This book deals with three main food issues in Australia: equity and access to nutritious diets, food production and trade, and the relevance of land use planning for the long-term viability of food production,  articularly around major Australian cities.

What is public health? To some, it is about drains, water, food and housing, all requiring engineering and expert management. To others, it is the State using medicine or health education and tackling unhealthy lifestyles.  This book argues that public health thinking needs an overhaul, a return to and modernisation around ecological principles. 

The FAO has published its latest State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report.  It finds that 2010, people consumed about 128 million tonnes of fish. In the last five decades, world fish food supply has outpaced global population growth, and today fish provides more than 4.3 billion people with about 15 percent of their intake of animal protein. Estimates for 2010 point to fish consumption reaching another new high of 18.6 kg per person.

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.