This report by the Science-Policy Partnership Network synthesizes current scientific information to help oil palm policy makers make land-use decisions which jointly meet biodiversity and carbon conservation agendas. The Science-Policy Partnership Network is led by University of York and was set up by the ‘Socially and Environmentally Sustainable Oil palm Research’ (SEnSOR) project with funding from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), and includes representatives from oil palm growers, consumer goods companies, NGOs, government and the RSPO.

A set of papers from the First International Conference on Global Food Security is now available online. The conference attracted 600 participants from 65 countries. All of the papers in the special issue are open access for the first year and available here.

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.

This blog discusses the June Business Forum meeting organised by the Food Ethics Council which saw businesses and NGOs coming together to consider how industry and government discusses issues of food consumption and choice now, and how this might need to change.

Chocolate company Mars has decided to join Unilever and Nestlé in their commitments to a sustainable palm oil sector. Mars signed up to the Roundtable on Sustianble Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2010 but now they join other companies in taking a step further, requiring all of their suppliers to have fully sustainable and traceable palm oil supply by the end of 2015. If this is not possible they will ensure that such plans are at least put into place by the end of 2015.

This paper, recently published in Global Environmental Change, addresses the issue of ‘Enhancing the sustainability of commodity supply chains in tropical forest and agricultural landscapes’. It portrays some of the many interventions through which state, civil society and market actors can influence commodity supply chains, and provides a framework for comparing, planning and evaluating different interventions.