Anglais

Articles

• Guidelines on food fortification with micronutrients
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The guidelines are written from nutrition and public health perspective, to provide practical guidance on how food fortification should be implemented, monitored and evaluated. They are primarily intended for nutrition-related public health programme managers, but should also be useful to all those working to control micronutrient malnutrition, including the food industry.

• 21/ Child undernutrition in Guatemala: aggravating factors and levers
  29 September 2022, by Mathilde COUDRAY

  – Juliana Yael Milovich, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, United Kingdom Elena Villar, Department of Economics and Finance, Catholic University of Milan, Italy
  Key points The aggressive expansion of African palm farming in Guatemala is exacerbating chronic child undernutrition by jeopardizing families’ access to sufficient food. Nutritional health programmes that operate at local level and involve all community members are particularly effective in reducing child (...)

• Limited food availability
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  While food security is a major worldwide issue, it is a much more serious problem in Low-Income
  (LI) and Lower Middle-Income (LMI) countries. Currently, sub-Saharan Africa is the sub-continent with the highest proportion of undernourished people, the largest gap between current and potential yields, and between cereal consumption and production. Looking to the future, population growth and climate change may worsen the situation, particularly in Africa. African countries are still facing rapid population growth with uncertain prospects about the ability of their agriculture to meet growing food demand. In addition, without sufficient adaptation measures, climate change will negatively impact food production in most African regions.

• Food choices at the intersections of race, class and gender struggles in post-apartheid South Africa.
  22 décembre 2017, par Roxane

  Yanga Zembe is an associate professor in the Institute for Social Development, at the University of the Western Cape. She is a behavioural social scientist, whose research explores the role of structural factors such as gender and economic inequalities in the production of social and sexual behaviours that lead to negative health outcomes.

• Resource over-exploitation and running out
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Food systems around the world are highly dependent on both renewable and nonrenewable resources. Drivers such as population growth, urbanisation and climate change put a lot of pressure on resources that have become core issues for the future of food systems. Cropland availability is limited in most parts of the world, adding pressure for cropping intensification. Fossil energy and phosphorus shortages are expected to occur within a few decades, with particular impact in Low-Income (LI) countries where farmers are more vulnerable to volatile prices. The availability of very unevenly distributed freshwater resources shows a similar picture, with an increasing number of regions reaching alarming levels of water scarcity. Some world fish stocks have been overexploited and are now depleted. But the situation is not without hope. While we need to intensify food systems to meet the challenge of a growing population, new ways to produce with less impact on the environment and more resilience to climate change need to be widely adopted.

• Power at the table : food fights and happy meals
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  In family meals the normative and the performative are very far apart—though everyone likes to think of the family table as a place of harmony and solidarity, it is often the scene for the exercise of power and authority, a place where conflict prevails. My interest in this topic was sparked by research on middle-class parents’ struggles with their “picky eater” children. Besides narrating the way the dinner table became battleground with their own children, many parents also recalled their own childhood family meals as painful and difficult. From this very narrow focus on family struggles, I expand the discussion to the larger question of why this topic is relatively ignored in social science, and I question the sources of the normative power of the family “happy meal.” The ideological emphasis on family dinners has displaced social responsibility from public institutions to private lives, and the construction of normative family performances is part of a process that constructs different family types as deviant and delinquent.

• 19/ Hidden costs and the fair price of our food: between the market, the State and the commons
  15 September 2022, by Mathilde COUDRAY

  Jean-Louis Rastoin, L’Institut Agro Montpellier, France
  Key points The market price of food products reflects only a limited share (between a third and half) of their true cost if we take into account the negative externalities associated with their production, distribution and consumption. These harmful impacts pertain to human health (50% of hidden costs on average), the environment (30%), and the economy (20%). These figures vary due to the territorial diversity of food systems. (...)

• Land statistics. Global, regional and country trends 1990–2018
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The FAOSTAT Land Use statistics and associated land indicators provide information on the full land use matrix by country, including agricultural land (1961–2018) and forest land (1990–2018). These statistics are based on data collected annually from countries via a standard Land Use, Irrigation and Agricultural Practices questionnaire. Forest land statistics in the dataset are collected separately from countries through the FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA, 2020). The FAOSTAT Land Cover statistics are conversely produced by FAO, based on its Land Cover Classification System (FAO-LCCS) (De Gregorio, 2015). Information is derived from remote sensing products generated independently by specialized Agencies, currently NASA (MODIS land cover) and the European Copernicus Climate Change service (CCI land cover). Thei brief provides an overview of the main results and changes over time in land use statistics with a focus on agricultural land uses, and with details at global, regional and country level. Additional information is provided on important irrigation and agricultural practices also collected via the above-mentioned FAO questionnaire. It also presents some of the results from the land cover dataset also at global, regional and country level and compares them to land use statistics, thus giving for the first time a joint view of land statistics in FAOSTAT.

• Improving lifestyles sustainability through community gardening : results and lessons learnt from the JArDinS quasi-experimental study.
  10 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Despite an increasing number of studies highlighting the health benefits of community gardening, the literature is limited by cross-sectional designs. The “JArDinS” quasi-experimental study aimed to assess the impact of community garden participation on the adoption of more sustainable lifestyles among French adults.

• Food systems at risk
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The way food systems have evolved over past decades means that they now face major risks, which in turn threaten the future of food systems themselves. Food systems have seriously contributed to climate change, environmental destruction, overexploitation of natural resources and pollution of air, water and soils. Despite the global average improvement in calorie production and major development of the food and agricultural product markets, huge inequalities in food access and repartition of the added value have emerged, leading to new serious nutritional and social problems. Based on a review of the most recent scientific knowledge, this report emphasizes Low-Income and Lower Middle-Income countries where the population faces greater challenges than elsewhere. Different threats are adding up and there are few options to adapt or mitigate these combinations of risks. This is a call for all those - businesses, policy makers, consumers, funding agencies - who are engaged in food systems transformations to bear in mind their systemic aspects and their multiple outcomes and risks in order to be able to fashion more sustainable and equitable food systems.

  This report was prepared and coordinated by the Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD), and is a joint production with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO). The scientific report hereunder takes stock of the current and future risks and challenges as regards to food systems.