A large proportion of supermarket food is thrown away every day regardless of quality, to avoid legal liability if a customer complains. In France, the government has now taken a firm step to incentivise food donation by removing the liability from the supermarkets. By barring stores from spoiling and throwing away food the government aims to tackle waste alongside food poverty. The measure follows a decision from February 2015 to remove the best-before dates on fresh foods and it is part of a wider drive to halve the amount of food waste in France by 2025. The bill will also ban supermarkets from deliberately spoiling unsold food so it cannot be eaten and the law will also introduce an education programme about food waste in schools and businesses.

In this publication FAO highlights the latest statistics on global food insecurity. The latest available estimates indicate that about 795 million people in the world – just over one in nine – were undernourished in 2014–16. In relative terms, the share of undernourished people in the population, or the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU), has decreased from 18.6 percent in 1990–92 to 10.9 percent in 2014–16, reflecting fewer undernourished people in a growing global population.

Compassion In World Farming (CIWF) has produced a new report, Feeding the Planet: Building on the Milan Charter, released to coincide with the Expo Milan 2015 which is organised around the theme: Feeding The Planet, Energy for Life. The Milan Charter – produced by Italy - highlights the need to produce healthy, safe and sufficient food for everyone, while respecting the planet and its equilibrium. 

This is a new report commissioned by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food in collaboration with the Meridian Institute for use by Global Alliance members.  The Global Alliance is a coalition of foundations that have come together to help shift food and agriculture systems towards greater sustainability, security, and equity.  In this report they aim to provide a high level assessment and overview of the philanthropic donor landscape in relation to sustainable food and agriculture systems. The report represents a synthesis of several parallel and complementary efforts:

This report was produced by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, IPES-Food -a new transdisciplinary initiative to support, inform and advise the policy debate on how to reform food systems across the world.

This report is produced as follow-on work to the Green Food Project, which focused on sustainable consumption and production. The Green Food Project report in July 2012 concluded that follow-on work was required to enable a broader and more sophisticated debate around the roles that diet and consumption play in the sustainability of the whole food system.

This new paper in Marine Policy suggests that eco-label improvements can be made by integrating the carbon footprints of products in sustainability assessments (eco-labels, sustainability certification, or consumer seafood sustainability guides).

This literature review, undertaken by the Food Climate Research Network and Chatham House, and in association with EAT who also kindly supported the work, considers what the evidence has to say about effective ways of shifting people’s consumption patterns in more sustainable and healthy directions.

This article from Nature Climate Change discusses a research project that investigates the impacts of both traditional and transitioning Indian diets on the climate. Funded by Wellcome Trust, the goal is to obtain a detailed picture of what people are eating throughout India and calculate both the climate and health impacts of different types of diets.