This new article published in Solutions, whose authorship includes several FCRN members, briefly outlines current food system issues. The work is based on discussions in the session ‘Sustainable nutrient management in the Anthropocene’ at the IARU Sustainability Science Congress 2014.

In this Nature Comment article, Elena Bennett of the McGill School of Environment and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, Québec, argues against the underlying premise of the ‘land-sparing’ vs ‘land-sharing’ debate that has dominated the agriculture-environment discourse for decades, and advocates a new and more holistic approach that focuses on maximising human well-being.

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.

The FCRN’s Tara Garnett gave a short presentation at an event held in November by the Sustainable Food Trust. The question posed was ‘Do livestock hold the key to a healthy planet and population?’ 

Tara Garnett (FCRN) and Sue Dibb (Eating Better) spoke on BBC World Service’s Inquiry programme about food consumption in relation to climate change.

This report, entitled ‘What’s at Steak? The Real Cost of Meat’ published by the Global Forest Coalition in December 2016, emphasises the negative impact of industrial livestock production on forests, using five detailed case studies, in Bolivia, Brazil, India, Paraguay, and Russia. In South America, for example, the report states that 71% of deforestation in the region has been driven by demand for livestock products.

This paper by FCRN member Corné van Dooren and colleagues reports that higher greenhouse gas emissions tend to be generated in the production of energy dense foods and lower in nutrient dense foods, and that emissions show significant correlations with 15 nutrients, including saturated fat, animal protein and sodium. Using these finding, the authors propose a ‘Sustainable Nutrient Rich Foods’ (SNRF) index, which summarises both climate and nutritional impacts of individual foods.

In this evidence review, co-written by FCRN member Ken Giller, the authors assess the extent to which agronomic fortification, the application of micronutrient fertiliser to crops, can improve the nutritional quality of diets in sub-Saharan Africa. They find that, while the technique has been shown to be effective in increasing the nutritional content and yield of crops, more research is required to establish the degree to which it can alleviate micronutrient deficiencies in humans.

This paper describes the operation of a bubble-insulated greenhouse system that recycles organic waste, through its anaerobic conversion into biogas and digestate, into inputs for new food. It reports that commercial crop yields were repeatedly matched and bettered, while an 80% reduction in heat energy demand and 95% reduction in CO2eq emissions was realised compared to conventional greenhouse production.