Broadening influence on the food supply and environmental sustainability

Blockchain: a framework for membership and access

The rapid expansion of hybrid maize in the uplands of northern Laos is viewed by the government as meeting policy aims related to green economic development. Yet, growing evidence of negative consequences of maize expansion are emerging. Based on farmers’ perceptions, we study: (1) farmers’ reasons for adopting and abandoning maize, and; (2) implications of commercial maize expansion on local livelihood security and inclusiveness (food supply, income, risk coping, and ability to join maize growing), and environmental sustainability (productivity, and soil and forest quality) over time (2013 and 2016). Results show that maize has advantages in terms of labour allocation, and it provides much-needed cash income. Yet, swidden is the main food provider and an essential safety net for unforeseen risks (including maize crop failures or price fluctuations). The way that maize was produced did not meet the criteria of green economic development due to its negative effects on the environment (soil and forest degradation) and socioeconomic sustainability (household differentiation, increased economic risks, debts, and food insecurity). By providing a local perspective, this study encourages a critical reflection of the underlying assumptions and conceptualization of the green economy approach in Laos, and argues for policies and measures that consider a more holistic perspective of human wellbeing and the environment.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing agriculture and environmental sustainability worldwide. As global demand for food and sustainable practices grows, AI is paving the way for smarter farming and more efficient environmental management. Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture and Environmental Sustainability: A Global Perspective delves into how AI is driving these changes, offering critical insights from both theory and practice. In this edited collection, authors explore the multifaceted impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) across various sectors, with a particular focus on agriculture and environmental sustainability. The work begins by examining the economic implications of AI in agriculture, addressing both the challenges and future directions for farming. It delves into smart crop recommendation systems and the transformative potential of AI on Asia’s food supply. The discussion then broadens to analyze AI’s role in economic growth and financial inclusion in the context of the environment. Authors investigate the relationship between environmental pollution and the integration of AI in sustainable practices. Finally, the work considers the socio-economic and environmental consequences of AI, offering a critical analysis of disruptive digital technologies. This work is essential reading for academics, policymakers, and industry professionals. It offers critical insights into how AI is revolutionizing agriculture and environmental sustainability, making it a valuable resource for anyone looking to understand and leverage AI’s transformative potential.

Nutrition has always straddled sectors, health and agriculture being the obvious two. The environment sector is a logical and important partner sector for nutrition, although not often recognized as such. Informally and incidentally, nutritionists have included environment sector issues in their research and practice. For example, food composition databases occasionally turn up nutrient data on food biodiversity (1). Food-based dietary guidelines sometime include a recommendation to decrease environmental footprints by eating locally, the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid being one such example (2). Other activities are more specific. For example, Total Diet Studies, which analyze environmental contaminants in the food supply, are conducted periodically in many countries (3). Recent formalized manifestations include the cross-cutting initiative on biodiversity for food and nutrition (4), sustainable diets (5), and sustainable consumption and production (6). As new as it all seems, reference and inferences linking nutrition and environmental sustainability can be found going back millennia in the writings and teachings of doctors and philosophers. If we look back nearly a century and a half we find one of the earliest university-level nutrition programs, developed by Ellen Swallow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late nineteenth century. A nutrition pioneer, Swallow called her subject Human Ecology. Fundamental to this course was the principle that human health and environmental health were linked, with food and nutrition being the key connecting forces (7). Modern iterations of Human Ecology often do not include nutrition, unfortunately. The era of industrial agriculture emerged in the twentieth century and environmental sustainability was uncoupled from human health. Nutrition became a clinical subject, nutrients became medicine. Meanwhile, food and agriculture became focused on dietary energy production, protein, and little else (8). In the mid-1980s, there were some efforts to bring environmental sustainability back into the nutrition domain with the work of Gussow and Clancy on dietary guidelines for sustainability (9), but it took another 20+ years, and a host of actual and looming perils for this to take root in mainstream nutrition thinking (10). The agriculture sector holds much of the blame for environment problems. Industrial agriculture, intensifying production of high-yield starchy staple through monoculture agriculture, leading to significant loss of food biodiversity; excessive use of agricultural chemicals to extract more dietary energy from every hectare while contaminating the very food it produces, along with groundwater and the soil; the greenhouse gas emissions from livestock industries to feed the ever-increasing demand for meat and dairy products. Global gatherings, from the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, raise alarms which are too often specific to the environment sector and ignored by agriculture. And global gatherings from the World Food Summit to the World Health Assembly raise alarms about dietary patterns, undernutrition, obesity and micronutrient malnutrition, which are too often specific only to health and fail to embrace the environmental implications. Occasionally the sectors come together to explore their common issues, e.g., the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture addressing key issues in nutrition (11). Here and elsewhere, it is acknowledged that multi-sectoral solutions are required in order to avert collateral damage in one sector caused by policies and programs in another. With the world’s population predicted to reach 9 billion by 2015, “sustainable production intensification” is one of the catch-cries. But how should it be defined and put into practice? One pragmatic suggestion is to approach it through a nutrition lens and define sustainable production intensification as, “nutrition-driven agriculture within planetary boundaries” (12). Policies and actions at all levels require more and better intersectoral research to simultaneously address nutrition and environmental sustainability. Mistakes of the past need to be corrected, present day problems need solutions, and the future urgently needs protection. This is truly a frontier in nutrition.

The aim of this research is to investigate the role of smallholder farming in tackling food security and sustainability related challenges in the developed world. In this regard, the relevant literature is discussed and a System Dynamics modelling framework that captures self-sufficiency of cereals produced in the United Kingdom, as an indicator of national food security, is developed. The simulation results from a scenario analysis indicate that appropriate governance and effective policy-making interventions, supporting smallholding farming and short food supply chains in the developed world, provide promising grounds towards ensuring food security and social cohesion, while further promoting economic growth and environmental sustainability. Finally, this research is an initial approach towards the development of food security early warning systems and decision support tools that could be employed by policy-makers and regulators to design effective interventions for the sustainable development of food supply systems.

Benefits and challenges of food processing in the context of food systems, value chains and sustainable development goals

Aflatoxins are toxic secondary metabolites produced by Aspergillus fungus. Continuous monitoring of aflatoxins in the entire food chain, from the field to milk and milk products is very important, as it grows readily in favourable condition. It causes major economic losses and adversely affects the animal and human health including infants and children. Public should be aware towards ill effects of aflatoxin. In all countries, there should be regulation of AFM 1 in milk and its products to protect consumers specially children. This toxin cannot be inactivated by thermal processing used in dairy industry. HACCP is considered as an effective method for control of aflatoxins in food supply. Feed given to cattle should be free from aflatoxin. Many environmentally sustainable pre or post-harvest methods like proper irrigation, genetically resistant crop strains and bio-pesticide management can be applied to reduce the contamination of aflatoxins in food chain.

Global food systems must be a part of strategies for greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, optimal water use, and nitrogen pollution reduction. Insights from research in these areas can inform policies to build sustainable food systems yet limited work has been done to build understanding around whether or not sustainability efforts compete with supply chain resilience. This study explores the interplay between food supply resilience and environmental impacts in US cities, within the context of global food systems’ contributions to GHG emissions, water use, and nitrogen pollution. Utilizing county-level agricultural data, we assess the water use, GHG emissions, and nitrogen losses of urban food systems across the US, and juxtapose these against food supply resilience, represented by supply chain diversity. Our results highlight that supply chain resilience and sustainability can simultaneously exist and are not necessarily in competition with each other. We also found a significant per capita footprint in the environmental domains across Southern cities, specifically those along the Gulf Coast and southern Great Plains. Food supply chain resilience scores ranged from 0.18 to 0.69, with lower scores in the southwest and Great Plains, while northeastern and Midwestern regions demonstrated higher resilience. We found several cities with high supply chain resilience and moderate or low environmental impacts as well as areas with high impacts and low resilience. This study provides insights into potential trade-offs and opportunities for creating sustainable urban food systems in the US, underscoring the need for strategies that consider both resilience and environmental implications.

Human population growth rates determine future population and cities sizes. By gathering together people and production, cities also concentrate the demand for fresh water and other natural resources, food included. In addition, because the urban sprawl has destroyed agricultural land, it is necessary to move some of the production from rural to urban areas. This means that it is necessary to re-think our cities, our productive cities. In this dissertation are explored major strategies for contributing to the challenge of feeding people in urban areas. Particular emphasis is placed on local low-input cultivation systems. The environmental profile of different food supply chains, based on different ‘food miles’, was assessed. ‘Food miles’, first coined in ‘90s, measure the distance that food travels from where it is grown or raised to where it is consumed. The selected methodology to assess the environmental impact was the life cycle assessment (LCA). The impact category chosen was the global warming potential (GWP), through midpoint methods, the IPCC 2013 100a. It contains the climate change factors of IPCC in a time-frame of 100 years; it is expressed in Kg CO2 eq. Nevertheless it was also used to evaluate the urban garden’s climate mitigation using ENVI-met software and the predicted mean vote indicator. Here, it was confirmed the important value of gardens and horticultural activities in urban contexts. That, because there is an environmental improvement and the generation of ecosystem services.

CAP Measures Towards Environmental Sustainability: Trade Opportunities for Africa?

Dietitians as change agents for promoting healthy and sustainable food systems

Environmental sustainability has become increasingly important in recent years, not only in social discourse but also in the healthcare sector. The healthcare sector in Germany contributes significantly to total CO2 emissions, accounting for over 5%, and consumes roughly the same amount of resources. Areas that are particularly relevant to urology, such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and instrument logistics, are among the most intensive consumers of resources, alongside construction measures, the operation of clinics and practices, and food supply. In light of this, the German Society of Urology (DGU) has recognized the urgency of the situation and developed asustainability strategy that includes all sectors of the field and aims to provide concrete perspectives for the responsible use of existing resources.

Agriculture is the leading sector that is responsible for global climate change through its significant contribution to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Intriguingly, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is experiencing higher temperatures and lesser rainfall due to climate change enhanced by anthropogenic GHG emissions. Agriculture and energy use in the SSA predominantly influence the anthropogenic GHG leading to global warming. Therefore, reducing agricultural GHG emissions (such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane) plays a significant role in climate change adaptation. This paper reviews the potential implication of agriculture and energy use on climate change and its implications on environmental sustainability in SSA. Herewith, we explored various GHGs emitted through agriculture-energy use, their effects on climate change, as well as several climate change adaptation mechanisms, and gaps in existing knowledge that necessitate more research, were also explored. We found that agriculture had negative implications on climate change impacts in the SSA countries and that a more focused strategy that is both economically and technically feasible in terms of preferences for land use, effective energy use, and food supply would aid in GHG emission reduction and environmental sustainability. Adapting to the projected changes in the short term while investing in long-term mitigation strategies might be the only way toward a sustainable environment in this region.

Business as usual or transformative change? While the global agro-industrial food system is credited with increasing food production, availability and accessibility, it is also credited with giving birth to 'new' challenges such as malnutrition, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation. We reviewed the potential of underutilized indigenous and traditional crops to bring about a transformative change to South Africa's food system. South Africa has a dichotomous food system, characterized by a distinct, dominant agro-industrial, and, alternative, informal food system. This dichotomous food system has inadvertently undermined the development of smallholder producers. While the dominant agro-industrial food system has led to improvements in food supply, it has also resulted in significant trade-offs with agro-biodiversity, dietary diversity, environmental sustainability, and socio-economic stability, especially amongst the rural poor. This challenges South Africa's ability to deliver on sustainable and healthy food systems under environmental change. The review proposes a transdisciplinary approach to mainstreaming underutilized indigenous and traditional crops into the food system, which offers real opportunities for developing a sustainable and healthy food system, while, at the same time, achieving societal goals such as employment creation, wellbeing, and environmental sustainability. This process can be initiated by researchers translating existing evidence for informing policy-makers. Similarly, policy-makers need to acknowledge the divergence in the existing policies, and bring about policy convergence in pursuit of a food system which includes smallholder famers, and where underutilized indigenous and traditional crops are mainstreamed into the South African food system.

Improving the environmental sustainability of the food supply chain will help to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This environmental sustainability is related to different SDGs, but mainly to SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 12 (Responsible Production and Consumption), SDG 13 (Climate Action), and SDG 15 (Life on Land). The strategies and measures used to improve this aspect of the food supply chain must remain in balance with other sustainability aspects (economic and social). In this framework, the interactions and possible conflicts between food supply chain safety and sustainability need to be assessed. Although priority must be given to safety aspects, food safety policies should be calibrated in order to avoid unnecessary deleterious effects on the environment. In the present review, a number of potential tensions and/or disagreements between the microbial safety and environmental sustainability of the fresh produce supply chain are identified and discussed. The addressed issues are spread throughout the food supply chain, from primary production to the end-of-life of the products, and also include the handling and processing industry, retailers, and consumers. Interactions of fresh produce microbial safety with topics such as food waste, supply chain structure, climate change, and use of resources have been covered. Finally, approaches and strategies that will prove useful to solve or mitigate the potential contradictions between fresh produce safety and sustainability are described and discussed. Upon analyzing the interplay between microbial safety and the environmental sustainability of the fresh produce supply chain, it becomes clear that decisions that are taken to ensure fresh produce safety must consider the possible effects on environmental, economic, and social sustainability aspects. To manage these interactions, a global approach considering the interconnections between human activities, animals, and the environment will be required.