This paper looks at how we can achieve greater food and nutrition security in a sustainable manner by reducing waste and it also analyses how losses impact overall food system efficiency.  It quantifies the food wasted throughout the food chain (10 stages) from primary production to human food consumption and also looks at the impact of livestock production on both food system biomass efficiency and feed crop losses. The paper defines wasted food energy of livestock production in terms of its poor efficiency in feed conversion ratios (ie. only some of the feed livestock consume end up as meat and dairy, with the rest loss via respiration, dung and urine).   

In this Nature commentary Jess Davies from Lancaster Environment Centre discusses the urgent need to deal with the degradation of our soils, focusing on the need for the private sector to take this sustainability threat seriously by taking action on soil. Today one-third of all soils and more than half of agricultural soils are moderately or highly degraded.

This report from the International Food Policy Research Institute IFPRI provides a comprehensive overview of major food policy developments and events. Leading researchers, policy makers, and practitioners review what happened in food policy, and why, in 2016 and look forward to 2017. This year’s report has a special focus on the challenges and opportunities created by rapid urbanization, especially in low- and middle-income countries, for food security and nutrition.

A new study submitted to us by an FCRN member discusses the virtual land footprint associated with regional supply capacities.

The Food Ethics Council has published the ‘food issues census 2017’, which provides an assessment of the activities and capacities of civil society organisations (CSOs) working on food and farming in the UK.

This report from the UK free market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs claims that healthy food is actually cheaper than ‘junk food’. In drawing this conclusion the IEA also states that taxes on unhealthy foods (consumed as they say disproportionately by people with low incomes) is unlikely to be enough to change consumer behaviour and will be regressive - it will hit poorer people the hardest. 

Utilizing a model derived from literature on environmental justice overlaid with multiple scales of agriculture, Environmental Justice and Farm Labor provides key insights about laborers in agriculture in the United States. It addresses three main topics: (1) justice-related issues facing farmers and laborers on farms; (2) how history and policy have impacted them; and (3) the opportunities and leverage points for change in improving justice outcomes.

In a blog-piece for The Conversation, Duane Mellor (Associate Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Canberra) and Cathy Knight-Agarwal (Clinical Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Canberra) argue that it is time to rethink the purpose of dietary guidelines both in terms of content and how people adopt (or ignore) their messages.

This Nature Plants paper by researchers from agroecological and agronomical research institutions in France used a statistical modelling approach to predict the effects of reducing pesticide use on the productivity and profitability of French arable farms.