The International Trade Center’s (ITC) Trade and Environment Unit has recently released a training manual aimed at addressing climate change in the tea sector. With climate change already having an impact on both the quality and quantity of tea the manual sets out to help tea farmers and factories lower their emissions and reduce energy costs. One of the reasons for the focus on factories is that exporters are increasingly subject to requirements set by buyers and retailers to measure and reduce carbon emissions.

This research argues that we need to implement a food waste hierarchy approach to preventing and managing food surplus and waste. It argues that a distinction between food surplus and waste is crucial as is the distinction between avoidable and unavoidable waste. Its main message is that food waste can be prevented by adopting a sustainable production and consumption approach and by tackling food surplus and waste throughout the global food supply chain.

Science's special issue on rethinking the global supply chain examines how traceability, measurement, and standardization might tame the unwieldy web that is our global supply chains.

China’s agricultural system, environment and food supply is under great pressure from an increasing population, an intensive use of agro-chemicals and extensive food safety problems.

Two reports by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation on malnutrition and on food waste. 

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 EU brief looks at a recent study assessing the social environmental impacts of agricultural imports to EU from other, often less developed countries. The EU has thus picked up on an important study assessing Europen diets' contribution to excessive land-use in countries outside of the European Union. FCRN has previously highlighted this study (Balancing virtual land imports by a shift in the diet. Using a land balance approach to assess the sustainability of food consumption).