In the world’s fifth-richest country, one in five people still go hungry, and the UK’s post Covid scheme will leave many out in the cold. Migrants are among the groups who are starving as they have no recourse to public funds, reports Harriet Morphy-Morris. […]
In Ireland, dangerous levels of ammonia emissions are driven largely by the burgeoning cattle population. Yet policymakers are turning a blind eye to the link between ammonia pollution and the expanding national herd. The evidence shows that Ireland is pursuing growth in the agri-food sector at the expense of air quality, biodiversity and human health, reports Alison Brogan. […]
In post-Brexit Britain, the new Agriculture Bill is exposing the fault lines between environmental conservation, neoliberal trade deals, and the future of small-scale farming. In part two of this series, Anoushka Zoob Carter explores the phenomenon of technological nationalism in post-CAP politics, and the conflicts it is generating between advocates of rural renewal and of an emancipatory rural politics. […]
Join us on December 9th at 17:00 CET for a participatory web conference on ‘Local Food – Reimagining Regional Responses’. In partnership with Forum Synergies and Cultivate, ARC2020 is co-organising this online event which will present collaborative approaches to building rural resilience, and consider how we can progress agri-food movements from the local level to the regional. […]
Redistributing food waste is surely a win for the environment and for society. So why is it such an uphill struggle? In the Belgian capital, a project called ‘Feed the culture’ helps out workers in the arts sector who are struggling to put food on the table because of the COVID-19 closures. Natasha Foote speaks to the volunteers on the ground in Brussels. […]
The era of direct payments in the UK is ending. Farm policy in the UK just took a step forward into the post CAP era this week with the royal assent on the Agriculture Bill. Now an Act of parliament, it represents a pretty radical new approach to farm support – paying farmers for the public goods or benefits they provide. […]
Brexit and the Covid crisis have yielded easy pickings for the far right. In the first of a two-part series, Anoushka Zoob Carter unpacks how new forms of nationalism are exploiting a broken food and farming system. […]
Ukraine is a major agricultural exporter to the European Union. A progressive CAP could force Ukrainian agriculture towards more sustainability. But the current nationalization of the CAP might steer such environmental ambitions off course. […]
Street Goat is a new urban farming project that grazes goats on disused land around the city of Bristol, UK. Run by a 20-member community cooperative, it provides local people with sustainable, healthy milk and meat, while helping to recover overgrown land for horticultural use. Ursula Billington reports. […]
Next week, likely on October 20, the European parliament will vote on a supposedly historical reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which accounts for over one third of the EU annual budget. But as it stands, it is rather set to become a historical failure of rather catastrophic proportions. Op-Ed by Nina Holland, Martin Pigeon and Hans van Scharen, researchers at Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) […]
Both academic and policy debates tend to focus on how to further intensify agricultural landscapes to spare natural lands for natural biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration. This Brief from IDDRI elaborates on a literature review of recent publications to argue that equal attention should be paid to the protection and restoration of biodiversity within agricultural landscapes, most notably for the role it plays as a critical production factor. […]
Part 2 of our Russia series aims to shed a light on the Russian agricultural industry and changes that lie ahead. Alia Yakupova and Hannes Lorenzen walk us through a brief history of Russia and the potential impact of recent developments on global agriculture and food. […]
Seeds4All is dedicated to seed diversity, and it aims to “give visibility to all European organisations that collect, enrich, produce, disseminate and sustainably use traditional and new varieties of seeds belonging to the public domain, freely reproducible and not genetically modified.” […]
The lack of funds by international donors and European countries towards agroecology is a blocking factor for the transformation needed in our food systems. […]
To cull or not to cull? As Poland’s battle with African Swine Fever rages on, state-sponsored efforts to decimate the wild boar population have polarized public opinion. In part 2 of this series, Igor Tomasz Olech examines the two sides of the culling story. […]
Agricultural and Rural Convention