This blog-post by Georgetown University professor Thomas Sherman discusses what he calls the “surprise feature” of considering sustainability in the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, suggested by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. In addition to the blog-post, Georgetown university’s Food Studies Group has published a series of videos on what the new dietary recommendations mean.

This new report from the Cocoa Barometer argues that a fundamental reform of the cacao sector is needed in order to tackle the challenges that cocoa farming is facing. The report states that current initiatives and programmes are not sufficient and that:

The journal Ambio has a special issue devoted to minimised phosphorus losses from agriculture. The papers cover topics such as: the need for stewardship to tackle global phosphorus inefficiency in Europe; past, present, and future use of phosphorus in Chinese agriculture and its influence on phosphorus losses; and modelling of critical source areas for erosion and phosphorus losses.

Researchers involved in this 18-month study examined the traditional agriculture of specific Liberian communities where farmers do not use industrial farming practices or artificial fertilisers.  The study found that sacred forests and ancestral lands were valued more than short-term economic gain through increasing food production.

This paper describes how deep public divisions over climate change are unrelated to differences in how well ordinary citizens understand scientific evidence on global warming. Contrary to what many believe, members of the public who score the highest on a climate-science literacy test are the most politically polarized on whether human activity is causing global temperatures to rise.

This is a special issue introduction, providing a brief overview of the CSES project (Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply (CSES)) to serve as an introduction for the papers that follow in this volume of Poultry Science. The full issue focuses on providing empirical information on the sustainability of commercial-scale egg production. 

This research from Duke University presents policymakers with a more accurate framework for estimating the costs of a broad range of health, climate and environmental damages linked to emissions from fossil fuels, industry, biomass burning and agriculture.

This study compared the impact that a 20 per cent sales tax and a 20 cents per litre excise tax on beverages such as carbonated non-diet soft drinks, cordials and fruit drinks would have on moderate and high consumers. It found that although high consumers of sugar-sweetened beverages have the least elastic demand, they drink so much that they are up against household budget limits, and therefore adding tax would bring down their consumption.

Volume 57.2 of Development - the quarterly journal of the Society for International Development - was produced in the lead-up to the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2). It explores the relationship between nutrition, food security and sustainable agriculture.