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June 3rd, 2019

Towards sustainable global food systems: Conceptual and policy analysis of agriculture, food and environmental linkages

Published by Sustainability journal,

This book (PDF) is a special edition of the Sustainability journal and promotes the view that sustainable food systems requires thorough insights into the structure and dynamics of agro-food production systems, the drivers for integrating food value chains and markets, and key incentives for supporting healthier consumer choices. At the production side, potential linkages between agricultural commercialisation and intensification and their effects for food security and nutritional outcomes are analysed. Value chains are assessed for their contribution to improving exchange networks and markets for food products that simultaneously support efficiency, circularity and responsiveness. Individual motives and market structures for food consumption need to be understood in order to be able to outline suitable incentives to enhance healthy dietary choice. The contributed papers focus on interfaces between food system activities and processes of adaptive change that are critical for overcoming key constraints and trade-offs between sustainable food and healthy diets. One article (PDF) in the book aimed to provide insights into vegetable consumption behavior of urban Nigerian consumers across different Socio-Economic Classes (SEC), their main food choice motives, and the associations of these motives and other drivers with vegetable consumption. A way to increase consumption would be to increase knowledge and self-efficacy. Another study (PDF) examined the impact of agricultural commercialization on the food security status of crop-producing households in the regions of Vietnam in the 1990s, which reveals that there is no clear evidence for the direction of commercialization on either caloric intake or dietary diversity. The journal also focusses on the up-scaling of agri-food system innovations in Brazil, New York and Senegal, by identifying common pressure points that have enabled local communities to drive system-wide transformations toward climate adaptation, resilience, and sustainability in the agri-food system. Other articles include a focus on land pressure, conservation agricultural practices, food loss and wastage, food system research, social innovations, dairy and much more.

Curated from mdpi.com