The European Public Health Alliance points to five areas where food, drink and agriculture policies in Europe are expected to develop in the coming year.

In this paper, the researchers evaluated the legal and administrative feasibility of enacting a US federal junk food tax to improve diets.

The Financial Times explores several emerging trends in the global food industry, including eating insects, new retail models in China, sugar taxes, food waste monitoring and genetically modified crops and animals.

This report from the UK free market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs claims that healthy food is actually cheaper than ‘junk food’. In drawing this conclusion the IEA also states that taxes on unhealthy foods (consumed as they say disproportionately by people with low incomes) is unlikely to be enough to change consumer behaviour and will be regressive - it will hit poorer people the hardest. 

In this paper, a coupled agriculture and health modelling framework is used to estimate the mitigation potential and global health impacts from emissions pricing of food commodities. The analysis suggests that levying an appropriately designed GHG tax on food would be a health-promoting climate change mitigation policy in all high-income, middle income and most low-income countries. It is suggested that sparing healthy foods from taxation, selectively compensating for income losses from the tax, and channelling the subsequent revenues to health promotion could avert potential negative health impacts on vulnerable groups.

This short blog by Michael Hallsworth from the UK’s Behavioural Insight Team, discusses the early impacts of the upcoming soft drinks levy by the UK government. This levy aims to reduce sugar intakes from drinks.

Recent research has shown that some foods have a considerably higher emissions-footprints than do others and that changes in average dietary consumption patterns towards lower-emissions foods, has potential as a climate change mitigation measure.

A new strategy has been launched by the UK government to tackle overweight and obesity among children. The strategy highlights a reaffirmed commitment to the sugary drinks tax (the only measure in the strategy which is not based on voluntary action) and it emphasises the importance of sports and school breakfast clubs.