The latest EU agricultural outlook report has been released. It presents the medium-term outlook for the major EU agricultural commodity markets and agricultural income to 2030, based on a set of macroeconomic assumptions deemed most plausible at the time of the analysis.

Researcher at the University of Nottingham have developed a free Excel-based tool to reduce the use of antibiotics on dairy farms. It is hoped this will help combat antimicrobial resistance in the farming industry. The calculator gives measurements which graphically display to farmers their use of antibiotics and detects any patterns. The calculator also tells farmers how their antibiotic use compares to other farms.

In this brief communication paper published in the first volume of the new journal Nature Sustainability, researchers from the US and Belgium assess the impact of international trade on global food supply, at the level of individual nutrients, rather than total calories. Based on their hypothetical comparison of food supply in a world with and without trade, they argue that international food trade is essential for global food security.

At the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA) 2018, the director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) spoke about the need for lower emissions from the livestock industry. In addition to efficiency gains, Graziano da Silva suggested that governments target the demand side with policies that reduce meat and dairy consumption. He said that alternative sources of protein, such as fish and pulses, are available and should be used.

Swiss company Eaternity has developed a set of tools to aid restaurants and chefs to get insights into the supply-chain of the produce they use and improve their nutritional and environmental impacts. The tools include a series of health and sustainability indicators and labels and a menu design app.

This article in Food Navigator discusses a start-up company which produces dairy proteins, from sugar and genetically modified yeast. The resulting proteins can be used in a wide range of products to replace animal-produced dairy protein, such as in chocolate, ice cream, protein shakes and yoghurt.

This special edition of ‘Duurzaam Bedrijfsleven’ (in Dutch) is dedicated to food issues.

This article in the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) journal examines NGOs’ opposition to agricultural biotechnologies. It finds that opposition to genome editing cannot be dismissed as being solely emotional or dogmatic, as is often asserted by the scientific molecular biology community (see for example this 2016 letter by 107 Nobel Laureates calling NGO action against GM a "crime against humanity”). Instead, opposition to genome editing among research participants was rooted in three areas of scepticism around the framing of food security problems and the proposed solutions.

This book, edited by Bruce Frayne, Jonathan Crush and Cameron McCordic, argues that programmes aimed at reducing food poverty in Africa overemphasise small-scale farmers and ignore urban food security.