This podcast by The Institute for Government, a UK think tank, explores how expert advice shapes decisions in government. It uses the COVID-19 pandemic as an example and also refers to other topics such as climate change.  

This report from charity Pesticide Action Network UK compares current UK pesticide regulations with those of the US and Australia - both countries are a priority for post-Brexit trade deals - as well as with those of India. It finds that food sold in the UK could soon be allowed to contain significantly higher levels of hazardous pesticides, if the UK agrees to weaken its pesticide standards during trade negotiations.

FCRN member Bálint Balázs of the Environmental Social Science Research Group, Budapest, Hungary has co-authored this paper, which argues that Eastern European food practices have been overlooked or their importance downgraded in much of the contemporary academic literature. The paper uses three examples to illustrate how evidence from Eastern Europe is often represented by deploying the terminology and concepts developed in West European food scholarship.

This report from the UK’s Food Ethics Council reviews the electoral manifestos of the Conservative, Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat parties in 2015 and 2019 to see how each party’s food policies have changed over time.

This report from UK food waste organisation Feedback makes a case for the end of industrial animal agriculture and calls for divestment from large livestock companies, arguing that the business model of “Big Livestock” is incompatible with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This report from US thinktank The Breakthrough Institute, co-authored by FCRN member Dan Blaustein-Rejto, outlines over $500 billion in potential federal spending that could lower emissions, be included in upcoming post-COVID stimulus investments and has already been vetted and earned bipartisan support in Congress. The brief proposes an agricultural research funding increase, research facility maintenance, and biomethane tax credits in addition to many proposals regarding energy innovation and infrastructure.

This report by Science Advice for Policy by European Academies sets out evidence on effective policies for sustainably transforming the European food system in an inclusive, just and timely way. It concludes that the complexity of food systems means that transformations rely on coordinated action between many actors, including different levels of governance.

This paper studies the relationship between food system drivers and sustainability for a sample of low-, middle- and high-income countries. The aim of the research is to provide a clearer understanding of what drives food system sustainability, in order to better target interventions and investments to transform the food system.

The European Commission has set out a European Green Deal, a plan to transform the European economy to net-zero emissions by 2050, and to decouple economic growth from resource use. The Green Deal will include a new “Farm to Fork” strategy (to be set out in full in the spring of 2020) to reward food producers for services such as storing carbon in the soil, improving water quality and reducing the use of pesticides, fertilisers and antibiotics.