The Danish government has officially ended its tax on saturated fat just a year after it was introduced, and has cancelled a proposed sugar tax.

New duties on foods known to be unhealthy should be part of a package of public health policies to tackle overweight and obesity and other diet-related diseases, according to the National Heart Forum (NHF).

The Politics of Land and Food Scarcity, by Paolo De Castro, Felice Adinolfi, Fabian Capitanio, Salvatore Di Falco, and Angelo Di Mambro, provides an overview of the new global challenges connected with land, food supply, and agriculture. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has released a report entitled the Low Carbon Economy Index, which analyses the amount of carbon emitted per unit of GDP. It concludes that for a 50 % chance of limiting temperature rise to 2˚C, carbon intensity needs to fall by more than 5 % per year every year until 2050. 

This article, published in Global Change Biology, examines the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the EU27 livestock sector for the year 2007 utilizing a life cycle assessment, which examines every step and input during the creation of a product to calculate total GHG emissions. They also examined the GHG emissions from livestock production, consumption of imported livestock products and wastage.

FCRN member Dr. Adrian Muller co-authored a meta-analysis published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The authors looked at datasets from 74 studies from pairwise comparisons of organic vs. nonorganic farming systems to identify differences in soil organic carbon (SOC). 

The UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) recently released a statement saying that by the end of 2015 all palm oil used in central Government food and catering services will come from environmentally friendly sources. However, Defra’s statement has come under fire from groups such as WWF-UK and the British Retail Consortium (BRC), who say the agreement is too weak and requires participation by other sectors to have a substantial impact.

In One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World?, Gordon Conway explains the many interrelated issues critical to our global food supply from the science of agricultural advances to the politics of food security. He emphasises the essential combination of increased food production, environmental stability, and poverty reduction necessary to end endemic hunger on our planet.

A paper in Nature Climate Change finds that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising temperatures cause rice agriculture to release more of the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4) for each kilogram of rice it produces.