Small-scale farmers are likely to be hit hard if open-air markets close due to coronavirus fears. This could have a longer-term impact on the food supply chain.
An entire section of meat and poultry is left empty after panicked shoppers swept through in fear of the coronavirus at a grocery store in Burbank, Calif. on March 14, 2020.
(AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
COVID-19 is showing us we must work collectively to put resilience alongside efficiency as the primary drivers for the systems we depend upon each and every day for food.
Globalization is making it harder to identify and trace outbreaks of foodborne illness. Technology can help, but consumers may also have to rethink their food choices.
Growing produce in cities is one way of boosting food production.
Shutterstock.
Global food system issues can be traced to colonial history. It’s time food production became more sustainable so that it meets the needs of people - equally.
New research challenges the assumption that world food production must double by 2050 to keep up with demand. The authors call for more focus on conservation through measures such as these diverse winter cover crops planted on a Pennsylvania dairy farm.
Mitch Hunter
According to widely-cited estimates, world food production must double by 2050 to keep up with population growth. New research challenges this target and calls for balancing growth with conservation.
The concerns about genetically modified foods are well known. But when we look at population and climate projections, what happens if we don’t use them to increase our food supply?
New season asparagus from farmland on Melbourne’s city fringe.
Matthew Carey
Food insecurity is a problem that doesn’t only stem from hunger. It is also a result of eating food that is not nutritious.
Children from a village in Papua New Guinea’s Western Highlands Province stand in one of countless sweet potato gardens destroyed by frost across the country, August 2015.
Kud Sitango
Papua New Guinea is now facing a drought and frosts that look set to be worse than 1997, when hundreds of people died. So how can memories of 1997 save lives over the next few months?
We are in the middle of one of the biggest experiments in human history. At its core is the homogenisation of global food systems, which increasingly must deliver the same products to an expanding population…
PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, and Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney