked a lot is "what is food security?" My favourite guess so far is that I will be standing outside of warehouses of veggies with baseball bats... Well, not really... food security is a complex term and has different definitions depending on whose defining it. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (http://www.fao.org) defines food security as existing when people have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and enable an active and healthy life. So my position, as I've come to understand, but I'm sure it will be somewhat different when I arrive, is a combination of research, fieldwork and organizing workshops on food security in the local context.
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