I'll speak of my experience prior to coming to the University of Saskatchewan and then of being there as well. In my experience, the people in those areas are interested in working together on that topic. So, for instance, in our projects on food safety at North Dakota State University, the experts in risk communication were eager to get out and meet with the producers and to understand how to deliver the message back to the producers on what they could do to mitigate risks for food safety or on how to get the message out to the people working in a processing plant that HACCP controls are important and needed to be followed. The agricultural engineers wanted to work with the microbiologists to develop ways of identifying signals of contamination of meat at the store level.
So when you have an important question like that, people will come together. Again with academia and the extension programs and things like that, part of our role is to get that information back out to the appropriate groups.
So how do we do it? I think I mentioned chairs, for example. We're in the process of forming a chair on food safety. When you have somebody of knowledge and stature in an area who can work to be the person who brings all of those groups together, it can be very effective.