What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Big Data and development: Upsides, downsides and a lot of questions, Duncan Green, Oxfam

Cash Crops With Dividends: Financiers Transforming Strawberries Into Securities, The New York Times

Video: ‘Journey of a gene’ illustrates science of genetic engineering for consumers, Genetic Literacy Project

Why NGOs can’t be trusted on GMOs, The Guardian

The Guardian, Marc Gunther and some NGOs can’t be trusted on GMOs, Political Concern

International Food Security Assessment, 2014-24, USDA

On Trial: Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa, Chatham House

Could businesses do for aid what Amazon did for retail?, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Missing Food, APPG on Agriculture and Food for Development

The Potential Impacts of Mandatory Labeling for Genetically Engineered Food in the United States, CAST

‘Peak soil’ threatens future global food security, Reuters

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

NIAB leads taskforce on new sustainable intensification guidelines, Farming Online

Are we measuring the right things? The latest multidimensional poverty index is launched today – what do you think?, Duncan Green, Oxfam

Study: Deforestation leaves fish undersized and underfed, BBC News

GMO 2.0: genetically modified foods with added health benefits, The Guardian

EU Nations Back Flexibility on Biotech-Crop Cultivation, Bloomberg

Countries recognize vital role of small-scale fishers, FAO

How Do We Feed The Next One Billion People?, Forbes

The hungry and forgotten, The Economist

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Weight of the world: 2.1 billion people obese or overweight, Reuters

Despite all the highs and lows around the world, our number one challenge is how to feed humanity with nutritious food!, African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development

Food, health and sustainability: we become what we eat, and so does Earth, The Guardian

12 Data visualizations that illustrate poverty’s biggest challenges, ONE

The Science of Inequality. What the numbers tell us, Science

3,000 rice genome sequences made publicly available on World Hunger Day, EurekAlert

UPDATE 2-EU member states back compromise to allow GM crops-diplomats, Reuters

EU biofuel targets need 70m ha of land, says report, Farmers Weekly

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Highlight: the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association (NASFAM) in Malawi, PAEPARD

FAO launches new standards for plant genebanks, FAO

Africa and India cultivate agricultural research ties, SciDev.Net

Who will pay for ecosystem services?, IIED

It’s not the ‘skipping’ three who should be questioned, it’s the wasteful supermarkets, The Independent

Pesticides halve bees’ pollen gathering ability, research shows, The Guardian

Natural Gas and Albacore: What Tuna Says About the Future of Mozambique, New Security Beat

Press Briefing of H.E. Mrs. Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture, PAEPARD

Fertilizer nutrient imbalance to limit food production in Africa, IIASA

Genetic weapon against insects raises hope and fear in farming, New York Times

Sustainable Food Systems

Food demand is expected to rise by 70% to 2050. Urbanisation and increasing incomes per capita are shifting diets to those more demanding of meat and other animal products, which has serious implications for the use of natural resources to produce food. Today around 1 in 8 people are malnourished and 870 million people chronically hungry, indicating our current food systems cannot meet present demand let alone future. Modifying the world’s food production systems to produce more food and perhaps distribute it more evenly, is made harder by a growing recognition of the negative impacts agriculture can have on the environment. Conversion of land to agriculture is the biggest threat to biodiversity. Agriculture places large demands on scarce natural resources, the overuse of which not only threatens the wider global environment and human wellbeing, but the very processes agriculture relies on e.g. pest control, pollination and rainfall.

A new report by the European Commission’s Science for Environment Policy, entitled Sustainable Food: A Recipe for Food Security and Environmental Protection, lays out the changes we need to make to our entire food system and the urgency with which we need to make them.

The report begins with a summary of the pressures on food production and the drivers of food demand namely: population growth; natural resource scarcity including land, biodiversity, water, climate change, and biofuels; changing dietary patterns and; rising food prices.

The report then turns to some of the solutions and pathways to making food systems more sustainable, advocating action around the following areas:

• Minimising food waste
• Rethinking land management and agricultural practices:
  • Using agroecological principles such as building soil organic matter, which the EU claim can reduce negative impacts and at the same time increase yields, although evidence of this potential win-win is scarce
  • Conservation agriculture and land sparing versus land sharing
  • Replenishing water supplies through, for example, no-till agriculture
  • Ensuring the long-term sustainability of fish stocks through expanding aquaculture
  • Reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change
  • Increasing the efficiency of agriculture through the application of science and technology
  • Understanding consumption patterns in a bid to contain the demand for the most resource-intensive types of food
  • Investing in smallholder farmers to help them increase their productivity and integration with global markets

Of course knowing that we need to undertake many of these actions is relatively easy. Understanding how to take action is hard and the report acknowledges that considerable policy and knowledge gaps exist, for example, what future per capita consumption levels will be, the benefits or impacts of different agricultural practices and ways of integrating multiple objectives in policy making.

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Milestone Claimed in Creating Fuel From Waste, The New York Times

Harvesting the Biosphere – book review, The Gates Notes

Should we embrace GM food? – five-minute video debate, The Guardian

Conservation agriculture puts Zimbabwean farmers on firmer footing, Thomson Reuters Foundation

In Uganda, better nutrition through school gardens, The Christian Science Monitor

Attacking the Hunger Epidemic — And Winning , Huffington Post

Women as a Force for Change, The New York Times

Iowa View: Increasingly, feeding a growing world needs more focus on science, technology, Des Moines Register

Scientists help African farmers battle pests in warming climate, Thomson Reuters Foundation

World’s 1st lab-grown burger cooked and eaten, CBC News

Indigenous Peoples and the Diversity of Food, Landscapes Blog for People, Food and Nature

What Does the Future Hold for Genetically Modified Cotton?, TriplePundit

ICRAF Studies Local Knowledge in Ethiopian Farming Systems, IISD