Contemporary agriculture is often criticized for its industrial scale, adverse effects on nutrition, rural employment and the environment, and its disconnectedness from nature and culture. Yet there are many examples of traditional smaller scale systems that have survived the test of time and provide more sustainable solutions while still maintaining food security in an era of climate change. This book provides a unique compilation of this forgotten agricultural heritage and is based on objective scientific evaluation and evidence of the value of these systems for present and future generations.

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.

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.

This report by the John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future presents itself as the ‘first international landscape assessment of industrial food animal production (IFAP) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to focus on trends in food animal production, related domestic and international policies, environmental and public health impacts and animal welfare.’

In ‘From Plate to Guide: What, why and how for the eatwell model’ Public Health England details how it moved from its 2014 Eatwell Plate to the 2016 Eatwell Guide.

This new book by Maurie J. Cohen examines how the system of mass consumption is changing; discusses popular trends such as the sharing economy, the Maker Movement, and economic localization; and describes the role that worker-consumer cooperatives could play in actively changing the current paradigm. 

The ‘2016 Food, Water, Energy and Climate Outlook’ by the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change finds that even if commitments from the  COP21 climate agreement are kept, many staple crops in various regions are still at risk of crop failures through extreme events, but at the same time, yields in many regions are projected to increase.

This paper makes an important methodological contribution to the highly disputed debate about whether the net effect of agricultural intensification on biodiversity is positive or negative. What is already known is that there is clear relationship between increased agricultural intensification and decreased biodiversity on the land that has been intensified.