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30% of the world’s population are either obese or overweight, according to a new study published last week by British medical journal The Lancet. The number of overweight and obese people increased from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 2013. The researchers used data covering 188 nations from 1980 to 2013. Worldwide, the […]

Governments and international organisations frequently stress that small farmers control the largest share of the world’s agricultural land. But a new review of data carried out by GRAIN, an international non-profit organisation, reveals that small-scale farmers are now squeezed onto a quarter of the world’s farmland – or just 17%, if farms in India and

FIAN International has raised grave concerns about the G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. In a policy paper published ahead of the G7 summit in Brussels on 4-5 June, the organisation analysed the initiative from a human rights perspective. The paper concludes that the New Alliance ignores general human rights principles and contradicts

UN experts have highlighted the need to address obesity and unhealthy diets. “Parts of the world are quite literally eating themselves to death”, Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), warned on Monday at the opening of the 67th World Health Assembly in Geneva. Around 3.4 million adults die each year as a

More people than ever before depend on fisheries and aquaculture for food and as a source of income, but harmful practices threaten the sector’s sustainability, says a new FAO report published today. According to the latest edition of “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture“, global fisheries and aquaculture production totaled 158 million metric tonnes

Public food purchasing can contribute to making food systems fairer and more sustainable. This is the key message of Olivier De Schutter’s final publication as the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. “Governments have few sources of leverage over increasingly globalized food systems – but public procurement is one of them. When sourcing

Research from NC State University shows that blueberries produce more seeds and larger berries if they are visited by a more diverse range of bee species, allowing farmers to harvest significantly more pounds of fruit per acre. In the study, which was published in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers looked at blueberries in North

A farmer in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu has set a new record in rice production using the system of rice intensification (SRI) method. Mr. Sethumadhavan from Alanganallur produced a bumper harvest of 24 tonnes of paddy per hectare, according to Jaisingh Gnanadurai, joint director of agriculture in Tamil Nadu. SRI originated in

Dr. Andrés Carrasco, an Argentine neuroscientist who confirmed the devastating effects of glyphosate on embryonic development, has died aged 67. Argentina’s national science council CONICET announced on Saturday the death of its former president, who had been in declining health. Carrasco, a professor of Molecular Embryology Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires, was a

A new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) identifies distinct regions of Africa which will be most affected by overlapping impacts of climate change such as drought, floods, declining crop yields or ecosystem damages. The German scientists reported their findings in the journal Global Change Biology. The three regions expected to