In a new briefing – “How TTIP undermines food safety and animal welfare”, Friends of the Earth Europe, Compassion in World Farming, IATP, Grain and the Center for Food Safety, says that TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) is likely to restrict efforts to build healthier, fairer and more sustainable food systems on both sides of the Atlantic.

A new CCAFS working paper, Climate-smart livestock sector development: the state of play in NAMA development, sheds light on key elements in the development of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) within the livestock sector.

In this commentary in Independent Science News researchers at University Pierre and Marie Curie/CNRS -National Center for Scientific Research in France discuss the concept of food sovereignty and whether or not it potentially provides a feasible and sustainable solution to feed the rural poor.

This blog-post by Georgetown University professor Thomas Sherman discusses what he calls the “surprise feature” of considering sustainability in the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, suggested by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. In addition to the blog-post, Georgetown university’s Food Studies Group has published a series of videos on what the new dietary recommendations mean.

Abstract This book By Nora McKeon fills a gap in the literature by setting food security in the context of evolving global food governance. Today’s food system generates hunger alongside of food waste, burgeoning health problems, massive greenhouse gas emissions. Applying food system analysis to review how the international community has addressed food issues since World War II, this book proceeds to explain how actors link up in corporate global food chains and in the local food systems that feed most of the world’s population.

This new report from the Cocoa Barometer argues that a fundamental reform of the cacao sector is needed in order to tackle the challenges that cocoa farming is facing. The report states that current initiatives and programmes are not sufficient and that:

WRAP - the UK’s Waste and Resources Action Programme has published a new report entitled 'Strategies to achieve economic and environmental gains by reducing food waste', which argues that reducing food waste worldwide can make a significant contribution to tackling climate change while also saving money. Wrap puts the total value of global consumer food waste at more than US$400 billion per year. The report says that globally as much as £194bn could be saved by reducing food waste by 2030.

The journal Ambio has a special issue devoted to minimised phosphorus losses from agriculture. The papers cover topics such as: the need for stewardship to tackle global phosphorus inefficiency in Europe; past, present, and future use of phosphorus in Chinese agriculture and its influence on phosphorus losses; and modelling of critical source areas for erosion and phosphorus losses.

Researchers involved in this 18-month study examined the traditional agriculture of specific Liberian communities where farmers do not use industrial farming practices or artificial fertilisers.  The study found that sacred forests and ancestral lands were valued more than short-term economic gain through increasing food production.