This open-access book reflects on how seeds are governed, seeking to move beyond simple descriptions of competing seed system types as traditional or modern, subsistence or commercial, or local or global. It focuses on case studies from Japan.

This book discusses how the governance of British agriculture will be affected by the UK’s exit from the European Union. It looks at profitability, farmers’ rights, environmental protection and animal welfare.

The Commission on Sustainable Agriculture Intensification has published two policy briefs: the first seeks to understand the agricultural innovation investment landscape - how much is being invested, by whom, and in what; while the second looks at the approaches and instruments used in successful cases of scaling up agricultural innovations.

This report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reviews the evidence on climate change’s impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity and people. It finds that there is a greater than 50% chance that global warming will reach or exceed 1.5°C (above the 1850-1900 baseline) in the near term, even under very low emissions scenarios, and that human-induced climate change has already caused “widespread adverse impacts” for nature and for people.

This study finds that vegetarians, fish-eaters and people who eat low levels of meat (five or fewer times a week) have a lower risk of all cancers than people who eat regular levels of meat (more than five times a week): 14% lower for vegetarians, 10% lower for fish-eaters, and 2% lower for low meat-eaters. The authors stress that some of the difference may be due to confounding factors such as smoking, alcohol consumption and physical activity. The study is based in the UK and had 472,377 participants.

This paper reviews the evidence on interventions that can increase or decrease consumption of animal-source foods. It finds that providing information on the environmental impacts of meat can reduce consumption, as can - to a more limited extent - providing information on health and animal welfare impacts, emphasising social norms such as trends towards plant-based eating, and reducing meat portion sizes.

This paper outlines the systemic risks of using artificial intelligence (AI), specifically machine learning (ML) models, in agriculture and proposes ways of mitigating those risks. The three categories of risk considered are: risks related to data; risks related to the narrow optimisation of ML models; and risks linked to deploying ML models at scale.

This paper analyses the annual reports and websites of 12 leading food and beverage companies and finds that a number of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled methods are being used to “nudge” consumer behaviour or choices, for example by changing the position of options on menu boards, automatically suggesting additional products based on a customer’s current choices, or using virtual-reality-based marketing.

This paper considers how people could be fed in the event of a sudden reduction in sunlight - for example, caused by a volcanic eruption, an asteroid strike, or nuclear war. These triggers could cause global agricultural output to collapse through abrupt falls in light, temperature and precipitation. The paper identifies foods that could still be produced under these conditions, and assesses their potential contributions to nutrition.