HALF A TONNE of meat, six tonnes of vegetables, 300 litres of coffee, 120 metres of sandwiches and more than 50 luxury limousines, most of them Audis, BMWs and Mercedes.
These few figures give some idea of the scale of the organisation required to make this year's International Students' Committee Symposium a success - one entirely down to students at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland.
Not that the most important ingredient of this now world-famous annual meeting of students and decision-makers from the worlds of politics, religion, academia and business is quantitative. Rather, it is qualitative: the priority is quality of debate, participants, organisation and outcome.
This year's ISC Symposium, which concluded last weekend, was the 34th since a group of five international students at St Gallen came up with an idea in 1969 of how to promote dialogue between the generations following the student protests in Europe in 1967 and 1968, with the first conference taking place in 1970. They considered dialogue and rational compromise preferable to confrontation and threat.
Developing that liberal humanist approach, this year's theme was 'The Challenges to Growth and Prosperity', but not dryly focused on business and economics. Speaker after speaker pointed out in keynote addresses and special sessions that we live in an increasingly interdependent world, where global divisions and formerly easy distinctions between academic disciplines are becoming questionable or even unsustainable, and the conference reflected that. Growth and prosperity are about lives and people's aspirations, as moderator Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach reminded the conference in an opening address.
'How do we pursue global economic growth in a world of enormous poverty and inequality? More than 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day. More than 50 countries grew poorer over the last decade. Each week 800 million people go hungry. More than 30,000 children die from preventable illnesses every year. It is totally unacceptable,' he said.
