On Thursday June 25, 2015, Professor Ovidiu Folcuţ, Rector of the Romanian-American University (RAU) received a visit from Professor Bernd Hallier, President of European Retail Academy (Germany) accompanied on this visit by his daughter Marie-Christin Hallier. Recently, the two special guests of the Romanian-American University delivered a presentation on the topic of ““Mental Health aspects: Art Therapy and Alternative Medicine” at the innovative scientific event “WPA 2015 Bucharest International Congress on Primary Care Mental Health: Innovation and Transdisciplinarity” (24-27 June, 2015), which took place at the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest.
The agenda of the productive meeting included significant items of discussion, such as: the international transfer of know-how between business and universities, bringing more transparency on retail-research and retail-education; the actual need of anticipating skill needs in the commerce sector, taking into account the attention to be paid to the evaluation of philosophies offered by the steady upgrade of retail-technologies; the developing cooperation between Germany and Eastern markets. Within this context, Professor Bernd Hallier introduced the challenging volume “Food Waste Management” (based on an EU-project FORWARD), the reduction of food waste being seen as an important lever for achieving global food security, freeing up finite resources for other uses, diminishing environmental risks and avoiding financial losses (not forgetting to suggest from the very beginning the distinction between “food loss” and “food waste”). It was underlined, for example, that: there are substantial losses along the stages of the food chain (agricultural production, post-harvest handling and storage, processing and packaging, distribution, and consumption); the reduction of food losses is seen as an important starting point for achieving global food security, freeing up finite resources for other uses, diminishing environmental risks and avoiding financial losses. You can see below a photo (posted recently, on June 15, 2015, on the Web site of the European Retail Academy) of Professor Bernd Hallier and J.G. da Silva, Director General FAO, at the Astana Economic Forum.
It is worth remembering that Professor Bernd Hallier, a distinguished Member of the Editorial Board of „Holistic Marketing Management” Journal of the RAU’s Management-Marketing School, has participated, at the end of May and beginning of June 2011, to a series of Round Tables and Public Lectures (The intertwine of Culture and Trade; Introduction of the European Retail Academy; Branding: the successful example of EuroShop; Evolution Tornado Retail; the Global House of Harmony; Lifelong-Learning; Environmental Retail Management). It is also worth mentioning that Professor Bernd Hallier began many years ago a fruitful collaboration with the prestigious Professor Klaus Toepfer (former Federal German Minister for Environment, former director of the United Nations Environment Program UNEP and initiator of the Kyoto Protocol), and with Dr. Angela Merkel (today Chancellor of the Federal Republic, and who pushed “environment” to become a high political issue during the EU-Presidency of Germany, in 2007).
