Economics, business, and trade | TableDebates

EU trade policy report cover

EU trade policy for sustainable food systems

This briefing note from European think-tank ECDPM and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) provides recommendations on how the European Union can use trade policies and agreement to encourage its trading partners to adopt more sustainable food practices. It stresses the importance of consulting marginalised food systems actors and civil society.

Trade Unwrapped

News and resources

Trade Unwrapped: Discussions on food trade in the UK

The UK’s Food, Farming and Countryside Commission has launched a new website called Trade Unwrapped, which aims to host conversations about “decisions being made about the UK’s new trading relationships and the impact they’ll have on our everyday lives.”

The Broken Plate 2020

The Broken Plate 2020

This report from the UK charity the Food Foundation sets out ten metrics which could be used to gauge the health of the UK’s food system. Compared to 2019, the report finds improvement in the following metrics: wages in the food industry, products with too much sugar, and products with not enough vegetables. Deterioration has been seen in food prices (note that figures are only available until the first quarter of 2020 and thus do not capture the full impacts of COVID-19) and in places to buy healthy food.

Image: Tyler Lastovich, Herd of Cattle on Brown Grass Mountain Under White Sky, Pexels, Pexels Licence

Journal articles

Lower-meat diets allow greater US food system localisation

This paper examines how localised the US food system could become by calculating theoretical minimum foodshed sizes (i.e. average distance travelled by food) for 378 urban areas under seven different dietary scenarios. It finds that (on average) foodsheds can be smaller for the low-meat diets compared to high-meat diets.

A cargo ship sailing off into a sunset. Photo by Anastasios Antoniadis via Unsplash.

What will TTIP mean for food and climate?

In this piece, FCRN advisory board member Vicki Hird covers the contention of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Treaty, introducing the politics and potential of the major negotiation. Vicki (MSC FRES RSA) is a food, farming and environmental professional with 25 years’ experience in research, policy advocacy and campaigning with some great wins, some moderate successes, some useful failures, many reports and a book on food and farming policy. She started out studying slime mould ecology and agricultural pest control but got sidetracked…