"Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life" is the core theme of Expo Milano 2015, the first World Expo to take place in Europe in 15 years. The European Union has its own pavilion recognizing that the theme is of vital importance for Europe and the world.
As a global player in the debate on food and sustainability, Europe highlights its achievements and, most importantly, takes this opportunity to work towards finding common solutions to these issues with other international organisations, countries and private stakeholders.
With the EU leading the way in terms of promoting quality food and ensuring food supply, photonics is giving a new impetus to this effort in numerous ways.
In the past several EC funded projects dealt with the issues of food security, e.g. by the detection of food contamination.
This year, the ICT28 call for Innovation Actions, which just closed with a budget of 11 M€, has a focus on quality, safety and process control in the food sector, with the expected impact of a wide market introduction of micro/nano-bio and bio-photonics systems for food quality, safety and processing.
The upcoming Photonics21 Annual Meeting 2015 will also devote a session to "Photonics for health and food security".
The Photonics 21 Annual meeting is the community event of the new Photonics Public Private Partnership in Europe. This cooperation model fosters photonics research and innovation under Horizon2020 linked to the Photonics Multiannual Strategic Roadmap. This community gave a clear recommendation last year to support the area of food related topics with photonics technologies.