This book explains how True Cost Accounting - i.e. the practice of tallying up all of the environmental and social costs and benefits associated with the production of a good or service - can be used to reform the food system.

The UK Government has published the final report of the Independent Review on the Economics of Biodiversity, led by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta of the University of Cambridge. The review sets out a new framework for how we should account for nature in economics and policy.

Table member Dominic Moran has written a letter to the editor of the journal Nature Food. In it, he argues that the debate on livestock production and consumption ought to be viewed through the lens of market failure (that is, a situation in which the incentives that influence individual behaviour lead to a suboptimal outcome for society at large) and externalities (costs or benefits produced by a transaction that affect people other than the buyer and seller). Moran concludes that assessing the extent of market failure in the livestock sector can help governments to decide to what extent to intervene.

According to this article from POLITICO, dairy farmers in West Africa are being undercut by exports of “fat-filled milk powder” from the European Union. This product is a blend of dairy whey left over from processes such as butter manufacture and vegetable fats such as palm oil. 

This report from US thinktank The Breakthrough Institute suggests federal policy pathways to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of dairy farming in the United States. It estimates the potential job creation and climate mitigation potential of each proposal and finds that, together, the policy proposals could save and create tens of thousands of jobs, while also reducing dairy sector greenhouse gas emissions by tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

This report from the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations reviews trends in food production and consumption, with a focus on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It finds that meat production is likely to contract in 2020 because of COVID-19, animal diseases and droughts, while seafood production has been affected by restaurant closures and restrictions on the operations of fishing fleets.

This book sets out an accessible framework for understanding the role of agriculture in sustainable development, focusing on agriculture as a complex system with many tradeoffs and synergies.

This article by Caroline Grunewald and Dan Blaustein-Rejto, both of of the US Breakthrough Institute think-tank, argues that the environmental movement fails to appreciate the environmental benefits that can result from free trade, by enabling producer countries with lower environmental impacts per unit of food to displace products from countries with higher environmental impacts.

This report from Dalhousie University and the University of Guelph tracks changes in food prices in Canada. It finds that prices in some food categories were impacted by environmental events, including an unexpected 5% increase in fish prices due to warming oceans. It also predicts that consumers will put strong pressure on food producers to avoid single-use plastic packaging, and that the Canadian food system is likely to be stressed by climate change, such as through  droughts, forest fires and heavy precipitation.