This book introduces the human right to adequate food and nutrition as an evolving concept and identifies two structural "disconnects" fueling food insecurity for a billion people, and disproportionally affecting women, children, and rural food producers: the separation of women’s rights from their right to adequate food and nutrition, and the fragmented attention to food as commodity and the medicalization of nutritional health.

This policy research working paper by the world-bank has revisited numbers on women’s contribution to agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Its findings have challenged the development profession to revisit a number of claims about African economies, including those about the role of women in African agriculture.

This paper addresses cultural barriers to achieving sustainability and health objectives. Previous research has suggested that meat eating and masculinity are closely associated in many people’s minds; this paper looks at whether there are differences between ethnic groups in how this association is perceived. The three ethnic groups it looks at are the native Dutch, Chinese-Dutch and the Turkish-Dutch. The paper argues that less traditional framings of masculinity seem to contribute to more healthy/sustainable food preferences with respect to meat.  Based on a survey of attitudes it finds that the Turkish-Dutch community are more traditional than the Chinese-Dutch and the native Dutch communities; and that the strongest meat–masculinity link was found among the Turkish men while the weakest meat–masculinity link was found among the native Dutch.

This EU brief looks at a recent study assessing the social environmental impacts of agricultural imports to EU from other, often less developed countries. The EU has thus picked up on an important study assessing Europen diets' contribution to excessive land-use in countries outside of the European Union. FCRN has previously highlighted this study (Balancing virtual land imports by a shift in the diet. Using a land balance approach to assess the sustainability of food consumption).

This working paper from the World Resources Institute (WRI) prepared for the forthcoming World Resources Report discusses how the increased demand for food in the future should be met and the various overlapping crises that are impacting the planet's capacity to produce food.  It warns of an imminent global food crises unless changes are made in global industrial agriculture. 

An interesting paper confirming what intuition might suggest – that men’s diets have a higher GHG burden than women’s because, (even allowing for the fact that men generally need to eat more) they tend to eat more meat; women’s diets are more water demanding due to their greater consumption of fruit and vegetables (the study looks at irrigation water rather than overall water).