Global nutrition & consumption (SDG 2 and 12)

Last Wednesday, we went to an educational institute called EPIZ, who is working for sustainable and global learning. Six of our students and three teachers participated in a workshop concerning global nutrition and consumption with a focus on poultry exports from the EU to Ghana. At first, they taught us some facts about Ghana and poultry consumption in Europe. For example, in Germany many people only eat chicken breasts and legs. All the other parts, that we don’t like to eat, get exported to Africa. Countries like Ghana have a lot of problems with the European poultry then. On the one hand it’s so cheap that the farmers can’t sell their own chicken anymore, so they loose their jobs. On the other hand, due to the long way the poultry travels and the related process of defreezing and refreezing, the meat looses quality. When the chicken arrives at the Ghanaian markets, it often has gone bad and consumers get food poisoning of it. The Ghanaian meat would be much healthier and fresher. So not only does the European poultry make the people in Africa poor, but it also makes them sick. To get really deep into the topic, we played a simulation game, where we had to solve the conflict between the Ghanaian farmers and the EU. The workshop day was very interesting and taught us a lot about how our consumption affects people globally.