The Politics of Land and Food Scarcity, by Paolo De Castro, Felice Adinolfi, Fabian Capitanio, Salvatore Di Falco, and Angelo Di Mambro, provides an overview of the new global challenges connected with land, food supply, and agriculture. 

This paper, published in Agriculture & Food Security, discusses the links between agriculture and climate change and considers how agriculture could contribute to global efforts to address both adaptation and mitigation. 

This is a very interesting take on rural food security from CGIAR guest bloggers, Matthew Fielding, Swedish International Agricultural Network Initiative and Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and Tom Gill, SEI. 

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) latest Agricultural Policy: Monitoring and Evaluation 2012 report revealed that government support fell to 19% of total farm receipts in 2011, with support to producers standing at just $252bn (€182bn). The recent decline in producer support was in many countries driven by developments on international markets, rather than by explicit policy changes. However, the report explains that there remain large differences in support levels among countries.

The Food Climate Research Network and the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food have jointly published a new report entitled: Sustainable intensification in agriculture. Navigating a course through competing food system priorities.

The Bioenergy Strategy commits the UK Government to further work to investigate the merits of temporarily flexing or otherwise relaxing biofuels mandates at times of agricultural price pressures. The current paper presents work by Defra analysts to explore some of the potential implications of this idea.   

Defra’s Green Food Project has published its report. This project was tasked to consider how production and consumption could change in the future, and whether/how it was possible to reconcile the goals of increasing production and improving the environment. 

The UK’s Environmental Audit Committee has published its report on Sustainable Food.  Its member MPs conclude that “Government must develop a joined-up strategy to change the UK's unhealthy and environmentally damaging food system, as fears mount about global food security.”

This report examines what part market governance mechanisms (regulatory, fiscal, voluntary and information-related) can or could play in addressing GHG emissions from the food system, focusing on the two extreme ends of the supply chain – the process of  agricultural production, and patterns of consumption.