The European Environment Agency has published a report on food systems approaches for the seafood industry in Europe, with the explicit aim of making ‘a first contribution to the collective endeavour of rethinking Europe's food system for sustainability goals’.

According to the latest joint OECD-FAO report Food Outlook which analyses global food markets, the coming decade will likely see an end to a period of high agricultural prices, although prices are expected to rise for livestock relative to those for crops.

This article reports that a new fish and animal feedstock product which uses methane gas may be released into the European feedstock markets from the beginning of 2018. The product, FeedKind, is currently in pre-production phase and it is described that the manufacturing process is very similar to the way in which Marmite and other yeast-extract sandwich spreads are produced.

The launch of the new vegetarian alternative to the meatballs – grönsaksbullar - is what Ikea calls “the first step to include a wider variety of healthier and more sustainable food choices”.

Ten years after the first Year Book in this series appeared, a special e-book anniversary edition – UNEP Year Book 2014 – presents a fresh look at ten issues highlighted over the past decade.

In our mailing of 1st July 2014 we highlighted a new paper by Pete Scarborough et al. which compared the GHG intensity of diets adopted by vegetarians, fish eaters and meat eaters in the UK. The Oxford Martin School has now published a short interview with Pete, in which he outlines his motivation for undertaking this work, the method he adopted, and the insights gained from the study. Citation Scarborough, P., "Q&A: Should We All Become Vegans to save the Planet?" Interview by Sally Stewart. Web log post. ThinkLONG. Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, 08 July 2014. Read the full interview blog-post here. We have also highlighted Peter Scarborough’s paper in an earlier newsletter, see it and our ‘further reading’ recommendations here. 

This twentieth edition of the Agricultural Outlook, and the tenth prepared jointly between OECD and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), provides market projections to 2023 for major agricultural commodities, biofuels and fish across 41 countries and 12 regions: OECD member countries (European Union as a region), key non-OECD agricultural producers (such as India, China, Brazil, Russian Federation and Argentina) and groups of smaller non-OECD economies in a more aggregated form. This edition includes a special focus on India.

This study is one of the very few that examines the GHG impacts of a selection of real life ‘self selected’ diets as opposed to those that are modelled or hypothetical.  It looks specifically at the dietary patterns (based on a standard 2,000 kcal diet) of UK vegetarians, semi-vegetarians and non-vegetarians.  Approximately 55,500 subjects were chosen for the study, all part of the EPIC-Oxford cohort study.