This short article discusses policies for achieving food security and environmental objectives in China. Rural development has been placed at the top of the policy agenda in China but recently the Chinese leadership has also included an ambition to achieve environmental sustainability. This is presented as part of the plans for an “ecological civilization”, presented at the 18th Plenary Congress of the Communist Party of China.

This paper focuses on the governance of food supplies and specifically discusses the increasing policy focus on engaging food industry in the international pursuit of sustainability. The researchers also look at policy actions aimed at achieving sustainable consumption and production of food.

Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) reports that the Australian beef industry has reduced its environmental footprint over the past 30 years. The results are presented in a new paper in Agricultural Systems, and in a press-release MLA writes that:

In a new video published by the Royal Society in their 'Science stories' series (which charts 350 years of scientific publishing at the Royal Society) Dr Paul Williams, a meteorologist in NERC's National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, considers why it is that scientific questions so often turn into full-blown and acrimonious controversies.

This paper discusses urban farmers’ markets in relation to food accessibility, the type and variety of foods they offer and their price and quality. This US based study is the first to itemize farmers’ market products in an entire urban county—in this case the Bronx—and compare them with what is available in nearby stores. It finds that farmers’ markets located in urban areas may not contribute positively to nutrition or health.

This paper argues that high-performance computing and genetic engineering that boost the photosynthetic efficiency of plants offers the best hope of increasing crop yields enough to feed a growing world population by 2050. It points out that we now have unprecedented computational resources that allow us to model every stage of photosynthesis and we can thus determine where the bottlenecks are. Advances in genetic engineering enable us to augment or circumvent steps that impede efficiency.

This study argues that government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings. It looks at three models used by U.S. and European agencies, and finds that all three estimate that some of the crops diverted from food to biofuels are not replaced by planting crops elsewhere. About 20 to 50 percent of the net calories diverted to make ethanol are not replaced through the planting of additional crops.

A number of major US NGOs, research institutions and academics have come together to support the recommendations of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC). An open letter, signed by more than one hundred individuals and institutions has been published in major daily newspapers urging Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to adopt the DGAC’s scientific recommendations on sustainability.

The World Health Organisation has called on countries to reduced sugar intakes among their child and adult populations.  It recommends that people should obtain no more than 10% of their daily calories from free sugars, and cutting intakes to below 5% would provide additional benefits.