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25 Kids From Around The World Photographed With What They Eat In One Week | Bored Panda

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"Daily Bread grew out of another of my projects on consumption and waste called 7 Days of Garbage," Segal said. "I asked family, friends, neighbors and anyone else I could convince to save their garbage for one week and then lie down and be photographed in it. It's impossible to ignore the problem of consumption and waste when you're lying in it! To me, the most disturbing thing about the garbage I photographed was the packaging that comes with our food. We've grown totally dependent on the industries of eating and cooking and the result has been a massive increase in waste. I began to ask, "How have our diets and local foods been impacted by this revolution in the way food is produced and consumed?" It struck me that we don't give enough thought to what's in our food because we're not the ones making it! We've outsourced the most vital ingredient of life, the connective tissue of families and culture. I thought, "What if we keep a journal of everything we eat and drink for one week to bring our focus onto diet & take ownership of the foods we eat?"

In total, Segal worked with about 60 kids, 52 of whom he included in the book. "I began photographing my son and friends of his from school in my backyard in Altadena, CA. I broadened the piece to include kids from other neighborhoods in Los Angeles and then decided the documentary photography project would resonate more deeply with a global scope. I needed a producer in each country to find the kids. The goal was to represent a diversity of diets in each location. If the rate of obesity in a given country was 25%, I aimed to reflect this percentage in my small sample of kids."

The photographer said that one of the biggest challenges working with many of the kids was the language barrier. "In many cases, I had to rely on crew members to translate and interpret for me - and hope they were accurately conveying what I wanted them to." But there were more obstacles Gregg had to overcome, for example, finding the right mix of kids, an experienced crew, equipment and locations that met my needs. "I needed a studio space with access to a kitchen to prepare the food for kids and a ceiling height of at least 13 feet (the camera height needed to be a consistent 12+ feet above the subject). Organization was critical but sometimes lacking. Making sure that all of the kids kept thorough journals of everything they ate so that those meals could be accurately reproduced, for instance. Fortunately, I had competent producers in most countries. Sometimes, the equipment I had access to wasn't reliable, which was challenging because the lighting for the pictures needs to be consistent, of course. Another major hurdle was money; this was a very expensive project to produce and generating the funds wasn't easy. Much of the funding came out of my pocket. I could have really used a benefactor or sponsor!"

"Recreating all of the kid's meals was a challenge of course, too! Kids kept a journal of everything they ate for one week. At the end of the week, producers collected the journals, checked to make sure they were complete and then handed them off to the cooks who'd shop for all the ingredients and reproduce all of the meals. I photographed as many as 5 kids a day, so the cooks were responsible for preparing over 100 meals. These were often 14-hour days for the food-preppers. It was demanding and exhausting! Once all the food was prepped and plated, I'd arrange the dishes and other elements in the frame. Sometimes I'd have the luxury of a food stylist to collaborate with, though often it was just me doing the styling."

"One of the surprising lessons of Daily Bread is that the best quality diets with healthy foods are often eaten not by the richest but the poorest. In the US, the poor are the biggest consumers of junk food because it's convenient and cheap. But in Mumbai, it costs $13 for a medium Dominoes pizza, which is way beyond the means of most people. Anchal lives with her family in an 8 X 8 foot aluminum hut. Her father earns less than $5 a day, yet she eats a wholesome diet of okra & cauliflower curries, lentils and roti which Anchal's mother makes from scratch each day on a single kerosene burner. Shraman, on the other hand, lives in a middle-class Mumbai hi-rise and eats very differently. His family's extra income means he can afford Dominoes pizza, fried chicken and treats like Snickers bars and Cadbury chocolate."

"In 2015, Cambridge University conducted an exhaustive study ranking diets around the world from most to least nutritional. Remarkably, 9 of the 10 healthiest countries are in Africa. It seems counterintuitive that some of the poorest countries lead the healthiest lifestyles. But when you look closely at what they're eating, it makes sense: fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, grains, fish, and legumes and very little meat (which functions more as seasoning) and few empty calories (processed foods)."

"The revolution in diet and sameness of what kids around the world are eating," the Gregg added. "Ultrprocessed packaged foods, empty calories. The children I met have distinct personalities and diverse hobbies, yet they're often eating in eerily similar ways. Compare the diets of Paulo from Sicily and Isaiah from Los Angeles. In the past, a Sicilian boy would have grown up eating very different foods from his counterpart in the US, but now their diets are converging. Both Paulo and Isaiah eat French fries, burgers, pizza, pasta and white bread. They live continents apart, but it's as if the boys' parents have been shopping at the same global superstore!"

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25 Kids From Around The World Photographed With What They Eat In One Week

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"Daily Bread grew out of another of my projects on consumption and waste called 7 Days of Garbage," Segal said. "I asked family, friends, neighbors and anyone else I could convince to save their garbage for one week and then lie down and be photographed in it.

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Diet Variation and impact on Food Security

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Diet Variation and impact on Food Security

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The food we eat is putting 11 million of us into an early grave each year, an influential study shows.

The analysis, in the Lancet, found that our daily diet is a bigger killer than smoking and is now involved in one in five deaths around the world.

Salt - whether in bread, soy sauce or processed meals - shortened the highest number of lives.

Researchers say this study is not about obesity, but "poor quality" diets damaging hearts and causing cancer.

The Global Burden of Disease Study is the most authoritative assessment of how people are dying in every country in the world.

The latest analysis used estimates of countries' eating habits to pin down how often diet was shortening lives.

The dangerous diets were those containing:

1. Too much salt - three million deaths

2. Too few whole grains - three million deaths

3. Too little fruit - two million deaths

Low levels of nuts, seeds, vegetables, omega-3 from seafood and fibre were the other major killers.

"We find that diet is one of the dominant drivers of health around the world, it's really quite profound," Prof Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington told the BBC.

How is this killing people?

About 10 million out of the 11 million diet-related deaths were because of cardiovascular disease and that explains why salt is such a problem.

Too much salt raises blood pressure and that in turn raises the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Salt can also have a direct effect on the heart and blood vessels, leading to heart failure when the organ does not work effectively.

Whole grains, fruit and vegetables have the opposite effect - they are "cardioprotective" and lower the risk of heart problems.

Cancers and type 2 diabetes made up the rest of the diet-related deaths.

No country is perfect and each favours some part of a healthy diet more than others, but this is how far the world is from an optimal diet.

Nuts and seeds again?

The healthy foods missing from the most diets around the world were nuts and seeds, according to the study.

Eager readers will have noticed they featured heavily in the planetary health diet, unveiled in January, to save lives, save the planet and feed 10 billion people.

So why don't we munch them?

Prof Nita Forouhi, from the University of Cambridge, said: "The perception is they are little packs of energy that will make you fat, whereas they are packed full of good fats.

"And most people don't see them as mainstream food; and the other issue is cost."

The huge fat versus sugar debate and the link between red and processed meats with cancer have attracted huge headlines in recent years.

"These can be harmful as we show, but they are much smaller issues than low whole grains, fruit, nuts, seeds and vegetable intake," said Prof Murray.

Although, the study did show too many fizzy drinks were being drunk in every corner of the world.

The researchers say it is time for health campaigns to switch from talking about nutrients like fat and sugar and instead promote healthy foods.

Bad diets are knocking a couple of years off life expectancies around the world, according to the researchers.

But Prof Murray warns this is just the average and says the real question we should be asking is: "Am I going to die in my 50s from a heart attack? Or am I going to have some of the diet-related cancers in my 40s?"

Are any countries doing well?

Mediterranean countries, particularly France, Spain and Israel, have some of the lowest numbers of diet-related deaths in the world.

Countries in South East, Southern and Central Asia are at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Israel has the lowest diet-related deaths - 89 per 100,000 people a year

Uzbekistan has the highest diet-related deaths - 892 per 100,000 people a year

Japan and China have curiously contrasting fortunes that reflect their changing relationship with salt.

China consumes enormous amounts of salt with soy and other salty sauces being a key part of the country's cuisine.

But the rising popularity of processed foods is introducing yet more salt to their diet. It has the highest death rate because of salt of any country.

Prof Murray said: "Japan is very interesting because if you go back 30 to 40 years, they like China today had enormous salt intake.

"Salt is still their number one problem, but it has come down dramatically,

"And they have a diet that is higher in many of the things we think are protective for heart disease such as vegetables and fruit."

What about the UK?

The UK is behind countries like France, Denmark and Belgium.

The biggest problems are a lack of whole grains, fruit, vegetables and nuts and seeds.

The study estimates 14% of UK deaths are related to diet, with 127 diet-related deaths per 100,000 people a year.

Any advice?

Prof Murray said: "Diet quality matters no matter what weight you are.

"The really big story for people to act on is increase your whole grains, fruit, nuts, seeds and vegetable intake and reduce salt if you can."

It is estimated that having your five fruit and veg a day would take up 52% of household income in poorer countries.

But Prof Forouhi warns: "The public can make healthier choices if informed and have the resources, but if what is on the shelves as buy-one-get-one-free is always unhealthy, then that message will fall down.

"Cheaper options that are healthy are badly needed."

Both agreed there needed to be a shift from focusing on nutrients (fat/sugar/salt) and on to which actual foods people should eat.

Follow James on Twitter.

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The diets cutting one in five lives short every year

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The food we eat is putting 11 million of us into an early grave each year, an influential study shows. The analysis, in the Lancet, found that our daily diet is a bigger killer than smoking and is now involved in one in five deaths around the world.

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British Bee Numbers threaten Food Security

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British Bee Numbers threaten Food Security

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A third of British wild bees and hoverflies are in decline, according to a new study.

If current trends continue, some species will be lost from Britain altogether, the scientists say.

The study found "winners" and "losers" among hundreds of wild bees and hoverflies, which pollinate food crops and other plants.

Common species are winning out at the expense of rarer ones, with an overall picture of biodiversity being lost.

Scientists warn that the loss of nature could create problems in years to come, including the ability to grow food crops.

The study looked at trends in 353 wild bees and hoverflies in Scotland, England and Wales over 33 years from 1980.

A third of species experienced declines in terms of areas where they were found, while about 10% became more abundant, including bees that pollinate flowering crops, such as oil seed rape.

While some pollination is carried out by honeybees in hives, much of the pollination of food crops and wild plants is carried out by their wild relatives and other insects, especially hoverflies.

Dr Gary Powney of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, said while the increase in key crop pollinators is "good news", species have declined overall.

"It would be risky to rely on this group to support the long-term food security for our country," he said.

"If anything happens to them in the future, there will be fewer other species to step up and fulfil the essential role of crop pollination."

The losses were concentrated among the rarer, specialised species. Dr Nick Isaac, also of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, said this was "particularly bad news if you're interested in wildlife and in conservation".

The "losers" include solitary bees, which live in burrows in the ground, and upland bees, living on mountains and moorlands. Among the "winners" are 22 of the most important crop pollinators.

Experts say the increase in some common species is set against a background of an overall loss of diversity.

"Every square kilometre in the UK has lost an average of 11 species of bee and hoverfly, between 1980 and 2013, according to the new analysis," said Dr Lynn Dicks of the University of East Anglia.

She said the pattern of biodiversity loss is happening everywhere we look.

"It's a process of homogenisation and leaves us with a natural world that is far poorer and less resilient to change."

More stories like this:

Matt Shardlow, chief executive of the charity Buglife, said the new paper provides further evidence that our pollinators are in trouble and that the health of our environment and food supply cannot be taken for granted.

"Solitary bees, rare bees and bees and hoverflies that live in the uplands are in particular trouble and need urgent help," he said.

The research is based on analysis of more than 700,000 records from volunteers recording the presence or absence of insects in their area.

This gives a measure of whether the ranges of insect pollinators are getting smaller or larger, however it does not look at drivers for this change.

What's causing the decline?

The scientists think habitat loss is likely key. Other possible factors include climate change - which could be having an impact on upland and northern species.

They say the relative success of some species could be due to environmental measures put in place by farmers, such as sowing wildflower strips.

Or this might be because much more oilseed rape is grown now than in 1980.

Another factor is the use of insecticides. The scientists said it remained to be seen how pollinators might have been affected by restrictions introduced since the study was carried out.

In 2013, the European Union introduced a temporary ban on the widespread use of insecticides known as neonicotinoids in light of evidence suggesting they harmed bees.

Last year, the ban on three of the main neonicotinoid types was made permanent, and was widened to cover all crops grown outdoors.

What can be done to help?

The researchers say actions such as wildlife-friendly farming and gardening can have a positive impact on pollinators in both towns and the countryside.

They echoed previous calls for gardeners to encourage pollinating insects by growing patches of wild plants and weeds.

The loss of insects has far-reaching consequences for entire ecosystems. Insects provide a food source for many birds, amphibians, bats and reptiles, while plants rely on insects for pollination.

A recent scientific review of insect numbers around the world suggested that 40% of species were undergoing "dramatic rates of decline", with bees, ants and beetles disappearing eight times faster than mammals, birds or reptiles.

Previous studies have found losses of butterflies, moths, beetles, bees and hoverflies across the UK.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Follow Helen on Twitter.

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Loss of British bees threatens food security

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A third of British wild bees and hoverflies are in decline, according to a new study. If current trends continue, some species will be lost from Britain altogether, the scientists say. The study found "winners" and "losers" among hundreds of wild bees and hoverflies, which pollinate food crops and other plants.

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UK scientists join race for lab-grown meat

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British scientists have joined the race to produce meat grown in the lab rather than reared on the hoof.

Scientists at the University of Bath have grown animal cells on blades of grass, in a step towards cultured meat.

If the process can be reproduced on an industrial scale, meat lovers might one day be tucking into a slaughter-free supply of "bacon".

The researchers say the UK can move the field forward through its expertise in medicine and engineering.

Lab-based meat products are not yet on sale, though a US company, Just, has said its chicken nuggets, grown from cells taken from the feather of chicken that is still alive, will soon be in a few restaurants.

Chemical engineer Dr Marianne Ellis, of the University of Bath, sees cultured meat as "an alternative protein source to feed the world". Cultured pig cells are being grown in her laboratory, which could one day lead to bacon raised entirely off the hoof.

In the future, you would take a biopsy from a pig, isolate stem (master) cells, grow more cells, then put them into a bioreactor to massively expand them, says postgraduate student Nick Shorten of Aberystwyth University.

"And the pig's still alive and happy and you get lots of bacon at the end."

To replicate the taste and texture of bacon will take years of research. For structure, the cells must be grown on a scaffold.

Steps towards lab grown meat

2013: First lab-grown burger, created by a team in the Netherlands at a cost of €250,000 - largely due to the time and labour needed to turn millions of tiny cells into meat

December 2018: A "steak" grown from cells in the lab and not requiring the slaughter of a cow was produced in Israel. It cost $50 for a small thin strip, but, according to its makers, needs perfecting.

At Bath, they're experimenting with something that's entirely natural - grass. They're growing rodent cells, which are cheap and easy to use, on scaffolds of grass, as a proof of principle.

"The idea was to essentially, rather than feeding a cow grass and then us eating the meat - why don't we, in quotation marks, 'feed our cells grass'," says Scott Allan, a postgraduate student in chemical engineering.

"We use it as a scaffold for them to grow on - and we then have an edible scaffold that can be incorporated into the final product."

The end product would be pure muscle tissue - basically, lean mince, rather than something with the taste and texture of a chop or steak, which means adding fat cells and connective cells to give it "a bit more taste".

For cultured meat to be available widely in the future, cells will need to be grown on a very large scale in a commercial facility.

"What we're doing here is looking to design bioreactors, and the bioprocess around the bioreactors, to grow muscle cells on a large scale that is economical and safe and high quality, so we can supply the muscle cells as cultured meats to as many people as want it," says Dr Ellis.

She envisages taking "primary cells" from a living or recently slaughtered animal, or using a population of "immortalised" cells, that will keep on dividing. "Which means that you don't kill any animals; you have this immortal cell that can be used forever."

Slaughter-free meat is clearly a big selling point. Cultured meat might also be of interest to meat lovers who are concerned about the environmental problems that come with livestock production.

Richard Parr is managing director for Europe of The Good Food Institute, a non-profit group that promotes alternatives to the products of conventional agriculture.

He says cell-based meat has the potential to use much less land and water, produce less carbon dioxide, spare billions of animals from immense pain and suffering, and help fight anti-microbial resistance and food contamination.

"It's also a massive commercial opportunity, which companies, universities and governments should seize the opportunity to support and invest in," he argues.

According to Marianne Ellis, most analysis seems to suggest a significant reduction in greenhouse gases, land use and water use for cultured meat, while the implications for energy use are less clear.

One recent study found lab-grown meat could actually be worse for the climate than conventional meat - although the research did not look at water and land use.

"Cultured meat might be one of these promising alternatives to reduce agricultural emissions but until we get more production data we can't automatically assume that for the time being," says the author of the paper, John Lynch of the University of Oxford.

The researchers at Bath see a future where cultured meat exists alongside traditional agriculture.

Illtud Dunsford, co-founder with Marianne Ellis of the biotech start-up Cellular Agriculture, comes from a long line of farmers in Wales and is an advocate of traditional agriculture, but says there will be a need in the future to manage farmland for nature, with cattle playing a role, albeit in much smaller numbers.

"In my little farm in West Wales, ideally what I'd like to see is that we kept a range of very, very traditional native breeds of livestock on a very, very small scale to an exceptionally high welfare standard.

"The by-product from their use as a land management tool - whether that's in clearing land or restoring grasslands - would be the harvesting of cells for the culturing of cell-based meats."

Lab-grown meat is not expected to be available widely for at least five years. It remains to be seen whether people will want to eat it, but surveys in the UK suggest 20% would eat it, 40% wouldn't and the rest are undecided, with younger generations, urbanites and wealthier people more open to the idea.

Chris Bryant, a psychologist at the University of Bath, says the three major concerns are to do with price, taste, and naturalness and the related issue of safety.

The third is most difficult to address, he says, based on "the naturalistic fallacy", where people reason that natural things are good and unnatural things are bad.

Ultimately, then, it will be consumers who will be the judge of the success or failure of lab-grown meat.

Follow Helen on Twitter.

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British scientists have joined the race to produce meat grown in the lab rather than reared on the hoof. Scientists at the University of Bath have grown animal cells on blades of grass, in a step towards cultured meat.

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In Kibera, one of Africa's largest slums, residents have found a new way of responding to the challenge of food insecurity. In the heart of the bustling, informal settlement they are championing an unusual form of urban farming: the sack gardens of Kibera.

These urban farms consist of a series of sacks that are filled with manure, soil and small stones that enable water to drain. From the tops and sides of these sacks, often referred to as multi-storey gardens, farmers in Kibera grow kale, spinach, onions, tomatoes, vegetables and arrowroot.

The concept is a recent initiative of the National Youth Service (NYS), a government agency that promotes youth affairs through the ministry of devolution and planning. The approach is seen as a cheap and healthy solution to food insecurity and runaway unemployment in Nairobi's slum. Kibera has thousands of sack gardens spread across 16 villages in the slum, according to Douglas Kangi, principal agricultural officer on the Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Project at the ministry of agriculture. The government plans to introduce the initiative to Kisumu and Mombasa counties.

At Kambi Maruu, one of the villages in Kibera, young farmers start their day at around 8am, in the open field where they have their sack farming project. They water the plants, weed and prune them where necessary and spray them with insecticide.

Ramadhan Abdulrahman, 25, is one of these farmers. Before being contracted by the NYS to take care of the vegetables in a local sack garden, he was unemployed. Today he earns a stipend of 6,592 shillings per month and saves up to Sh1,200 per week.

"Before this sack farming project was introduced here I used to use between Sh280 and Sh420 to buy vegetables per week, but I now use the money to buy other foodstuff," he said, adding that he used to struggle to feed himself. Through his sack farming he now feels more assured of getting at least one decent meal a day.

Abdulrahman is not alone in experiencing urban food insecurity. Across Kenya an estimated 1.5 million people are acutely food insecure and research from the International Fund for Agricultural Development suggests that a large number of households in Kenya limit their food intake to one or two meals a day. Nairobi like many other African cities, is experiencing rapid urbanisation, and urban food insecurity is on the rise. One estimate suggests as many as 38% of Kenya's urban populations (pdf) experience chronic food insecurity.

Urban farmers like Abdulrahman receive technical support from the ministry of agriculture, livestock and fisheries - through their Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Project.

"Apart from training them on the type of insecticides to use in event of pest attacks, we also teach them how to make multi-storey gardens using sacks," says Kangi.

While making the sacks, farmers are taught to ensure that, for each wheelbarrow of soil, they add one wheelbarrow of manure and then water the sacks steadily.

"We also ensure they use the right materials while making the sack and teach them business management skills," says Kangi.

The initiative, however, is not only about access to food. Abdulrahman explains that the money farmers earn from selling vegetables goes into a savings and credit society they have formed, which in turn will provide loans to young people to start their own businesses. For Fred Onserio, headmaster at Stara Rescue Centre and School which caters for more than 500 orphans and other vulnerable children in Kibera, urban farming has reduced the cost of their school feeding programme.

Sack farming has the potential not only to make food more available and affordable, but also more nutritious. Sophie Donde is the programme manager of Kicoshep, an NGO helping residents of Kibera to cope with HIV and Aids. Kicoshep, she explains, promotes urban farming in Kibera by providing sacks and other material to people living with HIV and Aids. "People taking ARVs [antiretroviral drugs] need to take a lot of vegetables to boost their nutrients and that is why we encourage them to plant their own vegetables," she adds.

This approach, she says, allows them to save enough money to buy other foodstuff like eggs and milk to improve their diet.

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Fred Onserio, headmaster of Stara rescue centre and school, waters vegetables in the sack gardens in the school grounds. Photograph: Patrick Mayoyo/Africa Eco News

Farming in a slum, however, inevitably has its complications. Not only is land and space scarce, but finding areas free from contamination can also be a challenge.

According to Eva Kadzo, a public health officer and community strategist with the ministry of health, sack farming in Kibera has helped discourage people from planting crops near dump sites and sewers, which had been a common practice in the area. Many of the sewers contain heavy metals such as lead and mercury, creating a health risk to those who consume vegetables grown near them.

Joyce Anyango, 30, a mother of three, says becoming an independent sack farmer has changed her life. She makes between $40 and $70 per month from selling her vegetables, and plans to increase her number of sacks to boost her income. "I used to struggle to feed my family," she says. "However, these days I not only have vegetables readily available, but also earn some little money from selling them."
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on Twitter. Topics

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improving nutrition and food security - global development professionals network

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How to grow food in a slum: lessons from the sack farmers of Kibera

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In Kibera, one of Africa's largest slums, residents have found a new way of responding to the challenge of food insecurity. In the heart of the bustling, informal settlement they are championing an unusual form of urban farming: the sack gardens of Kibera.

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A third of all food produced worldwide is never eaten. But how easy is it to reduce our food waste? Two students have been finding out.

"That's not a very pleasant smell," says Loughborough University student Helen Chigwende, standing with the entire contents of her household's food waste bin laid out before her.

"It just smells like sour milk to be honest."

It is far from an everyday scenario, but if Helen and one of her five housemates, Will Smith, want to learn how to live a more sustainable lifestyle, they need to understand their current habits.

And that means rummaging through their leftovers - or simply food that has been sent straight to the bin, having never been touched.

With the help of Dr Elliot Woolley, a senior lecturer in sustainable manufacturing at Loughborough University, they soon find out how much of their food waste could have been avoided.

"We've got a lettuce sandwich meat that doesn't even look like it's tried to be eaten, slices of bread, and some garlic bread as well," he says, looking at what still-edible food he could salvage.

It is formed into a pile of "avoidable" waste, that soon becomes double the size of the "unavoidable" cast-offs, containing the stem from grapes, lemon skins, chicken bones, eggs shells and banana peel.

"Looking at the amount that could have been eaten," says Will, reacting to the avoidable pile, "especially seeing how fresh the food is as well - it is surprising."

"A lot of [the avoidable waste] is mine," adds Helen, taking responsibility for the ham and bread.

"I didn't realise I was contributing to this much food waste."

When weighed, the waste combined comes to 3.5kg, which both feel they could halve.

Three tips for improvement

"One of the reasons why we end up with a lot of food waste is that food isn't stored properly," explains Dr Woolley.

Sometimes it is placed in an area of the fridge or cupboard where it is not easily visible, "so it gets left and not consumed in time", he adds.

He inspects the students' fridge.

"We've got some cheese that hasn't been sealed properly, so potentially that can end up dry," he says.

"We've got steak - one of them has been eaten, the other one hasn't been wrapped up properly. It could potentially go bad before someone gets a chance to eat it."

For Dr Woolley, there are also two other factors in reducing food waste.

"The first is planning," he says. "Write a shopping list - make sure you're not duplicating things you've already got."

The second is preparation, and "cooking the right amount for the people that are going to eat.

"If you're overcooking, you're likely to generate waste," he says.

For Rachel Ama, a vegan chef, food choices are also key to ensuring a sustainable lifestyle.

Scientists have recently developed a "planetary health diet", designed to feed 10 billion people without causing catastrophic damage to the planet.

It does not completely banish meat and dairy, but recommends we get most of our protein from nuts and legumes - such as beans and lentils - instead.

To take them one step closer to that goal, Ms Ama is teaching Helen and Will to cook vegetable bolognese, with lentils providing the fibre and protein.

Helen admits she is sceptical, but is willing to try it as a one-off.

"If I went to a restaurant I would never order a vegetarian meal, I'd never even think about it," she says.

But once cooked, the verdict is positive.

"This actually is really tasty. I'm 100% surprised," she says, smiling.

"I thought it'd be incomplete without any meat in it," adds Will, "but it tastes really nice. I'd definitely make it again."

Cutting down on meat and dairy can be key to living more sustainably.

Dr Woolley says typically animal-based products have the highest environmental impact.

Beef is one of the worst culprits, he adds, with 17kg of carbon dioxide being released for each 1kg of beef.

But it is also important to ensure we eat fruit and vegetables when they are in season.

If not, the carbon footprint can multiply tenfold.

Rather than 150g of carbon dioxide being released per punnet of strawberries, this can rise to 1.5kg.

Back at the student house, Helen and Will are cooking the vegetarian spaghetti Ms Ama taught them for their housemates, hoping to impress.

Of course, they don't have the chef's expect guidance, but it still goes down relatively well.

"You've done a good job bearing in mind I didn't think this was going to be eaten at all," says one of their housemates.

"It's not horrible," adds another.

The long-term test of whether Helen and Will can keep up their dietary charges and reduce food waste is yet to come.

But it seems both are keen to make a positive change.

Despite being a "picky eater" and previously having meat in all her meals, Helen says a week of sticking to the planetary health has not been too difficult.

She even ventures as far as to say it was "quite easy" to substitute meat products with non-meat options.

"It's just about finding things you'll enjoy eating," she adds.

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A third of all food produced worldwide is never eaten. But how easy is it to reduce our food waste? Two students have been finding out. "That's not a very pleasant smell," says Loughborough University student Helen Chigwende, standing with the entire contents of her household's food waste bin laid out before her.

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The way we eat is killing us – and the planet

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The way we eat is killing us - and the planet | Felicity Lawrence

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The global food system is causing an ecological and health catastrophe, says Guardian special correspondent Felicity Lawrence

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World's food supply under 'severe threat' from loss of biodiversity

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World's food supply under 'severe threat' from loss of biodiversity

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Plants, insects and organisms crucial to food production in steep decline, says UN

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Restaurants could make £7 for every £1 invested in cutting waste, report reveals

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Restaurants could make £7 for every £1 invested in cutting waste, report reveals

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Global study sets out how industry could make waste reduction pay, using data taken from across 12 countries

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You may have heard an increasing number of people vow to reduce their meat eating lately - or cut it out altogether.

This often forms part of a bid to become healthier, reduce their environmental impact, or consider animal welfare.

A third of Britons claim to have either stopped eating meat or reduced it, while two thirds of those in the US say they are eating less of at least one meat.

This trend is partly thanks to initiatives such as Meat-free Mondays and Veganuary. At the same time, a number of documentaries and high-profile advocates of veganism have highlighted the potential benefits of eating less meat.

But have these sentiments had any effect on the ground?

Rising incomes

What we do know is that global meat consumption has increased rapidly over the past 50 years.

Meat production today is nearly five times higher than in the early 1960s - from 70 million tonnes to more than 330 tonnes in 2017.

A big reason for this is that there are many more people to feed.

Over that period the world population more than doubled. In the early 1960s there were around three billion of us, and today there are more than 7.6 billion.

While population is part of the story, it doesn't entirely account for why meat production increased five-fold.

Another key factor is rising incomes.

Around the world, people have become richer, with the global average income more than tripling in half a century.

When we compare consumption across different countries we see that, typically, the richer we are the more meat we eat.

There are not just more people in the world - there are more people who can afford to eat meat.
Calculate your diet's carbon footprint Fast food giants under fire on climate and water usage
Who eats the most meat?

We see a clear link with wealth when looking at patterns of meat consumption across the world.

In 2013, the most recent year available, the US and Australia topped the tables for annual meat consumption. Alongside New Zealand and Argentina, both countries topped more than 100kg per person, the equivalent to about 50 chickens or half a cow each.

In fact, high levels of meat consumption can be seen across the West, with most countries in Western Europe consuming between 80 and 90 kilograms of meat per person.

At the other end of the spectrum, many of the world's poorest countries eat very little meat.

The average Ethiopian consumes just 7kg, Rwandans 8kg and Nigerians 9kg. This is 10 times less than the average European.

For those in low-income countries, meat is still very much a luxury.

These figures represent the amount of meat per head available for consumption, but do not account for any food wasted at home or on the shop floor. In reality, people eat slightly less meat than this, but it's still a close estimate.

Middle-income countries driving the demand for meat

It is clear that the richest countries eat a lot of meat, and those on low incomes eat little.

This has been the case for 50 years or more. So why are we collectively eating so much more meat?

This trend has been largely driven from a growing band of middle-income countries.

Rapidly growing nations like China and Brazil have seen significant economic growth in recent decades, and a large rise in meat consumption.

In Kenya, meat consumption has changed little since 1960.

By contrast, the average person in 1960s China consumed less than 5kg a year. By the late 1980s this had risen to 20kg, and in the last few decades this has more than tripled to over 60kg.

The same thing happened in Brazil, where meat consumption has almost doubled since 1990 - overtaking almost all Western countries in the process.

India is one notable exception.

While average incomes have tripled since 1990, meat consumption hasn't followed suit.

It is a misconception that the majority of India is vegetarian - two thirds of Indians do eat at least some meat, according to a nationwide survey.

Nonetheless, the amount of meat consumed in India has remained small. At less than 4kg per person, it is the lowest in the world. This is likely to be partly down to cultural factors for some in India, including not eating certain types of meat for religious reasons.

Is meat consumption falling in the West?

Many in Europe and North America say they are trying to cut down on meat, but is it working?

Not really, according to statistics.

Recent data from the United States Department for Agriculture (USDA) suggests meat consumption per head has actually increased over the last few years.

While we may think that meat is becoming less popular, US consumption in 2018 was close to its highest in decades.

It's a similar picture with meat consumption in the EU.

While Western consumption of meat is steady, or slightly increasing, the types of meat eaten are changing.

This means less red meat - beef and pork - and more poultry.

In the US, poultry now accounts for half of meat consumption, up from a quarter in the 1970s.

These types of substitution could be good news for health and the environment.
More stories like this
The impact of meat

In some circumstances, eating meat can be beneficial.

Moderate quantities of meat and dairy can improve people's health, particularly in lower-income countries where diets may lack variety.

But in many countries, meat consumption goes far beyond basic nutritional benefits.

In fact, it could be a health risk. Studies have linked excess red and processed meat consumption with increased risk of heart disease, stroke and certain types of cancer.

Substituting chicken for beef or bacon could be a positive step.

This swap is also better for the environment as cows, in particular, are inefficient converters of feed to meat.

Compared to chicken, beef has anywhere in the range of three to 10 times as much impact on land use, water and greenhouse gas emissions. Pork is somewhere in between the two.

A future where meat consumption is sustainable and balanced across countries would require major changes.

This would mean not only a shift in the types of meat we eat, but also how much.

Essentially, meat would have to become more of a luxury again.
About this piece
This analysis piece was commissioned by the BBC from an expert working for an outside organisation.

Hannah Ritchie is an Oxford Martin fellow, and is currently working as a researcher at OurWorldinData.org. This is a joint project between Oxford Martin and non-profit organisation Global Change Data Lab, which aims to present research on how the world is changing through interactive visualisations. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Edited by Eleanor Lawrie

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You may have heard an increasing number of people vow to reduce their meat eating lately - or cut it out altogether. This often forms part of a bid to become healthier, reduce their environmental impact, or consider animal welfare.

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The Sahel is engulfed by violence. Climate change, food insecurity and extremists are largely to blame | World Economic Forum

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The Sahel is engulfed by violence. Climate change, food insecurity and extremists are largely to blame

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From climate change to weak governance to poor infrastructure, a perfect storm of factors is threatening to unleash violence across the region.

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The diet to save lives, the planet and feed us all?

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A diet has been developed that promises to save lives, feed 10 billion people and all without causing catastrophic damage to the planet.

Scientists have been trying to figure out how we are going to feed billions more people in the decades to come.

Their answer - "the planetary health diet" - does not completely banish meat and dairy.

But it is recommending we get most of our protein from nuts and legumes (such as beans and lentils) instead.

Their diet needs an enormous shift in what we pile on to our plates and for us to turn to foods that we barely eat.

What changes am I going to have to make?

If you eat meat every day then this is the first biggie. For red meat you're looking at a burger a week or a large steak a month and that's your lot.

You can still have a couple of portions of fish and the same of chicken a week, but plants are where the rest of your protein will need to come from. The researchers are recommending nuts and a good helping of legumes every day instead.

There's also a major push on all fruit and veg, which should make up half of every plate of food we eat.

Although there's a cull on "starchy vegetables" such as the humble potato or cassava which is widely eaten in Africa.

So what is the diet in detail?

If you served it all up this is what you would be allowed each day:

1. Nuts - 50g a day

2. Beans, chickpeas, lentils and other legumes - 75g a day

3. Fish - 28g a day

4. Eggs - 13g a day (so one and a bit a week)

5. Meat - 14g a day of red meat and 29g a day of chicken

6. Carbs - whole grains like bread and rice 232g a day and 50g a day of starchy vegetables

7. Dairy - 250g - the equivalent of one glass of milk

8. Vegetables -(300g) and fruit (200g)

The diet has room for 31g of sugar and about 50g worth of oils like olive oil.

Will it taste awful?

Prof Walter Willet, one of the researchers who is based at Harvard, said no and that after a childhood on a farm eating three portions of red meat a day he was now pretty much in line with the planetary health diet.

"There's tremendous variety there," he said. "You can take those foods and put them together in thousands of different ways. We're not talking about a deprivation diet here, it is healthy eating that is flexible and enjoyable."

Is this for real, or just a fantasy?

This plan requires changes to diets in pretty much every corner of the world.

Europe and North America need to cut back massively on red meat, East Asia needs to cut back on fish, Africa on starchy vegetables.

"Humanity has never attempted to change the food system at this scale and this speed," said Line Gordon, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, at Stockholm University.

"Whether it's a fantasy or not, a fantasy doesn't have to be bad... it's time to dream of a good world," she says.

Taxes on red meat are one of the many options the researchers say may be necessary to persuade us to switch diets.

Who came up with this?

A group of 37 scientists from around the world were brought together as part of the EAT-Lancet commission.

They're a mix of experts from farming to climate change to nutrition. They took two years to come up with their findings which have been published in the Lancet.

Why do we need a diet for 10 billion people?

The world population reached seven billion in 2011 and it's now around 7.7 billion. That figure is expected to reach 10 billion around 2050 and will keep on climbing.

Will it save lives?

The researchers say the diet will prevent about 11 million people dying each year.

That number is largely down to cutting diseases related to unhealthy diets such as heart attacks, strokes and some cancers. These are now the biggest killers in developed countries.

How bad is farming for the planet?

The use of land for growing food and forestry accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. That's about the same as from electricity and heating, and substantially more than from all the trains, planes and automobiles on the planet.

When you look more closely at the food sector's environmental impact, you can see that meat and dairy are the major factors. Worldwide, livestock accounts for between 14.5 and 18% of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.

When it comes to other warming gases, agriculture is one of the leading contributors to both methane and nitrous oxide emissions.

Agriculture is also a significant source of air pollution with ammonia from farms a major cause of fine particulate matter, which the World Health Organization (WHO) says is a threat to health worldwide.

Similarly when it comes to water, agriculture and food productions are one of the biggest threats, consuming 70% of global freshwater sources for irrigation.

So will this diet save the planet?

The researchers' aim was to feed more people while:

minimising greenhouse gas emissions

preventing any species going extinct

having no expansion of farmland, and

preserving water

However, just changing diets is nowhere near enough.

To make the numbers add up, also requires a halving of food waste and an increase in the amount of food produced on current farmland.

Why isn't meat being banned?

"If we were just minimising greenhouse gases we'd say everyone be vegan," said Prof Willet.

However, it was unclear whether a vegan diet was the healthiest option, he said.

So what happens now?

The EAT-Lancet Commission is going to take its findings to governments around the world and bodies such as the WHO to see if it can begin to change the way we eat.

Follow James on Twitter

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Meat, veg, nuts - a diet designed to feed 10bn

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A diet has been developed that promises to save lives, feed 10 billion people and all without causing catastrophic damage to the planet. Scientists have been trying to figure out how we are going to feed billions more people in the decades to come.

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How does food impact the environment? Excellent article and calculator

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How does food impact the environment? Excellent article and calculator

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The popularity of vegan foods continues to grow, with January seen as a traditional time to consider giving them a try.

Milk alternatives, such as oat, soy, almond or coconut, are one area of interest, with sales rising in the UK.

A scientific study suggests the greenhouse gas emissions used in the production of plant-based milks are lower than for dairy milk.

But which milk has the smallest impact on the planet?

Looking at land use, the difference is starker still.

Producing a glass of dairy milk every day for a year requires 650 sq m (7,000 sq ft) of land, the equivalent of two tennis courts and more than 10 times as much as the same amount of oat milk, according to this study.

Almond milk requires more water to produce than soy or oat milk. A single glass requires 74 litres (130 pints of water) - more than a typical shower. Rice milk is also comparatively thirsty, requiring 54 litres of water per glass.

However, it's worth noting that both almond and rice milk still require less water to produce than the typical glass of dairy milk.

Where something is produced can mean there is a variation in its impact on the climate, see the chart below on dairy milk. On a more local level, sourcing products made close to home may result in a smaller carbon footprint than products that have had to be transported a long way.

The graphic below takes into account emissions from farming and in addition it includes transportation, packing and processing. Where livestock feed has had an impact on deforestation, this figure has also been included.

To find out the climate impact of what you eat and drink, choose from one of the 34 items in our calculator and pick how often you have it.

All figures for each food in the calculator are global averages. You can read more about how it was made at the foot of this page. Read more about it here. If you cannot view the food calculator, click to launch the interactive content.

Design by Prina Shah, development by Felix Stephenson and Becky Rush.

The research found meat and other animal products were responsible for most food-related greenhouse gas emissions, despite providing only a fifth of the calories consumed.

People tend to underestimate the greenhouse gas emissions from food, and dairy milk is no exception, according to research by Dr Adrian Camilleri, a psychologist at the University of Technology Sydney.

"The greenhouse gas emissions from milk are about 30 times higher than what people estimate," he told BBC News.

"I suspect that most consumers underestimate the greenhouse gas emissions saved by switching from dairy milk to plant-based milk such as soy milk."

Sales of so-called alternative milks are growing faster in the UK than sales of traditional milk, according to market researchers Mintel.

Searches for milk alternatives spike in January in the UK - especially soy milk and almond milk.

Oat milk companies have recently entered the UK market, giving the drink a boost in search interest. No other country in the world has had higher search interest in oat milk than the UK in the past 12 months.

Last year, a record 50,000 people signed up to the Veganuary campaign to live without animal products for a month. But the growing popularity of veganism extends beyond January. Searches for veganism have doubled in the past year.

So to what extent do plant-based diets' trendiness translate to actual numbers?

Yet, some farming bodies are critical of the idea of Veganuary.

The campaign ignores the fact sheep farming in the UK "works very much in harmony with our environment, our landscapes, and our human ecology", according to the National Sheep Association.

Red meat from livestock raised on grass was different from intensive animal farming, said chief executive Phil Stocker.

"Some people seem hell bent on portraying sheep as a global enemy - but in fact they are the ultimate in renewable technology and are an efficient form of productive land management that is planet-friendly," he added.

How did we make the calculator?

How is the environmental impact calculated?

They assessed the effect of these foods on climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of land and fresh water used across all stages of their production, including processing, packaging, and transportation, but excluding the cooking process.

By analysing data from nearly 40,000 farms, 1,600 processors, packaging types and retailers, Poore and Nemecek were able to assess how different production practices and geographies have very different consequences on the planet.

What about serving sizes?

The data in the study looked at the environmental impact for 1kg of each of the different food products.

Protein-rich foods were calculated using the impact per 100g of protein from Poore and Nemecek's research and data on protein per serving from the BDA, to avoid differences between cooked and uncooked foods.

Dairy, soy and almond milks were set to 3.3% protein, while rice and oat were standardised based on their lower protein content.

What are greenhouse gases?

The figures for greenhouse gas emissions are in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2eq). This is a unit that converts the impact of different kinds of greenhouse gases, like methane and nitrous oxide, to the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

How do you know what my diet is equal to in miles driven?

The annual impact from eating a specific food is calculated by multiplying the impact of one serving of that food by the times it is eaten in a year, based on the weekly estimates submitted by the user.

Heating the average UK home produces 2.34 tonnes of CO2eq annually, according to data from the Committee on Climate Change, and a passenger's carbon footprint for a return flight from London to Malaga is 320kg CO2eq, based on figures from the Carbon Neutral calculator.

The land used to produce the annual consumption of each food is compared with the size of a double tennis court, 261 metres squared.

Update 22nd February 2019: This article has been updated to include more detail about the methodology used. A chart has also been added showing the environmental impact of cow's milk, broken down by region.

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Climate change: Which vegan milk is best?

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The popularity of vegan foods continues to grow, with January seen as a traditional time to consider giving them a try. Milk alternatives, such as oat, soy, almond or coconut, are one area of interest, with sales rising in the UK.

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Excellent paper on reducing the environmental impact of food

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Excellent paper on reducing the environmental impact of food

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Meat or two veg? Find out your food's climate footprint - BBC News

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Avoiding meat and dairy products is one of the biggest ways to reduce your environmental impact, according to recent scientific studies.

But what is the difference between beef and chicken? Does a bowl of rice produce more climate warming greenhouse gases than a plate of chips? Is wine more environmentally friendly than beer?

To find out the climate impact of what you eat and drink, choose from one of the 34 items in our calculator and pick how often you have it.

All figures for each food in the calculator are global averages. If you cannot view the food calculator, click to launch the interactive content.

Design by Prina Shah, development by Felix Stephenson and Becky Rush.

However, the researchers found that the environmental impact of different foods varies hugely.

Their findings showed that meat and other animal products are responsible for more than half of food-related greenhouse gas emissions, despite providing only a fifth of the calories we eat and drink.

Of all the products analysed in the study, beef and lamb were found to have by far the most damaging effect on the environment.

The findings echo recommendations on how individuals can lessen climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

When it comes to our diets, the IPCC says we need to buy less meat, milk, cheese and butter - but also eat more locally sourced seasonal food, and throw less of it away.

The IPCC also recommends that we insulate homes, take trains and buses instead of planes, and use video conferencing instead of business travel.

Cutting meat and dairy products from your diet could reduce an individual's carbon footprint from food by two-thirds, according to the Oxford study, published in the journal Science.

"What we eat is one of the most powerful drivers behind most of the world's major environmental issues, whether it's climate change or biodiversity loss," study researcher Joseph Poore told BBC News.

Changing your diet can make a big difference to your personal environmental footprint, from saving water to reducing pollution and the loss of forests, he said.

"It reduces the amount of land required to produce your food by about 75% - that's a huge reduction, particularly if you scale that up globally," Poore explained.

If you fly regularly, replacing flying with other forms of transport may have a bigger impact on your carbon footprint than changing your diet. A passenger's carbon footprint from a one-way flight from London to New York is just under half a tonne of greenhouse gases. Switching from a regular petrol vehicle to an electric car could save more than double that over a year.

Knowing how and where your food is produced is also important, as the same food can have huge differences in environmental impact.

For example, beef cattle raised on deforested land is responsible for 12 times more greenhouse gas emissions than cows reared on natural pastures.

The average beef from South America results in three times the amount of greenhouse gases as beef produced in Europe - and uses 10 times as much land.

Meat and dairy are not the only foods where the choices you make can make a big difference.

Chocolate and coffee originating from deforested rainforest produce relatively high greenhouse gases.

For climate-friendly tomatoes, choose those grown outdoors or in high-tech greenhouses, instead of in greenhouses heated by gas or oil. Environmentally-minded beer-drinkers may be interested to know that draught beer is responsible for fewer emissions than recyclable cans, or worse, glass bottles.

Even the most climate-friendly meat options still produce more greenhouse gases than vegetarian protein sources, like beans or nuts.

How did we make the calculator?

How is the environmental impact calculated?

They assessed the effect of these foods on climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of land and fresh water used across all stages of their production, including processing, packaging, and transportation, but excluding the cooking process.

By analysing data from nearly 40,000 farms, 1,600 processors, packaging types and retailers, Poore and Nemecek were able to assess how different production practices and geographies have very different consequences on the planet.

What about serving sizes?

The data in the study looked at the environmental impact for 1kg of each of the different food products.

Protein-rich foods were calculated using the impact per 100g of protein from Poore and Nemecek's research and data on protein per serving from the BDA, to avoid differences between cooked and uncooked foods.

What are greenhouse gases?

The figures for greenhouse gas emissions are in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2eq). This is a unit that converts the impact of different kinds of greenhouse gases, like methane and nitrous oxide, to the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

How do you know what my diet is equal to in miles driven?

The annual impact from eating a specific food is calculated by multiplying the impact of one serving of that food by the times it is eaten in a year, based on the weekly estimates submitted by the user.

Heating the average UK home produces 2.34 tonnes of CO2eq annually, according to data from the Committee on Climate Change, and a passenger's carbon footprint for a return flight from London to Malaga is 320kg CO2eq, based on 2018 figures from the Carbon Neutral Calculator. The Carbon Neutral Calculator is no longer online, but the methodology behind it can still be accessed.

The land used to produce the annual consumption of each food is compared with the size of a double tennis court, 261 metres squared.

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Climate change food calculator: What's your diet's carbon footprint?

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Check the environmental impact of what you eat and drink.

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People living in Paris are planting little gardens in the streets.

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Poor diet a factor in one-fifth of global deaths in 2017 – study

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Poor diet a factor in one-fifth of global deaths in 2017 - study

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Global survey says diseases such as cancer and diabetes behind almost 75% of deaths last year

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Reduce meat eating to combat climate change

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Reduce meat eating to combat climate change

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Huge reduction in meat-eating ‘essential’ to avoid climate breakdown

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Huge reduction in meat-eating 'essential' to avoid climate breakdown

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Major study also finds huge changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying Earth's ability to feed its population

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Many Britons feel they have to watch the pennies after recent inflation rises and years of flatlining wages.

This extends to their supermarket shop, with four in 10 people reporting they are concerned about the cost of food.

Against this backdrop, grocery giant Tesco has joined the discount retailers, which the launch of "value-orientated" chain Jack's.

Yet in relative terms, the British grocery shop remains one of the cheapest in the world.

Half the price

Britons spend an average of 8% of their total household expenditure on food to eat at home. This is less than any other country apart from the US and Singapore, according to data from market research firm Euromonitor.

Food spending varies considerably around the world. Greeks spend 16%, while Peruvians spend 26%. Nigerians spend the most on food in relative terms - 59% of their household budget.

The food consumed in the UK is also the cheapest in Western Europe - costing 8% less than the EU average, according to EU statistical body Eurostat.

It is also much cheaper in relative terms than the food bought by Britons' parents and grandparents.

The proportion of household income spent on food has more than halved over the past 60 years, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), while spending on housing costs and leisure activities has doubled.

Rise of the discounters

Why have Britons come to spend less and less of their income on food?

It's partly a reflection of how people shop.

Store loyalty has decreased over time, with consumers more likely to shop around for the best prices.

Four out of 10 would not care if their usual supermarket closed, one survey of 1,500 of UK consumers found. Almost one in five had switched from their main supermarket in the past year.

Over the decades the traditional single weekly shopping trip has also given way to more frequent outings, for purchasing smaller baskets of goods.

Unable to rely on past loyalty, supermarkets have had to work harder to attract customers.

This is particularly true now there are more low-cost options available. Discounters Aldi and Lidl have grown quickly in recent years and now have 13% of the UK's grocery market, making it much harder for other supermarkets to raise their prices.

Technology boost

As with many countries, the UK has benefitted from mostly rising incomes, while food production has become more efficient.

Farming has become increasingly mechanised, which speeds up production and helps to maximise harvests.

At the same time, the way food is transported, stored and distributed has become increasingly streamlined. All of this has helped to push down the price of groceries in the shops.

The UK has also benefitted from the growth of trade between countries. It currently imports about half of all its food, up from a third in 1988.

Retailers are able to source foods cheaply from around the world, without incurring the UK's often higher manufacturing and processing costs.
More like this
Extreme weather

However, we cannot be certain that the era of ultra-low food prices will continue.

One threat comes from the weather.

This year, the Beast from the East brought snow and low temperatures in March and was followed by a summer heatwave. The combination hit crop yields and has already led to increased prices.

This combination caused the wholesale cost of carrots to rise by 80% and wheat by 20% between March and July, consultancy CEBR estimated. It believes these and other price rises could add £7 on to household bills every month.

While episodes like this may still be relatively rare in the UK, most scientists agree that international weather patterns are becoming more extreme.

If droughts and floods become more frequent, this is likely to boost global food prices.

Marmite fights

The UK's reliance on imported food means it is particularly affected by changes in the strength of the pound.

Since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, the pound has fallen by as much as 17% against the euro and 29% against the dollar, although it has recovered somewhat since then.

This has been followed by trade disputes, as food suppliers seek to pass a portion of their rising import costs on to retailers. One example of this was "Marmitegate", when Tesco temporarily stopped stocking Unilever products after the manufacturer raised its prices.

There are also fears that prices could rise if supplies are disrupted immediately after Brexit and duties are increased on EU imports, which account for about 30% of the food eaten in the UK.

If there is a "no-deal" Brexit, the UK should expect to see "a pretty significant increase in the cost of fruit and veg, the cost of meat and the cost of dairy products", according to Lord Price, former Conservative trade minister and ex-boss of Waitrose.

However, we do not yet know what the impact of Brexit will be on food prices. Another suggestion is that duties on food imported from outside of the EU will be lowered and that the UK will start to grow more at home.

Changing tastes

The UK is also subject to global trends beyond its control. By 2050, the world's population is predicted to increase by a third, with almost 10 billion mouths to feed.

And tastes are changing.

The growing middle class in countries like China now has more disposable income to spend on food, beyond the essentials.

This includes eating more meat and dairy products. Such trends can lead to price rises if demand can't keep up, for example the 24% spike in the price of butter.

In January 2017, cold weather in Italy and heavy rainfall in Spain caused a "perfect storm" for courgette importers, pushing up prices at a time of year when Western consumers demand healthier food.

End of an era?

We are in an era of low food prices, compared with other countries and the UK's own history.

If this changes, Britons may have to think hard about the choices they make.

Public health could improve if price rises lead people to consume fewer calories. But it could also lead to worsening diets if fresh produce prices rise faster than those of processed food.

Either way, environmental and economic factors may mean UK consumers face a future of higher food prices.
About this piece
This analysis piece was commissioned by the BBC from experts working for an outside organisation.

Ratula Chakraborty is a professor of Business Management at Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia

Paul Dobson is a professor of Business Strategy and Public Policy and head of Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia

Edited by Eleanor Lawrie.

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Many Britons feel they have to watch the pennies after recent inflation rises and years of flatlining wages. This extends to their supermarket shop, with four in 10 people reporting they are concerned about the cost of food. Against this backdrop, grocery giant Tesco has joined the discount retailers, which the launch of "value-orientated" chain Jack's.

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Fried chicken lover Hezron Springer finds out how some of the millions of birds reach our plates.

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Marston's will be first UK pub chain to sell 'bleeding' vegan burger

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Marston's will be first UK pub chain to sell 'bleeding' vegan burger

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Move over, chicken in a basket. Marston's is to become the first national pub chain to put the UK's first meatless "bleeding" burgers on its menus, as part of a £1m deal announced on Tuesday. The so-called B12 Burger, which sizzles, smells, tastes and bleeds like meat but is completely plant-based, will go on sale on Wednesday in the chain's 413 dedicated food pubs.

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New skills, new hope | FAO Stories | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

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Excellent Food Podcasts from the BBC World Service

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Excellent Food Podcasts from the BBC World Service

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The Food Chain examines the business, science and cultural significance of food, and what it takes to put food on your plate.

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the man using 'junk food' to stop food waste

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The man using 'junk food' to stop food waste, The Real Junk Food, The Food Chain - BBC World Service

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Adam Smith wants to tackle the world's food waste problem with his Real Junk Food Project

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Fast Food Availability and Healthy Food Deserts

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Fast Food Availability and Healthy Food Deserts

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Deprived areas such as Blackpool and parts of Manchester and Liverpool have five times more fast food outlets than affluent areas, a survey suggests.

The data, from Public Health England (PHE), compared levels of deprivation with numbers of takeaways such as chip shops, burger bars and pizza places.

Experts say children exposed to fast food on the way home from school are more likely to eat unhealthily.

PHE wants local authorities to refuse applications from new takeaways.

One in three children is now overweight or obese by the age of 11.

And children from poorer areas are more than twice as likely to be overweight.

Adults are also affected, with research in Cambridge indicating people living closest to the largest number of fast food outlets were more than twice as likely to be obese.

PHE is also encouraging local authorities to work with existing small businesses to provide healthier options.

The research analysed data from the Food Standards Agency, which inspects all food businesses.

It indicated 17% of fast food outlets were located in the most deprived areas, compared with just 3% in the least deprived.

PHE chief nutritionist Dr Alison Tedstone said: "Local authorities have the power to help support people in making healthier choices.

"They need to question whether these fast food hotspots are compatible with their work to help families and young children live healthier lives."

'Tasty and cheap'

Prof Russell Viner, of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said: "Kids are coming out of school hungry and finding themselves surrounded by cheap chicken shops, chip shops and other types of tempting junk food.

"This food is tasty and cheap - it's easy to blame the individual, but humans, particularly children, will find it hard to resist tempting food.

"Children from wealthy backgrounds will not be surrounded by junk food in this way."

The report comes a week after the government published its updated Childhood Obesity Plan, which aims to halve childhood obesity in England by 2030.

As well as restrictions on junk food ads and supermarket checkout sweets, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt MP pledged to "help close the deprivation gap."
Healthy chicken shops to fight obesity Reality Check: Why ban fast food within 400m of schools? Takeaway limit near schools plan backed
Healthy zones

Some local authorities are already developing "healthy zones" by limiting the number of fast food outlets.

In Gateshead, where 23% of 10- and 11-year-olds are obese, new planning rules were put in place in 2015.

All hot food takeaway applications have to be accompanied by a health impact assessment that looks at:

where children congregate

numbers of hot food takeaways already in existence

high levels of obesity

Since then, no new planning applications for fast food takeaways have been approved.

Other councils are working to improve the offering at existing takeouts.

In Tottenham, Taster's Fried Chicken recently started a new healthier menu for children.

The menu included grilled chicken, salad and chunky chips (lower in fat than French fries) in controlled portion sizes, at the same price as regular fried chicken.

Another scheme has been trialled by the Alexandra Rose Charity, which offers vouchers to low-income families to help them buy fresh fruit and vegetables.

Since the scheme began, 2014, about 750 families have taken part, in London and Liverpool.

And of those families, 95% ate more fruit and vegetables and reported improved health and wellbeing.

But Izzi Seccombe, from the Local Government Association, said more needed to be done.

"Numerous councils have set curbs on new fast food outlets - but current legislation means they lack planning powers to tackle the clustering of existing takeaways already open.

"New legislation is needed to empower councils to help drive forward an effective redesign of damaging food environments."

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'Five times more fast food' in poor areas

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Deprived areas such as Blackpool and parts of Manchester and Liverpool have five times more fast food outlets than affluent areas, a survey suggests. The data, from Public Health England (PHE), compared levels of deprivation with numbers of takeaways such as chip shops, burger bars and pizza places.

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Recruitment agencies are warning that they cannot secure the number of workers needed by British farmers to pick their fruit and vegetables.

Over half of recruitment companies could not find the labour even in the "quiet" first months of this year.

The figure has been released by the Association of Labour Providers.

A survey by the National Farmers Union shows that last year there was a 12.5% shortfall of seasonal workers required to work on horticulture farms.

This led to some valuable produce being left to rot in the fields.
The strawberry-picking robots doing a job humans won't
A total of 99% of seasonal workers on British farms come from Eastern Europe. Two-thirds of these come from Romania and Bulgaria.

Kent-based AG Recruitment and Management works in Romania to supply labour for 80 growers across the UK.

Over the next few months it needs to find 4,000 people to pick strawberries, raspberries, and eventually apples and pears. The agency is nowhere near that target, and is having to call farmers to say it will not have enough pickers for them.

According to co-director, Estera Amesz, the numbers of people wanting to work in Britain fell sharply after Brexit. A key issue was the fall in the value of the pound. She says it is also down to the uncertainty; people aren't sure what documents they now need.

"We used to have queues outside our office in Bucharest. Thirty to 40 people would come a day. Now, on a good day, it's a handful. We used to take the crème de la crème. Now, we are scraping the barrel."

The firm runs criminal history checks and the candidates do dexterity tests, but Mrs Amesz says her company has had to widen the net. She says she now considers those that, "have two hands and two legs, and stand a 50% chance of making it".

Rather than people coming to the company offices, they now have to travel deep into the Romanian countryside to sell the idea of coming to work in the UK.

At one presentation in the city of Barlad, close to the border with Moldova, 30 people turn up, but only five sign up.

Alina Stan, 31, decides to make the journey. She has come to the UK before to pick flowers and fruit. With the money, she's building a house for her and her family. But as soon as she can, she'll stop coming. She says: "We hope in the next two years to be able to finish our home. But leaving my children behind is very difficult."

According to Doug Amesz, Estera Amesz' husband and business partner: "We need an incentive. Previously we were looking for people with some English, now we find it difficult to recruit anyone with English."

Romania is one of the poorest countries in Europe. It is one of the largest recipients of EU money.

However, almost 30 years after the Romanian Revolution of 1989 and the fall of the communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu, its economy is growing at 6.9%. That's a much faster rate compared to Britain's.

It's creating a newly wealthy middle class.

In Iasi, Romania's second city, young people say they have no intention of picking fruit.

Puiu Jonut, 23, studies geography.

"The English pick and choose what they want to do and leave the harder jobs for the foreigners," he told BBC News.

"There are a lot of English people that could work the fields and not let the fruit rot. That's why Brexit to me was really strange because the foreigners are coming to do the hard jobs and the low-paid jobs - surely you want them to stay."

Growers in Romania are also finding it tough to find pickers.

The director of the Research and Development Centre for Fruit Growing in Iasi, Gelu Corneanu, said: "It's really difficult to find workers to harvest our crops, mainly because they are attracted to other European countries.

"People tend to go and harvest garlic in Spain, then they harvest cherries in Romania and then they harvest strawberries in Greece."

British farmers warned last year of the difficulties they were facing with recruitment, and according to the ALP report, three-quarters of agriculture and horticulture businesses anticipate shortages in low and unskilled roles in 2018.

Of these, over a quarter envisage a labour supply crisis. Some farmers have increased wages, bonuses, improved accommodation and other benefits to try to attract more foreign workers to come.

The government has pledged to address the issue of whether or not to introduce a scheme to give seasonal workers from further afield special permits to work in the UK, similar to the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) that was closed in 2013. So far, no alternative has been proposed.

In a statement, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said: "Defra and the Home Office are working closely to ensure the labour needs of the agriculture sector are met once we leave the EU.

"We have been clear that up until December 2020, employers in the agricultural and food processing sectors will be free to recruit EU citizens to fill vacancies and those arriving to work will be able to stay in the UK afterwards."

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Recruitment agencies are warning that they cannot secure the number of workers needed by British farmers to pick their fruit and vegetables. Over half of recruitment companies could not find the labour even in the "quiet" first months of this year. The figure has been released by the Association of Labour Providers.

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Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

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Avoiding meat and dairy is 'single biggest way' to reduce your impact on Earth

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Biggest analysis to date reveals huge footprint of livestock - it provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland

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Avoiding meat and dairy is 'single biggest way' to reduce your impact on Earth

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Biggest analysis to date reveals huge footprint of livestock - it provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland

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Thousands of British cattle reared for supermarket beef are being fattened in industrial-scale units where livestock have little or no access to pasture.

Research by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established that the UK is now home to a number of industrial-scale fattening units with herds of up to 3,000 cattle at a time being held in grassless pens for extended periods rather than being grazed or barn-reared.

Intensive beef farms, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are commonplace in the US. But the practice of intensive beef farming in the UK has not previously been widely acknowledged - and the findings have sparked the latest clash over the future of British farming.

The beef industry says that the scale of operations involved enables farmers to rear cattle efficiently and profitably, and ensure high welfare standards. But critics say there are welfare and environmental concerns around this style of farming, and believe that the farms are evidence of a wider intensification of the UK's livestock sector which is not being sufficiently debated, and which may have an impact on small farmers.

In contrast to large intensive pig and poultry farms, industrial beef units do not require a government permit, and there are no official records held by DEFRA on how many intensive beef units are in operation.

But the Guardian and the Bureau has identified nearly a dozen operating across England, including at sites in Kent, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. The largest farms fatten up to 6,000 cattle a year.

Drone footage and satellite images reveal how thousands of cattle are being kept at some sites in outdoor pens, known as corrals, sometimes surrounded by walls, fences or straw bales. Although the cattle will have spent time grazing in fields prior to fattening, some will be confined in pens for around a quarter of their lives, until they are slaughtered.

Supermarket demand is believed to be, at least in part, driving the trend. In addition, some smaller and medium-scale beef producers have struggled to farm profitably in recent years, with sometimes tight margins and fluctuating costs. Most of the units identified are believed to have grown incrementally, rather than setting up from scratch.

A number of retailers, including the Co-op, Lidl and Waitrose, are among those found to be sourcing beef from UK intensive industrial scale farms, most of which are privately owned but sell to beef processing companies, which in turn supply retailers.

Chris Mallon, director of the National Beef Association (NBA), the industry trade body, said the reason the largest units have come about was purely down to "efficiency".

"What we're talking about here is commercial production, for feeding people. It's not niche market. A lot of this will be on supermarket shelves - that's where it's coming into its own. In the catering side as well, they'll be doing it," he said.

"One of the things we've seen over the years is supermarket domination of the beef trade. What they want is specification, size of cuts, size to fit certain packaging, size of roasts - this has all become incredibly important."

But he cautioned that farms dedicated to fattening cattle had always been bigger than those rearing them, "so actually having higher concentration of feeding cattle on units [isn't new].

"The difference is we're getting some larger units now and that will be because of economies of scale ... if you can give the people you're supplying a constant supply of cattle that are in the right specification, that makes you more valuable. And that's one of the reasons we've seen a move towards it."

Dr Jude Capper, a livestock expert who has studied intensive beef units in the US and elsewhere said that due to economies of scale "it's almost inevitable that a larger farm can produce a greater quantity of a more affordable product - we see this in almost all agricultural sectors globally, just as we do in other industries".

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A UK unit. "Cows belong on pasture," according to Compassion in World Farming. Photograph: Google Earth

The Guardian and Bureau last year revealed that 800 poultry and pig "mega farms" or CAFOs have appeared in the British countryside in recent years, some housing more than a million chickens or about 20,000 pigs.

Following the revelations, the environment secretary, Michael Gove, pledged that Brexit would not be allowed to result in the spread of US-style agribusiness: "I do not want to see, and we will not have, US-style farming in this country, " he said in a parliamentary statement.

Although the number of beef units is tiny in comparison with intensive poultry or pig farms, the latest findings have further fuelled fears that the UK could be embracing industrial-scale practices.

Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavillion, said the farms were "gravely concerning" and that "with Britain hurtling towards Brexit, and with our animal and environmental protections facing an uncertain future, I'm worried that we could end up adopting more of this US-style agricultural practice".

Richard Young, Policy Director at the Sustainable Food Trust, said: "Keeping large number of cattle together in intensive conditions removes all justification for rearing them and for consumers to eat red meat... More than two-thirds of UK farmland is under grass for sound environmental reasons and the major justifications for keeping cattle and eating red meat are that they produce high quality protein and healthy fats from land that is not suitable for growing crops."

Young added that that smaller scale beef farmers might feel the impact, as larger farms were likely to be "more efficient in purely economic terms", allowing the supermarkets "to drive down the retail price of beef below the price at which more traditional farmers can produce it. As a result they go out of business."

The changing face of traditional UK beef production

Beef production in the UK typically involves three distinct stages - calf rearing, growing and fattening - with many farms specialising in one part of the rearing process. Cattle may move between a number of different farms during their lifecycle. (A smaller number of farms rear cattle from birth and keep them on the same farm until being sent to the abattoir.)

After spending time on pasture many cattle are moved to dedicated "finishing units" and are typically housed in barns or grazed whilst being fattened ahead of slaughter, often for around 6 months. Many are fed specialist diets designed to encourage weight gain.

But in the US, much beef fattening takes place in "feedlots" with cattle held in vast outdoor pens where the largest facilities confine up to 85,000 livestock. Such "feedlots" have proved controversial in the past, both because of their size and because many cattle were given hormones and antibiotics, sometimes to encourage rapid growth. (Such practices are not permitted in the UK).

Despite acknowledging the arrival of intensive beef farming in the UK, experts reject the notion that the British beef sector will see a wholesale shift towards farming on a US-scale.

graphic
In the US the rise of the CAFO has been paralleled by a fall in the number of small farmers.

"Are we likely to see huge - 100,000 head - feedlots? No. We don't have the market, infrastructure or public demand for them," said Capper. "However, could we make better use of male calves from dairy farms by rearing them for beef in feedlot-style operations, using feeds that we cannot [or] will not eat, such as by-products from human food crop production? Absolutely - some beef producers are already doing this."

Caroline Lucas called for the system of permits to be tightened up, and said "the Government should be officially recording the number of feedlots rather than letting reporting slip through a loophole ... we need a proper debate in this country over what kind of agriculture we want in the future."

A spokesperson for DEFRA said that "beef farms are regulated in exactly the same way as any other farms". But it later acknowledged that "Defra does not have a database of feedlot style units...The Cattle Tracing System can provide figures on the number of holdings split by premised type e.g. Agricultural Holding, Slaughterhouse, Market etc. and the number of animals registered to each. However, it does not hold any data in respect of the feeding practices on the holdings."

Waitrose said of its own supplier: "Animal welfare is of the highest importance to us and a large farm does not equal poor animal welfare standards. The farm is run under a bespoke environmental management plan in conjunction with Natural England. All the cattle graze the marshes during the summer season then during the winter months, when the grass is dormant the cattle are bought back to the yard when the finishing/fattening cattle are housed in covered sheds. For clarification the length of grazing season is weather dependent, once the grass stops growing the cattle need to be yarded and fed a forage based ration in accordance with animal welfare and best practice."

A spokesperson for the British Retail Consortium said: "Our members take their responsibilities to animal welfare very seriously and work closely with trusted suppliers so that high welfare standards are upheld. They have strict processes in place and will thoroughly investigate any evidence of non-conformity to ensure that any problems are immediately addressed."

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A UK unit. The reason that larger units have come about is down to efficiency, according to Chris Mallon, director of the National Beef Association. Photograph: Bureau/Guardian

The Guardian approached several of the largest units but all declined to comment.

Some in the beef industry itself have expressed unease about the intensive farming system. Russ Carrington, of the Pasture Fed Livestock Association, said: "It is sad that the travel towards cheap, de-valued food has led to the removal of livestock from fields. There is a very different, more sustainable way of producing high quality beef which is also considerably healthier for humans to eat - 100% grass-fed and grain-free, which has lower total and saturated fat content, a better ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acids and more vitamins and minerals, which comes from the diverse pasture they eat."

Pressure group Compassion In World Farming (CIWF) have raised concerns that some cattle held at in "feedlots" are kept in "high stocking densities" with little or no shelter or shade and "no dry ground to rest on." The group says it believes "cows belong on pasture".

In response Dr Jude Capper said: "In my experience at feedlots all over the world, I've yet to see any welfare issues that are inherent to the system. If we are to assume that cattle must be able to graze to lead a 'happy' life, then confinement may be regarded as an issue. However, I've yet to see this being backed by [any evidence-base]."

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A unit in the UK. "It's almost inevitable that a larger farm can produce more a greater quantity of a more affordable product," says Dr Jude Capper. Photograph: Bureau/Guardian

Evidence compiled by the Bureau and Guardian suggests that most intensive beef farms appear to operate to high welfare standards.

Chris Mallon said: "Cattle actually will be very happy in [these systems]. Cattle in the wild don't build nests for themselves or hide in caves, they're an outdoor animal and I think we've got to remember that."
Topics

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Revealed: industrial-scale beef farming comes to the UK

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Thousands of British cattle reared for supermarket beef are being fattened in industrial-scale units where livestock have little or no access to pasture. Research by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established that the UK is now home to a number of industrial-scale fattening units with herds of up to 3,000 cattle at a time being held in grassless pens for extended periods rather than being grazed or barn-reared.

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Revealed: industrial-scale beef farming comes to the UK

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Sad carrot? Pathetic potato? Tips to keep food fresh

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Five tricks to help perishables last longer than their recommended 'best before' date.

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Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

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It is often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to fruit and vegetables, one third of them never even make it to our grocery store shelves because they are rejected on their way from the farm to the store.

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In Kibera, one of Africa's largest slums, residents have found a new way of responding to the challenge of food insecurity. In the heart of the bustling, informal settlement they are championing an unusual form of urban farming: the sack gardens of Kibera.

These urban farms consist of a series of sacks that are filled with manure, soil and small stones that enable water to drain. From the tops and sides of these sacks, often referred to as multi-storey gardens, farmers in Kibera grow kale, spinach, onions, tomatoes, vegetables and arrowroot.

The concept is a recent initiative of the National Youth Service (NYS), a government agency that promotes youth affairs through the ministry of devolution and planning. The approach is seen as a cheap and healthy solution to food insecurity and runaway unemployment in Nairobi's slum. Kibera has thousands of sack gardens spread across 16 villages in the slum, according to Douglas Kangi, principal agricultural officer on the Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Project at the ministry of agriculture. The government plans to introduce the initiative to Kisumu and Mombasa counties.

At Kambi Maruu, one of the villages in Kibera, young farmers start their day at around 8am, in the open field where they have their sack farming project. They water the plants, weed and prune them where necessary and spray them with insecticide.

Ramadhan Abdulrahman, 25, is one of these farmers. Before being contracted by the NYS to take care of the vegetables in a local sack garden, he was unemployed. Today he earns a stipend of 6,592 shillings per month and saves up to Sh1,200 per week.

"Before this sack farming project was introduced here I used to use between Sh280 and Sh420 to buy vegetables per week, but I now use the money to buy other foodstuff," he said, adding that he used to struggle to feed himself. Through his sack farming he now feels more assured of getting at least one decent meal a day.

Abdulrahman is not alone in experiencing urban food insecurity. Across Kenya an estimated 1.5 million people are acutely food insecure and research from the International Fund for Agricultural Development suggests that a large number of households in Kenya limit their food intake to one or two meals a day. Nairobi like many other African cities, is experiencing rapid urbanisation, and urban food insecurity is on the rise. One estimate suggests as many as 38% of Kenya's urban populations (pdf) experience chronic food insecurity.

Urban farmers like Abdulrahman receive technical support from the ministry of agriculture, livestock and fisheries - through their Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Project.

"Apart from training them on the type of insecticides to use in event of pest attacks, we also teach them how to make multi-storey gardens using sacks," says Kangi.

While making the sacks, farmers are taught to ensure that, for each wheelbarrow of soil, they add one wheelbarrow of manure and then water the sacks steadily.

"We also ensure they use the right materials while making the sack and teach them business management skills," says Kangi.

The initiative, however, is not only about access to food. Abdulrahman explains that the money farmers earn from selling vegetables goes into a savings and credit society they have formed, which in turn will provide loans to young people to start their own businesses. For Fred Onserio, headmaster at Stara Rescue Centre and School which caters for more than 500 orphans and other vulnerable children in Kibera, urban farming has reduced the cost of their school feeding programme.

Sack farming has the potential not only to make food more available and affordable, but also more nutritious. Sophie Donde is the programme manager of Kicoshep, an NGO helping residents of Kibera to cope with HIV and Aids. Kicoshep, she explains, promotes urban farming in Kibera by providing sacks and other material to people living with HIV and Aids. "People taking ARVs [antiretroviral drugs] need to take a lot of vegetables to boost their nutrients and that is why we encourage them to plant their own vegetables," she adds.

This approach, she says, allows them to save enough money to buy other foodstuff like eggs and milk to improve their diet.

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Fred Onserio, headmaster of Stara rescue centre and school, waters vegetables in the sack gardens in the school grounds. Photograph: Patrick Mayoyo/Africa Eco News

Farming in a slum, however, inevitably has its complications. Not only is land and space scarce, but finding areas free from contamination can also be a challenge.

According to Eva Kadzo, a public health officer and community strategist with the ministry of health, sack farming in Kibera has helped discourage people from planting crops near dump sites and sewers, which had been a common practice in the area. Many of the sewers contain heavy metals such as lead and mercury, creating a health risk to those who consume vegetables grown near them.

Joyce Anyango, 30, a mother of three, says becoming an independent sack farmer has changed her life. She makes between $40 and $70 per month from selling her vegetables, and plans to increase her number of sacks to boost her income. "I used to struggle to feed my family," she says. "However, these days I not only have vegetables readily available, but also earn some little money from selling them."
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on Twitter. Topics

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improving nutrition and food security - global development professionals network

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How to grow food in a slum: lessons from the sack farmers of Kibera

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In Kibera, one of Africa's largest slums, residents have found a new way of responding to the challenge of food insecurity. In the heart of the bustling, informal settlement they are championing an unusual form of urban farming: the sack gardens of Kibera.

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What are the economics of meat?

Food and farming is one of the biggest economic sectors in the world. We are no longer in the 14th century, when as much as 76% of the population worked in agriculture - but farming still employs more than 26% of all workers globally. And that does not include the people who work along the meat supply chain: the slaughterers, packagers, retailers and chefs.

In 2016, the world's meat production was estimated at 317m metric tons, and that is expected to continue to grow. Figures for the value of the global meat industry vary wildly from $90bn to as much as $741bn.

Although the number of people directly employed by farming is currently less than 2% in the UK, the food chain now includes the agribusiness companies, the retailers, and the entertainment sector. According to the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in 2014 the food and drink manufacturing sector contributed £27bn to the economy, and employed 3.8 million people.

It is not simple to separate out the contribution that meat production makes to this - particularly globally. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation states that livestock is about 40% of the global value of agricultural output and supports the livelihoods and food security of almost a 1.3 billion people.

Animal welfare box
What about its cultural and social importance?
Cooked meat may have been partially responsible for the large brains that characterise Homo sapiens and have put humans where we are now. Cooking made calories from meat (and from vegetables) easier to consume and absorb than in a raw form.

And the domestication of certain animals - along with the domestication of wild grains and vegetables - marked the beginning of human agricultural history in the "fertile crescent". Throughout human history the hunting and farming of meat has been part of our stories and mythologies and some of our legal and religious systems; the fatted calf for the prodigal son; the medieval forest laws that created areas where no one but English royalty could hunt; the sacrifical sheep to mark the beginning of Eid Al-Adha; even the roasted wild boars consumed at the end of every adventure by Asterix and Obelix.

But is meat still crucial to human life? Some argue that, just because we've always eaten meat, that doesn't mean we always have to. If we can get all the dietary nutrients and protein that we need elsewhere, should we?

How has meat production changed?
The old-fashioned vision of a mixed farm with wheat and chickens and pigs still exists. More than half of the farms in the US, for example, were small enough in 2012 to have sales of less than $10,000 dollars. But the 20th century saw the application of the principles of the industrial revolution to agriculture - how could inputs be minimised and profits be maximised?

The result was the factory farm, first for chickens, then pigs, and more recently cattle. Producers discovered that animals could be kept inside, and fed grain, and could be bred to grow more quickly and get fatter in the right places. Since 1925, the average days to market for a US chicken has been reduced from 112 to 48, while its weight has ballooned from a market weight of 2.5 pounds to 6.2.

Pig and cattle farming has followed suit. Sows are held in gestation crates for up to four weeks once they are pregnant, and then put into farrowing crates once they've had their piglets to prevent them accidentally crushing their young. Industrially reared pigs spend their lives in indoor pens. Cattle farming is now being similarly streamlined, with cows in the last few months of their lives being fattened in feedlots with no access to grass and sometimes no shelter.

Impact on human health box
What is the environmental impact of our current farming model?
It is extremely difficult to separate out the different impacts of different farming models and types. Many measurements look at agricultural impact without making a distinction between arable v livestock, or industrial v small farms. However, the following information begins to indicate the scale of the problem.

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Eutrophication of a river during summer in France as a result of nutrient-rich farm run-off. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

An influential study in 2010 of the water footprints for meat estimated that while vegetables had a footprint of about 322 litres per kg, and fruits drank up 962, meat was far more thirsty: chicken came in at 4,325l/kg, pork at 5,988l/kg, sheep/goat meat at 8,763l/kg, and beef at a stupendous 15,415l/kg. Some non-meat products were also pretty eye-watering: nuts came in at 9,063l/kg.

To put these figures into context: the planet faces growing water constraints as our freshwater reservoirs and aquifers dry up. On some estimates farming accounts for about 70% of water used in the world today, but a 2013 study found that it uses up to 92% of our freshwater, with nearly one-third of that related to animal products.

Farms contribute to water pollution in a range of ways: some of those are associated more closely with arable farming, and some with livestock, but it's worth remembering that one-third of the world's grain is now fed to animals. The FAO believes that the livestock sector, which is growing and intensifying faster than crop production, has "serious implications" for water quality.

The types of water pollution include: nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilisers and animal excreta); pesticides; sediment; organic matter (oxygen demanding substances such as plant matter and livestock excreta); pathogens ( E coli etc); metals (selenium etc) and emerging pollutants (drug residues, hormones and feed additives).

The impacts are wide-reaching. Eutrophication is caused by excesses of nutrients and organic matter (animal faeces, leftover feed and crop residues) - which cause algae and plants to grow excessively and use up all the oxygen in the body of wate at the expense of other species. A review in 2015 identified 415 coastal bodies already suffering these problems. Pesticide pollution can kill weeds and insects away from the agricultural area, with impacts that may be felt all the way up the food chain. And although scientists do not yet have full data on the connection between antibiotic use in animals and rising levels of antibiotic resistance in the human population, water pollution by antibiotics (which continue to have an active life even after going through the animal and into the water) is definitely in the frame.

Livestock is the world's largest user of land resources, says the FAO, "with grazing land and cropland dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80% of all agricultural land. Feed crops are grown in one-third of total cropland, while the total land area occupied by pasture is equivalent to 26% of the ice-free terrestrial surface".

It's hard to work out exactly what quantity of greenhouse gases (GHG) is emitted by the meat industry from farm to fork; carbon emissions are not officially counted along entire chains in that way, and so a number of complicated studies and calculations have attempted to fill the gap.

According to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agriculture, forestry and other land use accounts for 24% of greenhouse gases. Attempts to pick out the role of animal farming within that have come up with a huge range of numbers, from 6-32%: the difference, according to the Meat Atlas, "depends on the basis of measurement". Should it just be livestock, or should it include a whole lot of other factors? Different models of farming have different levels of emissions: this has generated an energetic discussion around extensive versus intensive farming, and regenerative farming - a model that aims to combine technologies and techniques to regenerate soils and biodiversity levels while also sequestrating carbon.

What about the giant companies that dominate the sector? A 2017 landmark study found that the top three meat firms - JBS, Cargill and Tyson - emitted more greenhouse gases in 2016 than all of France.

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Cattle in the Brazilian Amazon. Photograph: Rodrigo Baleia

What next?
Some argue that veganism is the only sane way forward. A study last year showed, for example, that if all Americans substituted beans for beef, the country would be close to meeting the greenhouse gas goals agreed by Barack Obama.

But there are some alternatives. Reducing the amount of meat you eat while improving its quality is advocated by many environmental groups. But where do you find this meat? The organic movement was founded on the pioneering work of Sir Alfred Howard. It is still relatively small - in Europe 5.7% of agricultural land is managed organically - but influential. There are other agricultural models, such as biodynamic farming and permaculture. More recently some innovators have been fusing technology with environmental principles in the form of agroforestry, silvopasture, conservation farming, or regenerative agriculture to create farming methods which all encompass carbon sequestration, high biodiversity and good animal welfare. A recent study showed that managed grazing (a technique which involves moving cows around to graze) is an effective way to sequester carbon. However, while organic and biodynamic meats have labels, regenerative farming, as yet, does not - so you need to investigate your farmer yourself.

Further reading
The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation has a huge collection of data, and has also published some crucial reports on this issue, including the groundbreaking Livestock's long shadow.

The Meat Atlas.

Some institutions doing interesting research include Sustain; The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy; Brighter Green; Sustainable Food Trust; IPES-food.

Farming bodies the National Farmers' Union, the Farm Bureau, Copa-Cogeca.
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What are the economics of meat? Food and farming is one of the biggest economic sectors in the world. We are no longer in the 14th century, when as much as 76% of the population worked in agriculture - but farming still employs more than 26% of all workers globally.

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Beer and sandwiches have gone together ever since Harold Wilson invited trade union leaders for talks at No 10. Now brewers have gone one better and created a beer made from leftover sandwich bread.

It is a tasty solution to the shocking daily waste of bread, with more than 24 million slices thrown away in Britain every day by consumers alone. Three new beers will soon be available at Marks & Spencer made from surplus bread from its sandwich factory that would otherwise be discarded or turned into animal feed.

Suffolk brewery Adnams is using the crusted "ends" of sliced sandwich loaves - frozen by M&S supplier Greencore in Northampton and then sent to the brewery's headquarters in Southwold - to create the new beers, which are already on sale in some M&S stores and will soon be available to order online.

Making beer out of bread isn't new - its history stretches back 4,000 years to a time when brewers and bakers worked together. The difference is that the new beers use bread that would otherwise go to waste.

Bread is made from grains such as barley, wheat and rye - exactly the same raw materials that are used to make beer. In this case, surplus crusts are mashed down into the mix and replace some of the malted barley traditionally used in brewing to create the Used Our Loaf range.

Each batch of the new beer will use 700kg of surplus bread with three times the quantity of malted barley. And using bread has an added benefit of helping to reduce carbon emissions from the energy-intensive brewing process.

The three Used Our Loaf beers are a triple English hop pale ale, a raspberry fruit beer and an Earl Grey pale ale. If the drinks prove popular with customers, the process will be rolled out across a wider range of beers.

The ingredient switch is similar to that of the popular Toast Ale, launched two years ago by Tristram Stuart, founder of the food waste charity Feedback. Stuart was inspired to use leftover bread to make beer by a Belgian brewer who follows the same process. Toast Ale is now brewed in the US, South Africa, Iceland and Brazil. All distributable profits go to Feedback to help end food waste while its original online open-source recipe - which replaces a third of the malted barley with bread (equivalent to one slice a bottle) - has now been downloaded 30,000 times.

Richard Applegate, an M&S beer technologist, said: "Consumers who are fans of beer will be familiar with Toast Ale, and we wanted to find a way to use the surplus bread from our sandwiches in a more useful and environment-friendly way."

M&S launched pre-packaged sandwiches in Britain in 1981 and now sells 92.7 million a year, of which 72.4 million are conventional sandwiches and the rest baguettes and wraps.

According to official figures, about 10 million tonnes of food is wasted annually in Britain, in homes and in the commercial sector. Bread is one of Britain's most wasted foodstuffs, with an estimated 44% thrown away because people do not get around to using it in time and worry it is stale.

Fergus Fitzgerald, head brewer at Adnams, said: "Making malted barley is an energy-intense process, therefore by using bread this reduces the carbon footprint; the saving from the three new beers is an estimated 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide."

Toast Ale notably works with Wold Top Brewery in North Yorkshire, one of the UK's most sustainable breweries. And it recently became the first UK beer company to certify as a "B Corporation", joining a global movement of people using business as a force for social good. A B Corporation is to business what Fair Trade certification is to, say, coffee or organic certification is to milk, and means the company meets rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency.

Meanwhile, the brewery has launched a new batch of beer brewed with surplus bread from the EAT sandwich chain.

"It's great that bakeries and retailers are teaming up with social enterprises and charities to stop so much food being wasted," said Chris Young of the Real Bread Campaign. "But the real problem lies with the big industrial loaf manufacturers and the supermarkets. We'd like to see far less surplus being generated in the first place."
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Raise a toast! New beers made from leftover bread help to cut food waste

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Beer and sandwiches have gone together ever since Harold Wilson invited trade union leaders for talks at No 10. Now brewers have gone one better and created a beer made from leftover sandwich bread. It is a tasty solution to the shocking daily waste of bread, with more than 24 million slices thrown away in Britain every day by consumers alone.

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Raise a toast! New beers made from leftover bread help to cut food waste

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Last year, asparagus growers were harvesting as early as 8 April. This spring, they are not expecting to harvest their open-field crop until the last week of April - a week later than the official start of the season, St George's Day, 23 April. Welcome to just one of the consequences of Britain's disastrously delayed spring.

"We have had a very challenging time," said Guy Smith, vice president of the National Farmers' Union (NFU). "March breezed in with the ' beast from the east ' and went out with the worst bank holiday on record." For asparagus-lovers there is at least an upside. "The combination has to be right for the crowns to push through," explained Per Hogberg, of grower Wealmoor. "The air temperature has to be at least 12C, while the soil temperature should be between 8C and 10C. With warmer weather expected, consumers can expect a bumper crop in mid-May," he said.

It is not just asparagus growers praying for a warm, dry spell. The earlier farmers can sow, the more chance their crops have to achieve their potential. "My father was a farmer and one of his sayings was 'a peck of dust in March was worth a king's ransom'," Smith said. "If the ground is nice and friable and makes a good seed-bed then it can be potentially quite lucrative for the farmer. Well, that's gone this year."

Farmers griping about the weather goes with the job. But Smith fears something is happening to Britain's weather that has consequences which stretch far beyond farming.

"We farm in north-east Essex, in the driest spot in the British Isles, and so we're keen observers of the British weather. More often now we seem to be stuck in long periods of wet months and then long periods of dry months, which is more challenging for farmers."

Adam Lockwood grows spring onions in the Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire. "At the minute we're struggling to get going," he said. "Potato growers haven't even started planting yet and drilling dates are well behind where they should be.

"We're lucky in one sense that what we're doing is all seed. I can buy seed and put it in a shed and it doesn't matter, but lettuce and brassica growers who have plants raised in a nursery that were ready weeks ago, they're now having to throw those away."

Like Smith, Lockwood thinks that the climate is changing. "We're getting more rain in a shorter period rather than evenly distributed across the year - that's what I'm noticing. And you're getting more intense dry periods. It's more extreme."

Livestock and dairy producers have been particularly hard hit. "It's been a very late spring, even for a hill farm where we are," said Richard Findlay, chair of the NFU's livestock board, who farms in the North York Moors National Park.

"Instead of keeping the sheep in a couple of days after they've had lambs, we're keeping them in for two or three weeks. We're very fortunate in that we have the buildings to do it, but a lot of neighbours who don't are struggling and have had many more losses.

"We have nearly 1,000 sheep and it's costing us about £1,000 extra a week at the moment to feed and house them to avoid a lot of losses. If we turned them out in poor weather there would be very little grass to eat."

Findlay believes that it will be farmers who end up absorbing the extra costs, rather than consumers. But this puts them at the mercy of the markets, and poor prices for their lambs later in the year could see some producers call it a day. "It's been the worst and most challenging time that I can remember," Findlay said. "It really started last summer, which was very wet and quite cool, and the autumn and winter have generally been very wet. Sheep can stand cold weather and they can stand wet weather but when there is a prolonged period of both, it really pulls them down. We would normally expect to lose 1% of the ewe flock in this winter period and we've probably lost 3% to 4%, despite our best efforts."

What the farmers are experiencing first-hand accords with what scientists are finding. Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at NCAS-Climate, University of Reading, who helps run www.WeatherRescue.org - a site where volunteers digitise millions of historical weather observations - says that UK temperatures have risen by around 1.5 degrees in the last 150 years.

"It's basic physics: warmer air can hold more moisture so, as the atmosphere warms, it means, when it does rain heavily, we get more rain than we would otherwise have done from the same storm 100 years ago."

In the short term, farmers like Smith hope that the coming week's warmer, drier conditions are going to stretch through April. In the longer term, he believes that the first three months of 2018 should sound alarm bells.

"We need to remember that it's reckless to take food production for granted," he said.

Counting the cost of Britain's recent bad weather

Asparagus

Growers say their crops will not be ready until the end of the month, almost three weeks late.

Many growers have yet to plant.

Spring onions

Seeds which should have been sown back in February yet to go in.

Lamb and beef

Stocks have been kept indoors for weeks, meaning higher fodder prices and possible price rises for consumers.

Brassicas and lettuce

Plants due to go into the fields have had to be thrown away.

Arable

Spring barley and spring wheat weeks behind sowing schedule.

* The name of the North York Moors National Park was corrected on 19 April 2018.

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British farmers in turmoil as delayed spring plays havoc with growing season

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Last year, asparagus growers were harvesting as early as 8 April. This spring, they are not expecting to harvest their open-field crop until the last week of April - a week later than the official start of the season, St George's Day, 23 April. Welcome to just one of the consequences of Britain's disastrously delayed spring.

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British farmers in turmoil as delayed spring plays havoc with growing season

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January 22, 2016 - Much of what we know about agriculture may no longer be true, given Africa's rapid economic growth, urbanization, high food prices, and a scarcity of quality data. In this project, researchers separate facts from myths about Africa's agricultural sector, its farmers and their livelihoods. The goal Read More "

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Agriculture in Africa: Telling Facts from Myths

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January 22, 2016 - Much of what we know about agriculture may no longer be true, given Africa's rapid economic growth, urbanization, high food prices, and a scarcity of quality data. In this project, researchers separate facts from myths about Africa's agricultural sector, its farmers and their livelihoods.

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Scientists and entrepreneurs have been cooking up innovative ways to put food on our tables. What are they serving up next?

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Why what we eat is crucial to the climate change question | Ruth Khasaya Oniang’o | Environment | The Guardian

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Why what we eat is crucial to the climate change question | Ruth Khasaya Oniang’o | Environment | The Guardian

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Did you know that what's on your plate plays a larger role in contributing to climate change than the car you drive? When most wealthy people think about their carbon footprint, or their contributions to climate change, they'll think about where their electricity and heat come from or what they drive. They'll think about fossil fuels and miles per gallon, about LED lights and mass transit - but not so much about combine harvesters or processed meals or food waste. Few consider the impacts of the food they eat, despite the fact that globally, food systems account for roughly one quarter of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions. That's more than the entire transportation sector, more than all industrial practices, and roughly the same as the production of electricity and heat.

Meanwhile, the most immediate threat of climate change for most of the global population will be at the dinner table, as our ability to grow critical staple crops is being affected by the warming we've already experienced. Between 1980 and 2008, for instance, wheat yields dropped 5.5 % and maize yields fell 3.8% due to rising temperatures. Climate change threatens the food security of millions of poor people around the world. Young people are increasingly keen to protect the environment by shifting to animal-product-free diets. They seek plant proteins which taste like meat, while insects are also growing popular as an alternative.

What these inverse challenges - that food and agriculture are both enormous contributors to climate change, and massively impacted by it - really tell us is that our food systems, as currently structured, are facing major challenges.

There is a much larger problem that implores us to look beyond farm and agricultural practices. We need to open our eyes to solutions that address the full scope of the challenge to create more sustainable and equitable food systems. That way, we can provide healthy food for all people while we protect our planet's resources at the same time.

So what are food systems? Everything from seed and soil to the supermarket to the plate to the landfill. Food systems include the growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, and disposal of food and food-related items.

While farming alone accounts for 10-12% of global greenhouse gas emissions, when we look at entire food systems the contributions to climate change more than double. A recent report published by the Meridian Institute lays out the many factors throughout food systems that spell trouble for the climate, and also explains why a broad systems-wide perspective is necessary for implementing effective changes.

Consider deforestation and soil. A narrow view of agriculture alone would neglect the fact that a full 80% of the forests that are clear cut or destroyed are done so to create farmland. Forests are massive carbon sinks. So is soil, locking away two to three times as much carbon as there is present in the atmosphere. But farmers can help restore ecosystem functions and build resilient communities by producing crops and livestock in productive ways that sequester carbon and protect forests.

Or consider food waste. Not just the scraps that you throw away, but throughout the entire food system. A staggering 30-40% of the food produced in the world is never eaten. Some never gets harvested, some spoils before it reaches consumers, and a lot is tossed away by retailers, restaurants, and at home. For the sake of comparing emissions, if food waste were its own country it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, after only China and the United States.

This says nothing of the gross injustice of wasting so much food while so many in the world go hungry. In the developing world, improving infrastructure along the food chain - including cold storage - would prevent much good food being lost. In the developed world, retailers can prevent large amounts of waste by finding outlets for slightly blemished goods and consumers can limit waste by buying food in amounts they actually want and need.

There are countless more examples of challenges and solutions all throughout the food system - from production of fertiliser to distribution systems to the production of dried and purified foods that make up processed meals to the diets and lifestyles of the public. Everyone has a role to play; these challenges cannot be solved in a vacuum.

The complex, dynamic, and widely diverse forms of the world's many food systems yield some wildly divergent outcomes in terms of nutrition, health, and environmental and climate impacts. It is critical that we start to better examine what works in some systems and what must be improved in others, in order to produce more equitable, just, and sustainable outcomes around the world.

Just as there's no universal crop that grows everywhere, there's no "one size fits all" model food system to implement across the world. A broader systems-wide perspective is necessary if there is any hope for truly transformative change. It's time to look beyond farming and agriculture and to see the whole picture, to create systems that cause less harm to the climate and are more resilient to the impacts we're already suffering from global warming.

Food is a fundamental human need and to eat is a basic human right. Our food systems must deliver that need, fairly and equitably, without worsening the impacts of climate change.

Ruth Khasaya Oniang'o is an academic and a winner of the 2017 Africa Food prize

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Why what we eat is crucial to the climate change question | Ruth Khasaya Oniang'o

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Did you know that what's on your plate plays a larger role in contributing to climate change than the car you drive? When most wealthy people think about their carbon footprint, or their contributions to climate change, they'll think about where their electricity and heat come from or what they drive.

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Africa 'set to miss UN development goal on malnutrition'

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Africa 'set to miss UN development goal on malnutrition'

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Exceptionally detailed maps of child growth and education across Africa suggest that no single country is set to end childhood malnutrition by 2030.

That target was set by the UN as a Sustainable Development Goal.

However, the new maps, which give detail to the level of an individual village, show that almost every nation has at least one region where children's health is improving.

They are published in Nature.

The two studies have mapped child growth rates and educational attainment for women of reproductive age - tracking progress in both in 51 countries between 2000 and 2015. The scientists targeted these two factors in particular because they are important predictors of child mortality.

"Together, these are very useful indicators of where populations are doing well and where they're being left behind," explained Prof Simon Hay, a global health researcher from the University of Washington in the US.

Prof Hay and his team pieced together data from community-level surveys and produced a series of 5km by 5km scale maps, showing child growth and educational attainment across Africa over the 15-year span of the study.

'Stark disparities'

This revealed that most African countries, especially much of sub-Saharan Africa and eastern and southern regions, show improvement in malnutrition.

They also showed large disparities within individual countries. But by mapping these in such detail, scientists say policymakers will have the evidence to direct their resources.

Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former secretary general of the UN, endorsed this aim in an article he wrote in response to the maps' publication. "Without good data," he wrote, "we're flying blind. If you can't see it, you can't solve it."

While highlighting what he called "stark disparities" in progress, particularly in conflict-affected areas, Mr Annan said the progress in Africa that these maps painted was "astonishing".

"Especially for me," he said, "an African accustomed to international headlines depicting a continent consumed by war, famine and hunger. The Africa shown in these maps tells a different story - one of measurable, steady progress on issues long thought intractable.

"[But] there are villages where all children are too short for their age. Across most of the Sahel, a semi-arid swath of land from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, high rates of stunting persist, with no hint of improvement.

"Such fine-grained insight brings tremendous responsibility to act."

Lessons to learn

Progress in Africa has never before been mapped in this level of detail and Prof Hay said that making the data openly available and providing "the best information we can" would help to direct resources towards the populations most in need.

"We can look at those communities that are doing particularly well and ask if there are lessons we can learn and apply elsewhere," he told BBC News.

In a study that is considered to have been the birth of modern epidemiology in the 19th Century, the London physician John Snow mapped cholera cases in London - revealing in a world-changing map how cases in the city were clustered around one water pump in Broad Street. This led to the revelation that the disease was spread through contaminated water.

Mr Annan concluded that these maps could be as powerful in the long battle against hunger.

"They are another tool in our arsenal," he said. "Alone, they won't eradicate malnutrition but they will enable Africa's leaders to act strategically."

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Africa 'set to miss malnutrition target'

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Exceptionally detailed maps of child growth and education across Africa suggest that no single country is set to end childhood malnutrition by 2030. That target was set by the UN as a Sustainable Development Goal. However, the new maps, which give detail to the level of an individual village, show that almost every nation has at least one region where children's health is improving.

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Would you eat meat recycled from landfill?

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Ever wonder what happens to restaurant leftovers? In Manila, meat from rubbish tips is recycled.

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State of Food Security in the World 2017 - WFP

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State of Food Security in the World 2017 - WFP

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Fish farming is big business - the industry now produces about 100 million tonnes a year - and with salmon prices soaring, producers are turning to lasers, automation and artificial intelligence to boost production and cut costs.

How do you know if farmed salmon have had enough to eat?

Well, according to Lingalaks fish farms in Norway, which produce nearly three million salmon each year, the fish make less noise once the feeding frenzy is over.

The firm knows this thanks to a new hydro-acoustic system it has installed at one of its farms. The system listens to the salmon sloshing loudly about as they feed in a cluster. When the fish have had enough, they swim off and the noise lessens.

Lingalaks chief executive Erlend Haugarvoll hopes this knowledge will save his firm lots of money in reduced feed, as much of it currently gets wasted.

"I think it could improve [expenditure] by about 5%," he says. "That could be between 7m-10m krone (£630,000-900,000, $900,000-$1.3m) for our firm."

The system, developed by tech firm CageEye, has taken years to develop, says chief executive Bendik Sovegjarto.

"It's not like a pellet detector," Mr Sovegjarto says, which observes the number of fish food pellets left in the water.

"When you don't see any pellets, you can't be certain if it's because the fish are full or that you're looking in the wrong place because of the water currents."

Using audio data from the caged salmon is more accurate and could save Norwegian fish farms 1bn krone (£90m,$130m) a year in un-gobbled feed, believes Mr Sovegjarto.

The technology has been developed with the help of Ole Folkedal, at the Institute of Marine Research, in Bergen. He has monitored salmon feeding patterns and other data, such as water temperature and oxygen levels, and this is giving scientists and farmers new insights into the factors influencing how much the fish want to eat.

"You have huge variations in how much to feed every day," says Mr Folkedal.

He adds that the data can be used to operate completely automated feeding systems, with humans simply overseeing the process.

The rise of artificial intelligence technologies like these, which make decisions about when feeding should stop and start, is set to make big changes to the lucrative industry of salmon farming.

There are other hi-tech approaches to automated fish monitoring, too.

For example, one start-up, Aquabyte, recently raised $3.5m (£2.5m) for a system that makes better use of existing video surveillance data.

Many modern fish farms already use video cameras to monitor the salmon in their cages, says Aquabyte founder and chief executive Bryton Shang.

"They stick CCTV in the pens and have operators off site watching the fish and determining how much to feed," he explains.

"We take the images from the CCTV and use computer vision algorithms [instead]."

With this approach, computers carefully monitor the group of feeding fish visually. The system is also designed to look out for a perennially problematic visitor to fish farms - the parasitic sea louse.

Lice attach to salmon and eat them, causing damage that can be fatal. The lice can also make the fish inedible for humans.

Mr Shang hopes his technology will help farmers detect sea lice so that they can then be removed manually.

But even lice removal could be automated in the future.

Stingray has come up with a self-guided tool that fires lasers at the lice to destroy them.

"The louse is hit with a fatal result, and coagulates within milliseconds," boasts the company's website. Meanwhile the de-loused salmon, thanks to its mirror-like skin that reflects the laser, swims off unharmed.

It's perhaps no surprise that salmon farmers are turning to hi-tech solutions - the industry is certainly a wealthy one.

Fish farms are worth nearly 50bn krone (£4.6, $6.4) to the Norwegian economy, and this year the country is expected to see growth of 9% in farmed salmon production.

Norwegian fish company Salmar's gigantic offshore installation, Ocean Farm 1, is a 110m-wide (120 yards) cage capable of containing 1.5 million fish.

London-based Hemang Rishi, co-founder of Observe Technologies, says his firm is developing technology that can visually monitor feeding in salmon cages.

"We are just deploying our first product on site for an extended period of time in Chile, where they have the second largest salmon market in the world after Norway," he says.

And in Florida, a firm called Atlantic Sapphire is hoping to construct a giant salmon farm - on land.

The concept involves water swirled mechanically in large tanks to give fish the illusion that they are still at sea.

It's not hard to imagine highly automated fish farms of the future, in which humans have very little to do.

More Technology of Business

"My prediction is that autonomous systems will do most of the jobs in future years," says Mr Folkedal.

However, he notes that current regulations in Norway mean that, for now at least, farmed fish must be manually checked regularly for signs of illness and mortalities.

But many of the tasks farmers must perform daily - such as counting and measuring fish - are tedious, and could be automated once machines become accurate enough, Mr Folkedal believes.

"That's something that the farmers really want," he says.

Follow Technology of Business editor Matthew Wall on Twitter and Facebook

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How lasers and robo-feeders are transforming fish farming

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Fish farming is big business - the industry now produces about 100 million tonnes a year - and with salmon prices soaring, producers are turning to lasers, automation and artificial intelligence to boost production and cut costs. How do you know if farmed salmon have had enough to eat?

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Capitalism has coopted the language of food – costing the world millions of meals

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Capitalism has coopted the language of food – costing the world millions of meals

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Hardly a day goes by when food is not in the news. We are at once encouraged to eat healthily, locally, and reduce food waste. Meanwhile, stories about the various groups of people going hungry are also on the rise - there are reports about malnourished elderly people, children's holiday hunger, and rising food insecurity. Increases in these rates have been linked to government policies such as welfare reform and commercial protections that give rise to zero-hours contracts. But in my view the problem is deeper than this - it is embedded in the way we talk about food. The language we use is confusing - it creates feelings of guilt and enhances social divisions.

Most people in economically developed countries purchase at least some of their food from a supermarket. This food is part of a system where food is sold to make a profit, usually for a large corporation. We tend to think of this commercially sourced food as ordinary food, or just food. Food acquired through other means - for example, from local allotments, supermarket surpluses, digital food sharing apps, community refrigerators, community food programmes, or gleaning - is considered alternative food.

What bothers me is that by thinking of food in this way we imply value judgements depending upon who the eaters of this "alternative" food are most likely to be. Those who are into food sharing are "green lefties", whereas those who get food from local pantries or community kitchens are "vulnerable" or "in poverty". Finding a new language through which to talk about food could therefore enable a more healthy, pleasurable and sustainable relationship with the food that is available to all of us, whoever we are.

Megan Blake, Author provided

Surplus food

Take surplus food, which is a prime example of an alternative food that carries value judgements with it. Surplus food is food that was intended for supermarkets, but for a variety of reasons is no longer able to be exchanged commercially.

One recent scandal at a chicken production plant in the West Midlands provides a good example. The Two Sisters plant was closed for poor hygiene and mislabelling practices, not because the food, prior to reaching the plant, was inherently bad.

Thousands of chickens were wasted when the plant briefly closed because the chicken meat continued to move through the early stages of the food chain (growing in farms, killed in slaughterhouses), but could not be moved on to the plant where it is packaged, labelled and then distributed to supermarkets. If the producer had been able to move the chickens quickly to a charity or discounter who could collect, package, and distribute the meat, it would not have been wasted, but none could be found in time.

Other examples that give rise to surplus include packaging malfunctions, over-supply due to favourable growing conditions, unexpected changes in demand such as when a competitor offers a particularly good deal on an item, or when food is oddly shaped ("wonky") and therefore deemed unsaleable by supermarkets.

If such food is rescued from the vicissitudes of the commercial system, it is sometimes sold to discount retailers. These retailers sell the surplus for a lower price than the standard price, and are one of the largest growing sectors in the UK. Sometimes the food becomes animal feed, is composted, or turned into biofuel.

Increasingly, this surplus food is donated to organisations such as FareShare, Community Shop, City Harvest, Food Cycle, Real Junk Food Projects, and others in the UK but also in other countries. Donated surplus is distributed to eaters through cafes, community pantries, social eating, cooking lessons and the like, or indirectly through charities and third sector organisations who then feed people in many ways - often not as emergency food providers (foodbanks).

Megan Blake, Author provided

We do not really know how much surplus food is rescued and donated. But to give an idea, in 2017 FareShare helped distribute the equivalent of 28.6m meals to nearly 7,000 organisations. Meanwhile, food from the Community Shop network provided almost 4m meals through its four sites, and City Harvest delivered just shy of 1m meals to organisations just in London. Despite this, figures suggest that considerably more could be rescued. Wrap, the UK's key organisation responsible for supporting waste reduction, estimates that nearly 2m tons of food is wasted annually from the UK commercial sector (one ton is approximately 2,380 meals), much of which could have been eaten.

Shared, social, sustainable food

The links that surplus food has with waste and commercial loss cause us to see surplus food as inferior food, despite its edibility. For example, some attempt to shame governments into changing social policy by calling it " leftover food for leftover people". While I agree that austerity and welfare policies are causing great harm to families and communities, I also know that donated surplus food is a resource that supports the resilience of organisations aiming to help struggling communities and households.

The effect of framing surplus food as second class dismisses the positive social, cultural, environmental and economic values of this food, complicates how organisations aiming to help communities can do so while still preserving dignity, and for eaters, comes to signify a failure to engage with the commercial supply chain. All while giving the commercial sector a pass.

Access to free or low cost surplus food is a means for expanding tight organisational and household budgets, enabling community interactions, and enhancing personal and household well-being through social cooking and eating activities. It also brings people together. So what if we referred to surplus food as shared or social food? This language would reflect the social role this food plays and we would associate it more closely with the care of self, family, community and planet that this food enables.

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Capitalism has coopted the language of food - costing the world millions of meals

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Hardly a day goes by when food is not in the news. We are at once encouraged to eat healthily, locally, and reduce food waste. Meanwhile, stories about the various groups of people going hungry are also on the rise - there are reports about malnourished elderly people, children's holiday hunger, and rising food insecurity.

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Visiting the Matanuska banana plantation is not easy these days. After a two-hour drive from the nearest city in northern Mozambique, visitors who make it to the farm are stopped at the entrance and asked to dip their feet in pools of disinfectant. Even the cars get a bath.

Once an apparent miracle - a massive banana plantation in the middle of a dry, flat part of a desperately poor country - its formerly lush greenery has now been devastated by a deadly fungus called Panama disease.

Five years ago, Tropical race 4 (TR4), as it's formally known, was spotted here for the first time in Africa after killing off millions of bananas in Asia from the 1980s onwards.

The failure to contain the disease set off alarm bells around the world.

Could the banana, the world's most exported fruit and the source of nutrients for millions of people, be at risk of extinction?

The BBC was the first to be given access to the farm since it was hit with the disease.

We travelled all the way to Matanuska not just to observe the devastation but because the story of the plantation is about more than just bananas.

It's emblematic of unintended consequences of global trade - and the way that solutions to those consequences might come from some very unlikely places.

After our disinfectant baths, we continued down a long, red dirt road to what remains of the farm. It's strikingly lush.

Trundling along on metal zip lines are hands as they're known - carrying hundreds of bananas to a processing facility, where they too get the bath treatment before being shipped off in Dole-branded containers to the Middle East.

Standing over this procession is Elie Matabuana, the farm's head of technical services.

He spends all his time looking at every banana grown here to see if they are exhibiting the yellowing leaves and tell-tale rotting smell that indicate a plant has been infected with Panama disease.

"When [I wake] up in the morning the first thing I have in my mind is; what can I do to stop the disease?" he says.

"It's a really big struggle but we are winning," he says, before amending his answer. "We are going to win."

Containment

But Elie and the Matanuska team are fighting an uphill battle. The disease has spread swiftly over the past five years.

"When I first came to Matanuska, it was just after we identified the pathogen and at that stage the farm was just beautiful," says Stellenbosch university professor Altus Veljoen, who was the first to confirm that the disease had in fact escaped Asia.

"I knew that that might change.

"But I never knew the extent of that change and how severe it would be."

Today, only 100 hectares are left of Matanuska's original banana plants.

Of the farm's 2,700 workers, nearly two-thirds have been laid off -- sending the surrounding economy into a spiral.

And containment, along with finding a resistant banana strain, has become a pressing priority.

It's estimated that more than half a million people are employed in the banana industry in Mozambique.

'Bad luck'

Neighbouring countries like Tanzania, just 150km north of Matanuska, also depend on banana cultivation for a significant portion of their economic activity.

And though the type of banana grown for sustenance in Uganda and Congo - where residents get something like 35% of their daily nutrients from bananas - is thought to be resistant, no one knows for sure.

"All African countries are worried about what's happening in Mozambique," says Antonia Vaz, the head of plant pathology at Mozambique's Ministry of Agriculture.

She says the Mozambican government has implemented control measures to ensure that the disease does not escape the northern part of the country.

She's also quick to note the disease isn't endemic to Mozambique. The government thinks it came from the boots of two workers from the Philippines.

"It was just very, very bad luck," she says.

Each year, more than $12bn worth of bananas, primarily of the Cavendish variety, are exported globally making it the world's favourite fruit both by value and by volume.

No cure

Usually if there are millions of dollars at stake, solutions aren't that hard to find.

But the problem in fighting Panama disease is the way that bananas are cultivated today.

The bananas that we eat are Cavendish bananas - often grown to the exclusion of all of the other thousands of types of bananas found in the world.

Growing only one variety of a plant is known as monoculture - and it's a practice that became increasingly common across the world in everything from forest plantations to fruit.

But monoculture crops are incredibly susceptible to disease.

What makes the story of the banana even more dire is that the Cavendish variety isn't a natural banana. It was first bred in Derbyshire in England in the 1840s and it's what's known as a triploid, which means its sterile.

So hoping that nature will produce a resistant banana is futile - there is no natural selection to save the Cavendish.

New hope

But in the face of such odds, why continue to even plant bananas at Matanuska?

There are two reasons.

One is that "if that land is simply abandoned and people start moving through there, no one knows who's going to carry the disease where," says Prof Veljoen.

The other is hope.

American Tricia Wallace is a former investment banker who helped to arrange financing for the farm back when the idea of a banana plantation in this part of the world seemed like a mirage in the desert.

In the first few years of operation, she tells me: "People came from other parts of Mozambique and they couldn't believe that this farm existed here and was doing this on this scale."

Ms Wallace says she felt an obligation to ensure that the people here weren't given up on, which is why she ended up quitting her banking job to run the farm.

Now, she's invested heavily - perhaps more than any other plantation in the world, in a particular type of Taiwanese Cavendish banana that's known as formosana.

It's this strain that could hold the answer to the world's banana problems, and it's what Matanuska will need to survive.

And so far the results are promising, 200 hectares of formosana are now growing. While some of the plants still get the disease - they seem to be stronger and able to fight it off.

Bounce back

So a disease from Asia, transported to Africa, due to poverty and grit might end up with a solution, which is then shipped back across the world.

Global Trade

More from the BBC's series taking an international perspective on trade:

The banana is, after all, shaped like a boomerang. It's an irony not lost on Ms Wallace.

"You know we couldn't call the Philippines and say come and show us how you solved this," she says.

"So if we make this work then I think that there's a huge benefit not only for the rest of the banana industry in Mozambique but the region as a whole."

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Visiting the Matanuska banana plantation is not easy these days. After a two-hour drive from the nearest city in northern Mozambique, visitors who make it to the farm are stopped at the entrance and asked to dip their feet in pools of disinfectant. Even the cars get a bath.

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Tesco: No edible food will go to waste by February 2018

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Tesco: No edible food will go to waste by February 2018

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No food fit for human consumption will be wasted by Tesco's UK stores by the end of February, the retail giant says.

Chief executive Dave Lewis told the Daily Telegraph food waste had been "talked about for years" as he unveiled the plans for all 2,654 stores.

Urging other chains to follow suit, he said edible food should be used for people, not go to waste.

Tesco, with all major UK supermarkets, has signed a commitment to cut food waste by one-fifth within a decade.

The voluntary agreement is known as the Courtauld Commitment 2025.

Many supermarkets have introduced initiatives to tackle waste - such as moving away from "buy-one-get-one-free" offers that have been criticised for potentially increasing the amount of food thrown away in the home.

East of England Co-op recently became the first major retailer to sell food beyond its "best before" dates.

But Mr Lewis, who joined Tesco in 2014 from consumer brand Unilever, said the contrast between the amount of wasted food in the UK and the situation in countries suffering food shortages was "really stark".

He said: "Last year we sold 10 million tons [10.2 million tonnes] of food to the British public. But even if our waste is just 0.7% of the food, that's still 70,000 tons [71,100 tonnes] of food.

"And so long as that food is fit for human consumption, I'd much prefer it to go to people than animal feed or fuel."

The UK throws away 8.1 million tons [8.2 million tonnes] of food a year, according to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.

Tesco says it cuts waste by selling surplus groceries with "reduced to clear" stickers and running a scheme giving unsold items to local charities.

It uses an app, FoodCloud, to scan and upload surplus food that stores have at the end of the day, which is shared with registered charities that collect the food.

"That goes a long way in reducing charities' bill burdens, so they can spend the money on other things, like the cost of housing two more addicts, or providing much more needed services," Mr Lewis said.

But he admitted it was "impossible" to prevent food surpluses in supermarkets.

"In retail there will always be some surplus food," he said.

"No matter how sophisticated the ordering systems are, it will be impossible to perfectly match the supply and demand for every one of our shops, 365 days a year, when there's so much volatility.

"Food waste has been talked about for years but if Tesco can make this work, with all of our different stores across the country, then why can't everybody," he added.

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Tesco to go 'food waste free' by February

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No food fit for human consumption will be wasted by Tesco's UK stores by the end of February, the retail giant says. Chief executive Dave Lewis told the Daily Telegraph food waste had been "talked about for years" as he unveiled the plans for all 2,654 stores.

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Fergal Keane reveals the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Kasai region, where millions face starvation.

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The Co-op will become the first major retailer to sell food beyond its "best before" dates.

The chain's 125 stores in the East of England will sell dried foods and tinned products for just 10p in a bid to cut food waste.

WRAP, the waste and recycling advisory body, said the Co-op's "bold" move complied with food safety standards.

The UK throws away 7.3 million tonnes of food every year, according to the Food Standards Agency.

The Co-op will sell tinned goods and dried food such as pasta, crisps and rice for 10p once they reach their best before date.

However, the offer will not apply to perishable foods, which carry a "use by" date indicating when a product is safe to eat.

The "Don't be a Binner, have it for dinner" campaign follows a successful three-month trial in 14 stores.

Roger Grosvenor, East of England Co-op's joint chief executive, said the 10p items were sold within hours of being reduced.

"The vast majority of our customers understand they are fine to eat and appreciate the opportunity to make a significant saving on some of their favourite products," he said.

"This is not a money making exercise, but a sensible move to reduce food waste and keep edible food in the food chain."

The retailer estimates the initiative will stop at least 50,000 items a year being thrown away.

Analysis

By Joe Lynam, BBC business correspondent

WRAP estimates that £13bn worth of edible food is thrown out in Britain every year - the majority of which is discarded needlessly. Consumers are often unaware of the difference between a "use by" and a "best before" date.

This move by a national retailer to continue to sell non-perishable food after it has exceeded its best before date could start to tackle the UK's burgeoning food waste mountain.

By selling rice, pasta, confectionery etc for a flat rate of 10p in some of its stores, the Coop cannot be accused of trying to profit on such products.

It may spark similar or even wider initiatives by larger rivals, which aim to eliminate food waste entirely.

Whether this idea works depends entirely on consumers, many of whom are used to observing best before dates. Will they continue to eat by the rules?

WRAP hoped the Co-op's initiative would result in both less waste and cheaper food.

"While 'use by' date labels indicate when a product is safe to eat, 'best before' date labels only refer to when food is at its best. As such it is perfectly safe to sell food at or after its "best before" date," a spokesperson said.

As long as discounted items were not damaged, WRAP said the move met the latest guidelines from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Food Standards Agency.

The FSA said products past their best before date were safe to consume but may not be at the optimum quality intended by the producer.

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The Co-op will become the first major retailer to sell food beyond its "best before" dates. The chain's 125 stores in the East of England will sell dried foods and tinned products for just 10p in a bid to cut food waste.

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10 million tonnes a year is thrown out. Here's why.

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'A danger to future generations': $640m pledged as third of world malnourished | Global development | The Guardian

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'A danger to future generations': $640m pledged as third of world malnourished | Global development | The Guardian

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Donors have pledged an extra $640m (£490m) to reduce the serious burden of malnutrition, which affects one in three people in the world.

The crisis "endangers the physical and mental wellbeing of present and future generations", warned Kofi Annan, speaking in advance of the global nutrition summit in Milan on Saturday. "We need further urgent investments so that people, communities and nations can reach their full potential."

Related: Gasping for breath: pneumonia's deadly toll among the hungry children of Kenya

The World Bank has pledged to increase its spending on nutrition to $1.7bn by 2020. The summit will be accompanied by the launch of the 2017 global nutrition report, in which almost every country in the world is identified as facing a serious nutritional challenge.

The annual report found 88% of all the countries surveyed face a serious burden of two or three forms of malnutrition, including childhood stunting, anaemia in women of childbearing age, and/or overweight in women.

Although the number of children under five who are chronically or acutely malnourished has fallen in many countries, the data show the rate of decline is not rapid enough to meet internationally agreed targets. At the other end of the spectrum, the "inexorable rise" in obesity continues, with 2 billion adults obese or overweight and 41 million children overweight.

The likelihood of meeting global targets to halt the rise in obesity and diabetes by 2025 is less than 1%.

At the summit, governments including Ivory Coast, El Salvador and Madagascar committed to extending their nutrition programmes. Philanthropic organisations in India and Nigeria have promised to spend $150m to tackle the problem in the two countries with the highest numbers of malnourished children.

A study published earlier this year showed how the number of people going hungry in the world had increased for the first time since the turn of the century, sparking concern that climate change and conflict could reverse years of progress.

Related: 'My baby went to sleep and didn't wake up': young lives lost to Ghana's silent killer

Roughly 815 million people were going to bed hungry last year, compared with 777 million in 2015.

An estimated 38 million people face food insecurity in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen, while Ethiopia and Kenya are facing severe droughts.

The report found that spending by donors on undernutrition increased by 1% to $5m between 2014 and 2015, but fell as a proportion of official development assistance, from 0.57% in 2014 to 0.5% in 2015.

Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said: "When nutrition is at the top of the agenda, countries can tap into their full potential ... These commitments bring us one step closer to a future in which every child not only survives, but thrives."

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'A danger to future generations': $640m pledged as third of world malnourished

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Donors have pledged an extra $640m (£490m) to reduce the serious burden of malnutrition, which affects one in three people in the world. The crisis "endangers the physical and mental wellbeing of present and future generations", warned Kofi Annan, speaking in advance of the global nutrition summit in Milan on Saturday.

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Different Extra Reading and Resources from the UK Food Group

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Different Extra Reading and Resources from the UK Food Group

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Sustaining local food webs
Ben Murphy ed for the europAfrica project and UK Food Group, published by Practical Action, 2014

Local food webs are productive, resilient and healthy, connecting food providers and consumers locally. These food webs are efficient in terms of food provision when compared with the long chains that deliver the commodities produced by industrial agriculture to distant consumers, and they need protection, increased investment and support. This report has case studies from Cameroon, Kenya, Mali, the UK and Hungary.

Justice, democracy and diversity in our food system
CONCORD, 2014

Hunger in our world today is a result of injustice not of scarcity. Position paper of the CONCORD network on food security, setting out a vision of a food system that enables everyone to eat a healthy, nutritious diet that is based in the right to food, shaped by planetary boundaries, resilient and defined by people. Calls for participatory and democratic governance of our food system, agroecological methods of production, prioritising local economies and trade, responsible investment and measures to stabilise markets, rights to productive resources, responsible consumption, research and innovation that meets the needs of small-scale producers, and better aid and development policies.

Family farmers for sustainable food systems:
a synthesis of reports by African farmers regional networks on models of food production, consumption and markets
EAFF, ROPPA and PROPAC, published by the europAfrica project, 2013
english | français

Family farming is the basis for modern food provision in Africa, today and tomorrow. Investing in family farming and small-scale food production will improve food provision, social and environmental sustainability and safeguard livelihoods for the majority. Guaranteeing rights of access to and control over productive resources- land, water, agricultural biodiversity - is essential to support family farming and small-scale food production and resilient food systems. Strengthening and building agricultural and food markets, which are within the control of family farmers and small-scale food producers, support socially and environmentally sustainable production, and provide accessible quality food for consumers, is essential.

Securing future food: towards ecological food provision
UK Food Group, 2010

We need to make a radical shift towards ecological food provision in order to secure future food for the world's predicted 9 billion people. The systems that currently feed most people in the world are smaller-scale and locally-sourced. They can be enhanced through practices based on agroecology to meet current and future global demands for food. Research and trade policies and agricultural support measures urgently need to be reoriented in this direction.

Hidden threats: an analysis of intellectual property rights in EU-ACP economic partnership agreements
Andrew Mushita for UK Food Group, 2009

The EU sought to include new rules on Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in already controversial and resisted Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). This is highly contentious because of the potential impacts on securing food supplies and conserving agricultural biodiversity. The European Union is demanding from African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP) new intellectual property standards beyond those already incorporated in the WorldTrade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

More aid for African agriculture: policy implications for small-scale farmers
UK Food Group, 2008

As agriculture returned to the policy spotlight in 2008 following the food price shock, many donors reviewed their priorities on food and agriculture issues. The UK Food Group summarised the policies of major donors, which cluster around five main themes: aid effectiveness, market & private sector led agricultural growth, exiting agriculture, improved governance & political processes, and African ownership. Calls for the new agriculture agenda to give priority to approaches that would be sustainable, can be locally controlled and would realise the Right to Food and food sovereignty.

Food Inc: corporate concentration from farm to consumer
Bill Vorley for UK Food Group, 2003

Supply chains are developing in such a way that a large number of competitive and relatively powerless suppliers face a few large buyers. Farmers are playing to the rules of perfect competition while their customers are part of a complex monopoly. The savings that food processors and retailers accrue from paying suppliers below competitive levels are often passed on to consumers to gain market share. Growth of supermarkets and the 'modernisation' of the retail sector can have profound impacts on the structure of domestic agriculture and food processing, and these patterns are moving into mid- and low income countries.

Hungry for power: the impact of transnational corporations on food security.
UK Food Group, 1999.

Details the impact of food and agricultural transnationals on food security. Between them, the food and agribusiness corporations have huge control over every part of the food chain, from land to seeds, crops to chemicals, processing to marketing. Spotlights the activities of Nestlé, Cargill, Monsanto, Chiquita, Zeneca, British American Tobacco. Food security is too important to be left in the control of transnational corporations. The international community must take action to curb the power of transnational corporations where their activities threaten food security.

Briefings and policy submissions

UK Food Group submission to the International Development Committee of Parliament on 'Global food security'. December 2012.

UK Food Group submission to the UK Dept of Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) on 'Shaping a UK strategy for agri-tech'. November 2012

UK Food Group submission to the APPG Food and Agriculture for Development inquiry on 'Meeting the Millennium Development Goals'. November 2010

Contribution from the European Food Security Group (EFSG) of CONCORD to the consultation on the Issues Paper "Towards an EU policy framework to assist developing countries addressing agriculture and food security challenges". January 2010.

UK Food Group submission to the consultation on the White Paper "Securing our common future". May 2009.

The food price crisis: what needs to be done. European Food Security Group of CONCORD. October 2008.

Advancing African Agriculture: the impact of European policies and practices on African agriculture. Monitoring exercise by European Civil Society Organizations, October 2008

UK Food Group submission to the International Development Committee of Parliament on 'The World Food Programme and global food security'. April 2008.

CAP's impact on productive structures and family-based agriculture in Europe. UK Food Group case study for the EuropAfrica project. 2006

UK Food Group submission to the DFID White Paper consultation 'Eliminating World Poverty'. April 2006.

Achieving fairness in trading between supermarkets and their agrifood supply chains. UK Food Group briefing, September 2005, Anne Tallontire and Bill Vorley

Comments from the UK Food Group on DFID's draft agriculture policy paper "Productivity growth for poverty reduction: an approach to agriculture". September 2005.

Dialogue on agricultural trade reform, subsidies and the future of small and family farms and farmers. Tom Lines for Sustain and UK Food Group. April 2004. Including submissions from CIIR, Christian Aid, Family Farmers Association, Farm Crisis Network, Farmers Link and IATP.

The CAP doesn't fit. Sustain and UK Food Group briefing, 2002.

The Common Agricultural Policy: how the CAP operates, the key commodities, competitors and markets for the European Union. Background briefing 1. Sustain and UK Food Group, 2002.

The Common Agricultural Policy: options for reform and their potential impact. Background briefing 2. Sustain and UK Food Group, 2002.

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Sustaining local food webs Ben Murphy ed for the europAfrica project and UK Food Group, published by Practical Action, 2014 Local food webs are productive, resilient and healthy, connecting food providers and consumers locally.

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Welcome to the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food | Future of Food

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The Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food is an interdisciplinary programme of research and policy engagement concerning all aspects of the food system, based at the University of Oxford. Find out about our current activities:

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SOAS Food Security Unit - look at bottom for extra suggested reading

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SOAS Food Security Unit - look at bottom for extra suggested reading

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SOAS University of London | Food Security and Social Protection (30 credits)

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What are the most effective interventions for tackling poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition? Should governments provide free or cheap food, or simply offer poor people cash? Answer these questions and more with the online module, Food Security and Social Protection, from SOAS University of London

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At their inaugural meeting, the Global Food Security Science Advisory Group analysed recent events and identified a set of 10 priority research questions to address the food security challenge. Professor Tim Benton from the University of Leeds and chair of the advisory group, and the Global Food Security (GFS) programme's Sian Williams explore the evolving research landscape.
The question of how to transform the food system to provide healthy diets for all, sustainably, is a complex one, for which there is no quick-fix. This challenge is compounded by the fact that the food system is also highly dynamic and continually evolving under the influence of a large number of both local and global drivers. This means that while we might make positive strides on one aspect, suddenly something game-changing can happen elsewhere, altering the nature of the challenge as a whole and therefore the way it must be approached.

For example, what does the Paris climate deal imply for how we address global nutrition? Will big data change global diets? And does political change in one country have knock-on effects for food markets on the other side of the world?

The GFS Science Advisory Group

GFS aims to reflect this constantly changing research landscape in its activity. It recently appointed a Science Advisory Group (SAG) of prominent researchers with interests spanning the food system to provide expert advice and guidance at the forefront of the food security challenge.

At its inaugural meeting, the SAG was tasked with exploring the latest developments relevant to the food system - in research findings, policy, or in response to other changes in the world - before using this to draw out a list of ten priority research questions for food security that could be addressed through interdisciplinary research.

Diets, not just food

In 2010, when GFS was first launched, the predominant issue was about providing more food for the world. Now, less than a decade later, we are recognising that malnutrition in all its forms (from hunger, micronutrient deficiency and over consumption of calories) is acute, with under 50% of the world's population currently being of a healthy weight (ref 1). More than ever, we need to think about diets and their quality, not simply growing more calories.

In part, this focus on diets rather than just food has been prompted by the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals. This wide-ranging and holistic set of goals has challenged researchers to find resilient ways to supply diets that not only feed, but provide healthy diets, in a sustainable way.

Planning for the future

Increasingly, food security research is being framed not just by the problems we are facing now, but by challenges we may face in the future. For example, projecting forward current trends leads us to a future that is unsustainable for health and environment, with food alone likely to emit enough greenhouse gas to ensure we miss the targets in the Paris agreement. Ambitious global goals such as those set in Paris are increasingly posing important questions on our ability to transform systems now to avoid undesirable futures.

Connected thinking - Linking production to consumption

More than anything else, the overarching theme across these priority questions is that of the need for systemic approaches to food and nutrition challenges. Research is needed that connects food production with processing and manufacturing, policy and retail, as well as consumers and their health and wellbeing; and of course, connect all with a healthy environment.

Transforming the food system to deliver healthy diets in sustainable ways for everyone certainly requires urgent research and innovation. But as demonstrated in this priority questions exercise, this is not just in finding new technologies to underpin a transformed food system, but also the business, social and policy innovations that might bring it about.

Read the full report:

References

Collaboration, N.R.F. (2016) Trends in adult body-mass index in 200 countries from 1975 to 2014: a pooled analysis of 1698 population-based measurement studies with 19· 2 million participants. The Lancet, 387, 1377-1396.

Featured image copyright: Mimadeo/iStock/Thinkstock

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Earth, Wind, Fire, and global agreements: How do global events change the nature of food security research? - Global Food Security

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At their inaugural meeting, the Global Food Security Science Advisory Group analysed recent events and identified a set of 10 priority research questions to address the food security challenge. Professor Tim Benton from the University of Leeds and chair of the advisory group, and the Global Food Security (GFS) programme's Sian Williams explore the evolving research landscape.

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Can it really be true that the French are running out of butter? That the country with the second biggest dairy sector in Europe (after Germany) is incapable of providing households with such basic culinary fare?

The answer is yes... and no.

Yes - there are indeed butter shortages in French shops. Shelves are emptying. Supermarket own-brands have become scarce, and often it is only possible to find more expensive varieties for sale.

A sign in my local supermarket reads: "The butter market is facing an unprecedented shortfall in raw materials which is causing supply problems to this store."

There is no butter crisis. If you need butter, you will find it. But it is obvious to all that the system is not functioning as it should do. Something is going wrong.

The experts have ascribed several causes.

Spreading with pride

The world market for butter has gone into overdrive. The Chinese in particular have discovered a taste for Western-style pastries, which require butter as an essential ingredient.

At the same time, European and American consumers are moving back to butter. After years in which we were told animal fat was bad, today the advice is changing. Now, the demon is sugar. Butter has been rehabilitated, and we can spread with pride.

Just as demand for butter is rising on the world market, supply is falling. According to the EU's Milk Market Observatory, New Zealand, the world's largest dairy producer, exported 11% less butter between January and August than it did the year before.

And in the EU, there are specific problems. The end of milk quotas in 2015 led to an immediate rush to produce dairy. But that triggered a collapse in milk prices, which drove some producers back out of the market.

There has also been a question of poor weather - 2016 was not a good year in France for growing animal feed and that means lower milk yields in 2017.

With demand for butter rising and supply falling, the result is self-evident. Prices head north. Indeed over the last year and a half, the price went from €2,500 (£2,200) a tonne in April 2016, to €6,500 in September 2017.

But these factors are not purely French. Every country in the world has to cope with these market changes. Why is it only in France we see the spaces in the racks?

There is a simple answer to that - rigidities in France's system of pricing and distribution.

In other countries like Germany, supermarkets have responded to the changing world butter market by putting up their prices. In France, the cost to the shopper of a pack of butter has barely changed.

This is because butter prices are set annually in France, in negotiations between supermarkets and producers. The next round of talks is not due until February, so until then the supermarkets are only offering to pay what was agreed nine months ago - when butter was much cheaper.

French producers are not foolish. They can see that the world market is much more attractive than the domestic market. So they are saying "non" to the supermarkets, and selling their stock abroad.

So this is why the answer to the question - is there a shortage of butter in France? - is both yes and no.

No, there is no lack of butter. France still makes plenty of it. However the butter is now going to places other than where the householder expects to buy it. So yes, there is a lack of butter.
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Reality Check: Is there a butter crisis in France?

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Can it really be true that the French are running out of butter? That the country with the second biggest dairy sector in Europe (after Germany) is incapable of providing households with such basic culinary fare? The answer is yes... and no. Yes - there are indeed butter shortages in French shops.

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The true cost of a plate of food: $1 in New York, $320 in South Sudan | Global development | The Guardian

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The true cost of a plate of food: $1 in New York, $320 in South Sudan | Global development | The Guardian

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The world's poorest pay more than a day's wages for a single plate of food, according to a report from the World Food Programme, which reveals that the same bean stew can cost the average consumer in New York just $1.20, while the price tag is more than $320 in South Sudan.

The research, released to coincide with World Food Day on Monday, underlines the sheer discrepancy of consumers' purchasing power around the world by measuring the relative cost of food in various countries against a single baseline.

"By adjusting for purchasing power, we shine a stark light on inequalities in the affordability of food," said WFP's executive director, David Beasley. "The results are, in many cases, staggering: if you thought a meal was expensive in, say, Norway - well, try Malawi."

Economists at WFP took a standard meal of beans and pulses, paired with a locally preferred carbohydrate such as rice or cassava, priced it on a local scale, then compared it with the average daily budget derived from national GDP per capita figures. Using this as a baseline, WFP was then able to determine how much an average person in New York state would have to pay for the stew if they spent the same proportion of their daily income as people in other countries.

That $1.20 (90p) plate of rice and beans in New York, which is just 0.6% of the New Yorker's average daily income, costs $8.27 in Guatemala, $27.77 in Nepal, and $72.65 in Haiti.

In South Sudan, the worst-ranking country in the study, the meal costs $321.70, or 155% of a person's daily wages.

Cost of a plate of food

Beasley points to the sheer unaffordability of food - rather than the absence of it - to explain why hunger rages on, particularly in the developing world. Some 795 million people went hungry in 2016, according to WFP, a figure expected to rise this year, due to factors including conflict, political instability, poor infrastructure and climate change.

"Nearly 800 million people went hungry on the planet last year because they simply could not afford to feed themselves, yet we have enough food to feed everyone worldwide: the food we waste could actually feed 2 billion people," said Francis Mwanza, a London-based spokesperson for the WFP.

"Unless we stop the conflicts, unless we stop the migration of people from their homelands into neighbouring states, unless people have the means to either grow their own food or be able to afford to buy it, people will continue going hungry."

Even in relatively stable countries, food systems can still be subject to poor communications, transport and storage facilities, the report says. But in nations ravaged by war and instability, drought and famine, food systems can all too easily be at risk because of oppression and abuse of power.

Nearly 50% of Syria's population needed food assistance in 2016, according to the report, with a basic bean stew estimated at $190.11. Prior to the conflict starting in 2011, Syria was a middle-income country; just five years later, four out of five Syrians are living in poverty, with 75% of the population needing humanitarian assistance.

In Yemen, where conflict has been raging for the past two years, more than two-thirds of the population are struggling to feed themselves. Cereal production currently provides less than 20% of the nation's needs, while crop and livestock diseases are going untreated for lack of money and supplies, the report claims.

"These are sobering figures, and I welcome the attempt at simple accountancy to allow such comparisons to be made - it highlights some crucial areas where there is very little resilience to shock," said Chris Gilligan, co-chair of the Strategic Initiative in Global Food Security at Cambridge University, of the report.

"I'm very concerned that each time we have an epidemic in Africa, or a pest infestation, there is a danger that we start from scratch each time in terms of how we react. We need to get ahead, work out where the infection is likely to come from and where it will go, so that we can ... prevent severe losses."

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The true cost of a plate of food: $1 in New York, $320 in South Sudan

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The world's poorest pay more than a day's wages for a single plate of food, according to a report from the World Food Programme, which reveals that the same bean stew can cost the average consumer in New York just $1.20, while the price tag is more than $320 in South Sudan.