This policy brief, produced by the PBL – the Netherlands environmental assessment agency, investigates the integrated approach that would be needed to making the food chain more circular. In a circular food chain, raw materials are used in a way that adds the most value to the economy and causes the least harm to the environment.

This book is based on the papers that were presented and discussed at a workshop with the group “System Innovation towards Sustainable Agriculture” (SISA), an initiative by researchers from ‘Wageningen University & Research’ in the Netherlands (WUR) and the ‘Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique’ in France (INRA). 

This summary has been provided by FCRN member Alessandro Cerutti from the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC). Public administrations such as schools, hospitals and other sectors are well aware of the effort required to manage all the stages of the catering service, from menu selection through to waste management. Several strategies hold potential to reduce the environmental impacts throughout these stages, especially in the context of the Green Public Procurement (GPP). Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, budget constraints are constantly forcing managers to make difficult trade-offs.

This book, by Pamela Mason and Tim Lang, explores what is meant by sustainable diets and why and how this can be made the goal for policymakers as we enter the Anthropocene. We do recommend that you take a look at Tim Lang’s blog-post for the FCRN where he discusses the book’s findings and insights.

This report by the FAO aims to equip policymakers in ministries of agriculture and rural development, development partners and others with the tools they need to design nutrition-sensitive food and agriculture policies and programmes.

This paper in Biological Conservation argues that the role of pesticides in driving biodiversity loss deserves renewed emphasis, quantification and amelioration. The authors present their views on how conservationists should support integrated approaches, for sustainable agriculture and rural development planning, that simultaneously address food security, pesticide use and biodiversity conservation.

This blog-post/commentary on food policy and Brexit is written by Terry Marsden, Director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute and Kevin Morgan, Professor of Government and Development, both at Cardiff University.

This report authored by By Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at University of London was commissioned for Friends of the Earth. It outlines the current state of policy thinking on sustainable diets and reviews some national, international and local attempts to chart new policy directions to tackle growing evidence that food consumption has immense impact on environment, health, society and economy.

This research article presents a novel method for assessing public policy with regard to an urban food system and discusses a first application of the approach in Basel, Switzerland. We want to thank FCRN member Christian Schader from the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) for providing us with this summary of his and his colleagues research.