Food and agriculture policy | TableDebates

Cover of the SLU-TABLE publication "Exploring the future of meat" (2024)

Exploring the future of meat: Navigating complex topics for better decision making

This report draws on insights gleaned from putting together the project "The future of meat – storytelling and dialogues for improved decision making" from 2021-2023, integrating lessons from expert interviews, podcast production, and facilitated workshops.

Front cover of report titled: Certified Exploitation: How Equitable Food Initiative and Fair Trade USA fail to protect farmworkers in the Mexican Produce industry. Image contains a man in a red hoodie standing in a strawberry field.

Certified Exploitation: how equitable food initiative and fair trade USA fail to protect farmworkers in the Mexican produce industry

This report from the Corporate Accountability Lab explores how American fair trade organisations protect the image of corporations more than the rights of their workers by analysing case studies on horticultural farms in Mexico.

A green valley in the UK with green trees and agricultural lands with a road running through the middle.

Land matters: why we need better land use decision making

Georgie Barber of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission puts forward the case for Land Use Frameworks as a vital tool for meeting climate, nature, food and health challenges, and considers the features that determine their success.

Cover for Reaping the Rewards: Cultivating a fair transition for farming, a report by IPPR

Reaping the rewards: Cultivating a fair transition for farming

This report from the Institute for Public Policy Research sets out nine key principles for the UK to address the climate crisis, improve food security and restore nature in a way that is just and fair to farmers, farm workers and communities. The researchers convened several community panels and grounded their report in the lived experience of farming communities.

45 actions to orient food systems towards environmental sustainability: co-benefits and trade-offs

45 actions for environmental sustainability in food systems

This Research Brief from the Centre for Food Policy, aimed primarily at policymakers, lists 45 actions that have a direct pathway to impact across five environmental sustainability dimensions (greenhouse gas emissions, chemical pollution, freshwater resources, biodiversity and soil health). It groups the actions into five domains: land use in agriculture; the environmental impacts of agriculture; wild fishery and aquaculture sustainability; food loss and waste; and dietary change.

Three women sit at a market stall selling fruit in La Paz, Bolivia. Image credits: Lesly Derksen, Unsplash, Unsplash Licence.

Journal articles

Explaining a failed food sovereignty policy in Bolivia

This paper studies how a top-down (i.e. state-led) food sovereignty policy in Bolivia was negatively impacted by the “corporate food regime”. Food sovereignty was included as a central element of Bolivia’s new constitution in 2009, and regulations were introduced to prioritise food from small-scale farmers in school feeding programmes.

Supply Chain Synergies – What is the appropriate role of supply chains in achieving responsible production at farm level?

Achieving fair, resilient food supply chains in the UK

This report from Forum for the Future, based on a series of interviews as well as desk research, identifies barriers to food supply chain transformation in the UK as well as options for voluntary action and policy to support change.

Multifunctional landscapes: Informing a long-term vision for managing the UK’s land

Multifunctional landscapes

This report from The Royal Society sets out a “multifunctional” approach to land use (with a focus on the UK) - i.e. an approach that considers how land can produce not only goods with a market value (such as food) but also a wide range of products and services that for the most part do not have a market value (e.g. biodiversity provision, carbon sequestration and flood alleviation).

https://ecdpm.org/work/investing-sustainable-food-systems-methodology-and-lessons-learned-africa

Investing in sustainable food systems in Africa

This briefing note by think tank ECDPM sets out a five-step methodology, developed by ECDPM and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), for stimulating investments in sustainable food systems by strengthening collaboration between public and private actors. It also outlines lessons learned from the application of the methodology in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya and Niger.