Articles

Food systems rely on plastics, but a top-level understanding of their effects on environmental, food security and human health remains poorly explored. The systematic scoping review presented here describes the research landscape from 2000 onwards, finding many publications on agricultural production, but gaps in our knowledge on low-income regions and outcomes for human health.

Demand for animal products in East Africa is projected to rise, but climate change-induced temperature increases will negatively impact livestock production. This modelling study quantifies the potential frequency and length of dangerous heat-stress events for the six main livestock types, identifies the regions that will be most affected and highlights the types of livestock that will be most at risk.

Fast and simultaneous identification of multiple viable pathogens on food is critical to public health. By integrating paper chromogenic arrays (PCAs) and machine learning, a system was developed to automatically recognize PCA patterns on multiplexed viable pathogens with strain-level specificity.

In South Africa, GM white maize has been grown for direct human consumption, whereas GM yellow and conventional hybrid maize have been cultivated primarily for livestock feed. Across 106 locations, 28 years, 491 cultivars, and 49,335 dryland and 9,617 irrigated observations in South Africa, GM maize showed increased mean yields over conventional hybrid maize, and GM white maize showed higher increased yields than GM yellow maize.

Assessing the effects of cover crops on soil health under real-world conditions requires a comprehensive dataset. A farmer-led trial on 1,522 strip-years from 78 farms across 9 US states over 5 years reveals improvements in key soil indicators, with active carbon concentration responding the most rapidly.

Starch bioaccessibility is limited by an intact cell wall. Type 1 and type 2 cell walls, exemplified by chickpea and durum wheat, confer variable dimensions of cell integrity, digestion kinetics and starch bioaccessibility to unprocessed and processed foods. Tissue fracture properties and cell wall permeability emerge here as mechanisms by which dietary fibre affects starch bioaccessibility.

Sudan faces population growth to 80 million people, rising temperatures and trebling in demand for wheat by 2050. Crop modelling under climate and socioeconomic scenarios indicates the regional rates of yield growth that must be achieved by breeding heat-tolerant varieties to adapt wheat production to climate change and increased demand.

System-level analysis on the effects of soil biodiversity on cropping system is lacking. Across conventionally managed European fields, the proportion of time with crop cover during the past ten-year rotation has a greater impact than crop diversity on soil microbial diversity, soil multifunctionality and crop yield.

Understanding the propagation or attenuation of environmental variability and shocks along food supply chains is key to food security. This scoping review identifies entry points for variability, the main factors for variability diffusion, research gaps in terms of food items and types of shock studied, and risk reduction responses at individual, company and governmental levels.

Chinese vegetable production accounts for 1.7% of the global harvest area of crops but uses 7.8% of the chemical fertilizer and produces 6.6% of the crop-sourced greenhouse gas emissions of the global agricultural sector. An innovative management programme offers opportunities for producing more vegetables with lower environmental impacts.

The European Union relies on imports of soybean for protein-rich animal feeds. Scenarios of animal-source food supply in the EU under constraints relating to soybean production and imports for animal feed are assessed for effect on land use and human diets in the EU.

Increasing pressure on the world’s water resources raises serious concerns about future food security. This global, spatially explicit assessment of water consumption reveals where and by how much sustainable blue water flows are infringed. The study covers 146 food items for 174 countries over 1996–2005.

Disentangling the impacts of anti-deforestation interventions from other conservation efforts remains a challenge. An econometric analysis of remotely sensed data reveals the efficacy of the Soy Moratorium in the Brazilian Arc of Deforestation and the extent to which its success relies on complementary policies.

Chromosome-scale, phased Vanilla planifolia genome sequencing shows variants that may impact the vanillin pathway and, therefore, bean quality. Resequencing related vanilla species could benefit vanilla productivity and reduce post-harvest losses.

Oil uptake during deep-frying of potato crisps can be modified by the presence of short amylose chains. The choice of cultivar and processing conditions that enhance levels of short amylose chains may facilitate the production of reduced-calorie crisps.

Global geospatial datasets and a regression discontinuity design enable the country-level effects, such as agricultural policies, on crop yields and nitrogen pollution to be quantified. The influences of countries were much larger on nitrogen pollution than on crop yields.

Fruit and vegetable supply in the United Kingdom has increasingly been characterized by reduced domestic production of fruit and vegetables and increased reliance on imports from climate-vulnerable countries. With increasing climate change, this may impact availability, price and consumption of fruit and vegetables in the UK, with health consequences, particularly for older people and low-income households.

Understanding major sources of uncertainty in yield change facilitates adaptation strategies for cropping systems. Using eight crop models, 32 global climate models and two climate downscaling methods, it is shown that their relative contribution to uncertainty in climate–crop modelling depends on location.

A key climate change adaptation goal in agriculture is to reduce drought sensitivity of crop yields. A comparison of two empirical strategies applied to US maize for detecting changes in drought sensitivity reveals the advantages of utilizing within-country spatial variability in drought exposure, driven primarily by differences in soil water-storage capacity.

Seeds, flour and food products derived from two near-identical pea genotypes (BC1/19RR and BC1/19rr) were utilized in a series of in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo studies to explore the contribution of starch structure, food matrix and intestinal environment to postprandial glycaemia.