This new 712 page book in 28 chapters is edited by Rajeev Bhat. It addresses a very wide range of topics on agriculture, food and sustainability.

In international trade agreements, restrictions on goods or demands for labelling which differ from country to country can be ‘barriers to trade’, effectively restricting the free movement of goods. Trade organisations which manage such agreements, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), have mechanisms in place to ensure that environmental or public health measures are not in fact ‘disguised restrictions on international trade’ which aim to protect national industries. Formal processes exist in the WTO to query public health and environment regulations for their ‘trade restrictiveness’, their necessity and the possibility of using alternatives.

This special issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology takes a closer look at how consumption is increasingly met by global supply chains that often involve large geographical distances.

This study aims to assess the effect of five dietary scenarios – designed to promote healthier and more sustainable eating – on the blue water scarcity footprint of UK food consumption. The objectives are to estimate the total blue water consumed in producing food commodities consumed in the UK; the contribution, and geographical concentration, to global blue water scarcity; and the potential impact of alternative healthy eating scenarios on global blue water scarcity.

In this report commissioned by Center for Global Development, researchers at Chalmers University, Linköping University and Vienna University describe how international trade with agricultural and wood products is an increasingly important driver of tropical deforestation. More than a third of recent deforestation can be tied to production of beef, soy, palm oil and timber.

In this blog post for Global Food Security, former FAO agricultural economist Andrew MacMillan says the doctrine that food prices should be kept as low as possible to end hunger is wrong.

This report from Centre for Agricultural Strategy at the university of Reading discusses the use of soya in UK livestock feeds. It describes how UK livestock production has become increasingly intensive over the last 20 years with a declining number of livestock farms rearing fewer, more productive animals, which require more nutrient dense feeds, containing a higher proportion of high quality protein. As UK agriculture has been unable to meet all of the demand from for vegetable protein, imported soya bean meal has largely filled the gap.

This twentieth edition of the Agricultural Outlook, and the tenth prepared jointly between OECD and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), provides market projections to 2023 for major agricultural commodities, biofuels and fish across 41 countries and 12 regions: OECD member countries (European Union as a region), key non-OECD agricultural producers (such as India, China, Brazil, Russian Federation and Argentina) and groups of smaller non-OECD economies in a more aggregated form. This edition includes a special focus on India.

This study published by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in the journal Environmental Research Letters analyses the water footprint of agricultural production and consumption in Europe. It looks at the net virtual water import of 365 European river basins for the period between 1996-2005 based on two diet scenarios – a healthy diet based upon food-based dietary guidelines and a vegetarian diet.