Planetary health is a new approach that broadens health research to include the health of human civilisations and the natural (external) systems on which they depend. In a new journal, alongside The Lancet Public Health and The Lancet Global Health, The Lancet Planetary Health will explore the links between planetary and human health and how we can protect the environment on which we depend and develop sustainable systems that support human health. 

This blog-post/commentary on food policy and Brexit is written by Terry Marsden, Director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute and Kevin Morgan, Professor of Government and Development, both at Cardiff University.

The Food Ethics Council has published the ‘food issues census 2017’, which provides an assessment of the activities and capacities of civil society organisations (CSOs) working on food and farming in the UK.

Concerns about the links between trade and investment agreements and the spread of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) have seen increasing scholarly attention in the past years. Reviewing 44 low- and middle-income countries over 13 years, this paper aims to provide a generalizable analysis of how trade and investment liberalisation has affected the growth in sales of SSBs, contributing to the evidence base on how international trade impacts health.

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.

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. 

As Britain is preparing for the task of disentangling its laws from those of the European Union, a first light has been shown on potential future agricultural policies after Brexit. Andrea Leadsom, the new Conservative environment secretary, has stated that many EU laws and regulation in this area will be scrapped, allowing for a ‘Year Zero’ approach to regulation of the agricultural sector after Brexit.

On 24th of October 2016, Professor Tim Lang gave a ‘Food Thinkers’ lecture on the potential consequences of Brexit on the food system. It discussed: