Volume 2 Issue 4, April 2021

Emerging evidence indicates that the changes brought about by COVID-19 have raised the risk of unhealthy weight gain, food insecurity and undernutrition. Building back better nutrition demands a double-duty approach where actions to aid recovery synergistically reduce the risk of both obesity and undernutrition.

Agricultural insurance is a valuable strategy to cope with extreme weather risks. Improved satellite observation capabilities can be particularly helpful with droughts, but will not translate into better insurance unless key challenges are overcome.

Economists must embrace the food systems approach and emerging economies must engage in setting the global food systems agenda, argues Shenggen Fan.

Agriculture is the main contributor to global water scarcity but not all diets contribute equally. Modifying what, and how much, we eat could reduce the impact of our diets on global water resources.

Publicly funded technological innovations, strategic policy implementation and private sector upscaling have facilitated greater demand and lower costs for certain foods in the past. Can lessons be learned for transitioning towards healthy, sustainable diets?

A framework based on circular economy and business model canvas principles is used to explore pathways towards future seafood sector resilience, elucidating how seafood business models currently operate and highlighting business practices that could increase sustainability.

Crop microbiomes provide plants with beneficial functions including increased nutrient acquisition and stress tolerance, but the current capability of utilizing indigenous crop microbiomes is limited due to low efficiency of separating the targeted functional microbes. A newly proposed framework using single-cell-sorting Raman spectroscopy combined with a synthetic community approach has the potential to design and optimize a ‘beneficial biome’.

Different methods are currently used to quantify nitrogen use efficiency. The comparison of three such methods based on real-world experiments shows the impact of indicator choice on results, while highlighting the importance of long-term observations.

The effects of previous and contemporaneous consumption of animal-sourced foods on stunting in children under two years in Nepal, Uganda and Bangladesh are studied here, with implications for contextualizing the interpretation of sustainable, healthy diets.

Environmental impacts of water use affect the sustainability of food production. The impacts of water use associated with self-selected diets in the United States are estimated here based on the types and quantities of foods in the diet, the irrigation water required to produce those foods and the relative scarcity of water in the regions where that irrigation occurs. Food substitutions offer opportunities to reduce these water impacts.

Soybean and corn production in Brazil increased more than fourfold from 1980 to 2016, which was achieved by double cropping and cropland expansion. The contribution patterns of the two strategies were spatiotemporally specific, while double cropping shows increasing impacts over land expansion to the grain boom.

Increasing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture must be compensated by emissions reduction in other sectors if global emissions are to be capped. Using macroeconomic–climate modelling, this study quantifies such emission compensation efforts under different dietary choices.

Transition theory and the political economy of food regimes provide insights for transforming food systems. Recent historic case studies of scientific, technological, political and cultural innovations, including advances in tilapia farming and ultra-heat treatment of milk, provide lessons for future food system shifts.

Optimization models using locally adapted constraints and trade-offs demonstrate that adult populations in urban Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, could benefit from increased legume consumption, while children would gain from increased animal protein intake. This approach could inform policy and dietary recommendations in low- and middle-income countries.