This paper asks the question “Can agriculture be sustainable?”  It argues that, if we want to take a different path, we will have to make the choice to do so. It emphasises that we need to be clear that we have choices - options that need to be debated rather than subsumed in a dialogue of crisis and food shortages. The paper outlines some of these options in order to pursue a more sustainable pathway.

This is a new book on the concept of sustainable intensification in the context of smallholder agriculture.

Barbara Hendricks, Germany’s environment minister, has recently announced that her ministry will no longer be serving meat, fish or meat-derived products at official functions citing environmental concerns and a desire to serve as a “role model” on environmental and sustainability issues.

In a recent public survey commissioned by the Global Food Security (GFS) programme, many British adults say they recognise that the food system is a key contributor to climate change and that they would change their diets to avoid negative future climate impacts.

Concerns about the links between trade and investment agreements and the spread of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) have seen increasing scholarly attention in the past years. Reviewing 44 low- and middle-income countries over 13 years, this paper aims to provide a generalizable analysis of how trade and investment liberalisation has affected the growth in sales of SSBs, contributing to the evidence base on how international trade impacts health.

This paper argues that the strength of the linkages between the ‘Human System’ and the Earth system warrants a new paradigm of modeling which incorporates key factors in one system as variables of a model of the other.

A Perspectives piece in Science discusses some recent studies focusing on the increasing abundance of available nitrogen on Earth.

This study of large land acquisitions in developing countries published by the International Land Coalition (ILC) finds more evidence of harm than benefits.  More than 40 organisations collaborated on the Global Commercial Pressures on Land Research Project, which synthesised 27 case studies, thematic studies and regional overviews. The report also includes the latest data from the ongoing Land Matrix project to monitor large-scale land transactions, and covers a full decade of land deals from 2000-2010. Those deals amount to more than 200 million hectares of land – or eight times the size of the United Kingdom.

This is an interesting article about a farmer’s attempt to improve the sustainability of the farm by basing production on a dual purpose dairy/beef breed, based on grass-feeding, high welfare and zero waste.