A new FAO-led partnership is looking to improve how the environmental impacts of the livestock industry are measured and assessed. FAO and governmental, private-sector, and nongovernmental partners will work together on a number of fronts to strengthen the science of environmental benchmarking of livestock supply chains.

The Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI) has produced the first complete world atlas of resource use - "Green economies around the world? Implications of resource use for development and the environment".

The Bioenergy Strategy commits the UK Government to further work to investigate the merits of temporarily flexing or otherwise relaxing biofuels mandates at times of agricultural price pressures. The current paper presents work by Defra analysts to explore some of the potential implications of this idea.   

FCRN mailing list member Kurt Schmidinger has recently been awarded his thesis on the following subject: "Worldwide Alternatives to Animal Derived Foods – Overview and Evaluation Models", subtitle "Solutions to Global Problems caused by Livestock".

The latest OECD-FAO Agricultural outlook report has been published. It finds that while international agricultural commodity markets appear to have entered calmer conditions after record highs last year, food commodity prices are anticipated to remain on a higher plateau over the next decade, underpinned by firm demand but a slowing growth in global production.

This is taken from CCAF’S latest e-newsletter.  CCAFS is the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, a partnership between the Consultative Group on International Agricultural CGIAR and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP).

The journal, PloS Medicine has published its latest issue which focuses on ‘big food’ – a series of 7 articles that examine the activities and influence of the food and beverage industry on health.

Defra’s Green Food Project has published its report. This project was tasked to consider how production and consumption could change in the future, and whether/how it was possible to reconcile the goals of increasing production and improving the environment.