This is a useful and readable opinion piece highlighting some fundamental errors in thinking about biofuels.

In August 2012, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), responding to a request from the United Nations’ Committee on Food Security, asked experts from CGIAR’s 15 research centers to summarize the effects of climate change on 22 of the most important agricultural commodities and 3 critical natural resources in the developing world.

In One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World?, Gordon Conway explains the many interrelated issues critical to our global food supply from the science of agricultural advances to the politics of food security. He emphasises the essential combination of increased food production, environmental stability, and poverty reduction necessary to end endemic hunger on our planet.

A paper in Nature Climate Change finds that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising temperatures cause rice agriculture to release more of the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4) for each kilogram of rice it produces.

New duties on foods known to be unhealthy should be part of a package of public health policies to tackle overweight and obesity and other diet-related diseases, according to the National Heart Forum (NHF).

The DNA of Pseudocercospora fijiensis, the fungus that causes the black Sigatoka disease in bananas, has been sequenced and assembled in an attempt to find means of disease control. The black Sigatoka disease occurs across the tropics and is responsible for huge banana yield losses. In addition, it can cause the fruit to ripen prematurely, which stops exports of the crop. The Cavendish banana, the clonal type of bananas most consumers in the west eat is especially vulnerable to the black Sigatoka fungi.

Governments meeting in Bangkok have given a green light to the production of a new IPCC special report to assess the feasibility of achieving a 1.5˚C goal. The report is due to be completed on in 2018 and will also look at the likely impacts of a 1.5˚C temperature rise.