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.

This short blog by Michael Hallsworth from the UK’s Behavioural Insight Team, discusses the early impacts of the upcoming soft drinks levy by the UK government. This levy aims to reduce sugar intakes from drinks.

With milk prices in the USA dropping due in part to a fall in demand from Chinese middle class customers, large stockpiles of cheese now lie waiting.

This report by the African Centre for Biodiversity argues that the Farm Input Subsidy Programmes (FISPs) have not achieved their intended goals in a number of African countries where they have been implemented. In its highly critical analysis the report argues that they consume large parts of agricultural and even national budgets and are largely ineffective social transfer schemes that create dependency.

This report by Compassion in World Farming highlights the so-called “negative externalities” associated with livestock-based food production – that is, costs to human health and the environment that are borne by society as a whole and which are not accounted for by the cost of producing the food or the price of consuming it.

In this blog post for Global Food Security, former FAO agricultural economist Andrew MacMillan says the doctrine that food prices should be kept as low as possible to end hunger is wrong.

Food taxes & subsidies are effective at improving diets, according to a systematic review carried out by Australian researchers and published in the journal Nutrition Reviews. The systematic review analyses evidence from research published between January 2009 and March 2012 looking at the effectiveness of food taxes and subsidies on consumption. Included in the review were only papers assessing a specific food tax and those which directly and prospectively observed consumer responses to a fiscal policy intervention.