A new study submitted to us by an FCRN member, highlights a final report from a four year, multi-disciplinary research project conducted by the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (located in Richmond, BC, Canada).

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. 

A newly revised edition of Tim Jackson’s important 2009 Prosperity without Growth has been published by Routledge. In it, Jackson aims to demonstrate that building a ‘post-growth’ economy is a precise, definable and meaningful task.

This World Economic Forum report explores four alternate visions of the world and its food systems in 2030. The key predictable forces of change are used as a base and the critical uncertainties of ‘Demand Shift’ and ‘Market Connectivity’ are used as axes to derive the four scenarios. 

According to the latest joint OECD-FAO report Food Outlook which analyses global food markets, the coming decade will likely see an end to a period of high agricultural prices, although prices are expected to rise for livestock relative to those for crops.

This report by a partnership comprising the International Trade Centre, the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture and the International Institute for Sustainable Development summarises the recent market trends and growth in voluntary sustainability standards (VSS), for nine commodities.

This FAO brief on food waste discusses the carbon footprint of global food waste and so called embedded emissions in avoidable food waste. In order to measure the avoidable emissions it is necessary to know how much of what kind of food is wasted and where.

This discussion paper entitled The Triangle: The Evolution and Future of Industrial Animal Agriculture in the U.S., China, and Brazil provides an analysis of the modern livestock industry and of so called factory farming. The paper focuses on the connections between the three most important countries in today´s meat and feed industries: the United States, China, and Brazil. The underlying emphasis of the paper is that as living standards improve in emerging economies, rising consumption of animal products is one of the factors fuelling the expansion of Western-style, large-scale, intensive animal farming and feed crop monoculture.

This International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) report looks into the dilemma facing developing countries and emerging economies in deciding whether they should favour local over global food chains. Using case studies from Senegal and Peru this paper shows a new and complex reality that challenges ideological views about re-localising food production and consumption. It analyses national policies and food chain practices of increasingly globalised markets, and shows that in both countries local food chains are complementary rather than an alternative to imported food.