This very interesting paper, co-authored by FCRN member Ken Giller, pays serious attention to the question of what a family farm actually is and the assumptions that people make about them. Taking as its starting point for exploration the FAO’s assertion that family farms are important as a means of eradicating poverty, providing food and achieving sustainable development, it explores the characteristics and patterns of family farming in countries as diverse as the United States, Netherlands, China, Brazil, Ethiopia and India.

This paper provides the first estimate of energy and material flows in the world’s 27 megacities (cities with over 10 million inhabitants). These megacities are home to 6.7 per cent of the world's population, but consume 9.3 per cent of global electricity and produce 12.6 per cent of global waste. The authors establish statistical relations for energy use, transport, water use, waste and so forth and factors such as average temperature, urban form, level and type of economic activity, and population growth.  This allows the researchers to evaluate which cities have high versus low levels of consumption and which ones make efficient use of resources.

Livestock, domestic animals raised for meat, dairy and eggs, is responsible for 14.5 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  Because of the scale of its contribution, mitigation of emissions from the livestock sector must be addressed in order to avoid an average global temperature rise of more than 2°C compared to pre-industrial times. 

In 2014, the FCRN released a major report entitled Appetite for change: social, economic and environmental transformations in China’s food system. This provided a detailed and integrative analysis of the dramatic changes in China’s food system over the last 35 years, explored emerging environmental, health, economic and cultural trends and challenges, and identified policy and research implications.  

Twenty three African and European research partners are involved in this new long term research and innovation partnership on the sustainable intensification of the agro-food system in Africa - PROIntensAfrica. The project is funded by the EU and its focus is on sustainably improving food and nutrition security and the livelihoods of African farmers.

In this blog-post Ademola Braimoh, Senior Natural Resources Management Specialist, at the World Bank, argues that quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production is a necessary step for climate-smart agriculture (CSA). He writes that greenhouse gas accounting can provide the numbers and data that are important for solid decision making.

This report is published by the Chicago Council for Global Affairs, an independent, nonpartisan organization committed to educating the public—and influencing the public discourse - on global issues of the day. In the report’s introduction they write: “In the effort to produce enough calories to sustain the global population, we have neglected the importance of nutrition. Food systems today simply are not structured to provide the most nutritious food possible to the greatest number of people. We need a new approach to address not just the quantity of food to be produced, but also its quality.”

This review paper published in the Journal of Integrative Agriculture discusses the future of artificial meat.  It suggests that the meat industry will not be able to respond to increases in demand while also finding solutions to livestock induced welfare, health and sustainability challenges, and they will face competition from emerging non­-traditional meat and protein products, ranging from plant based meat replacements and in the longer term artificial meat.

This paper addresses cultural barriers to achieving sustainability and health objectives. Previous research has suggested that meat eating and masculinity are closely associated in many people’s minds; this paper looks at whether there are differences between ethnic groups in how this association is perceived. The three ethnic groups it looks at are the native Dutch, Chinese-Dutch and the Turkish-Dutch. The paper argues that less traditional framings of masculinity seem to contribute to more healthy/sustainable food preferences with respect to meat.  Based on a survey of attitudes it finds that the Turkish-Dutch community are more traditional than the Chinese-Dutch and the native Dutch communities; and that the strongest meat–masculinity link was found among the Turkish men while the weakest meat–masculinity link was found among the native Dutch.