Shaping food environments to support sustainable healthy diets in low and middle-income countries

The global ambitions to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture demand a complex transition of the current food environments for enabling sustainable healthy diets. The food environments in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) have been experiencing rapid and dynamic transitions across the globe, necessitating a system-level thinking and systemic approach to understand opportunities for improvement. There is a need for valid, reliable measures of food and nutrition environments for reorienting thinking and data collection toward determinants of food demand, especially the food environment components, which are critical to understand the transforming food systems. Food environment transformations are urgently required to provide consumers with more affordable and nutritious diets capable of meeting social and environmental challenges. In the present perspective, we aim to provide insights on prioritizing research on understanding and designing evidence based inclusive food environments which is crucial for promoting long-term food system innovations that are economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable and, above all, contribute to sustainable healthy diets

Predicting Resin Pockets in Radiata Pine Logs from Blemishes on Log Ends

More than 120 radiata pine (Pinus radiata D. Don) sawlogs, from two sites, were assessed for resin pockets and blemishes (resin streaks, bark pockets, colored marks, and other grain deviations) on the log ends. At both sites, the assessment of blemishes on the log ends improved the prediction of resin pockets on the lumber after sawing (r2 = 0.29 and 0.49), beyond the prediction achieved by assessing resin pockets on the log ends alone (r2 = 0 and 0.24). Noting only the presence or absence of blemishes on the log ends enabled explanation of half the variation between logs in loss of clear cuttings due to docking out resin pockets from the lumber (r2 = 0.50, P < 0.001). Since the log ends were assessed after ordinary chainsaw cuts were made, we believe that blemishes could be recognized by log graders, and that it should be possible to develop selection procedures for sawlogs that minimize the value losses associated with resin pockets

Wood Properties of Twenty Highly Ranked Radiata Pine Seed Production Parents Selected for Growth and Form

Twenty highly ranked radiata pine (Pinus radiata D. Don) seed production parent trees, grown under a commercial sawlog regime, were destructively assessed at rotation age (27 years) for wood quality traits significant to solid-wood and veneer products, including: juvenile-wood density, density variation, juvenile-wood spiral grain, compression wood, and appearance characteristics such as within-ring internal checking and resin pockets. Traits varied considerably among parents, which is reasonable since breeding efforts in New Zealand have, until recently, focused primarily on stem productivity and form. Parental information is useful for many wood properties owing to their high heritabilities in radiata pine (usually 50-80%); thus production forests established using advanced-generation genetic materials can also be expected to be variable in wood properties. Like other fastgrown pines, much of the radiata pine crop is juvenile wood, and an important challenge for tree improvement is to ensure that juvenile wood properties meet processor and end-user requirements

Globalization, Financial Depth, and Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa

ISSN:0948-3349ISSN:1614-750

Toward healthy and sustainable diets for the 21st century: Importance of sociocultural and economic considerations

Four years after the EAT-Lancet landmark report, worldwide movements call for action to reorient food systems to healthy diets that respect planetary boundaries. Since dietary habits are inherently local and personal, any shift toward healthy and sustainable diets going against this identity will have an uphill road. Therefore, research should address the tension between the local and global nature of the biophysical (health, environment) and social dimensions (culture, economy). Advancing the food system transformation to healthy, sustainable diets transcends the personal control of engaging consumers. The challenge for science is to scale-up, to become more interdisciplinary, and to engage with policymakers and food system actors. This will provide the evidential basis to shift from the current narrative of price, convenience, and taste to one of health, sustainability, and equity. The breaches of planetary boundaries and the environmental and health costs of the food system can no longer be considered externalities. However, conflicting interests and traditions frustrate effective changes in the human-made food system. Public and private stakeholders must embrace social inclusiveness and include the role and accountability of all food system actors from the microlevel to the macrolevel. To achieve this food transformation, a new “social contract,” led by governments, is needed to redefine the economic and regulatory power balance between consumers and (inter)national food system actors

Life Cycle Impact Assessment

International audienceThis chapter is dedicated to the third phase of an LCA study, the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) where the life cycle inventory's information on elementary flows is translated into environmental impact scores. In contrast to the three other LCA phases, LCIA is in practice largely automated by LCA software, but the underlying principles, models and factors should still be well understood by practitioners to ensure the insight that is needed for a qualified interpretation of the results.This chapter teaches the fundamentals of LCIA and opens the black box of LCIA with its characterisation models and factors to inform the reader about: (1) the main purpose and characteristics of LCIA, (2) the mandatory and optional steps of LCIA according to the ISO standard, and (3) the science and methods underlying the assessment for each environmental impact category. For each impact category, the reader is taken through (a) the underlying environmental problem, (b) the underlying environmental mechanism and its fundamental modelling principles, (c) the main anthropogenic sources causing the problem and (d) the main methods available in LCIA. An annex to this book offers a comprehensive qualitative comparison of the main elements and properties of the most widely used and also the latest LCIAmethods for each impact category, to further assist the advanced practitioner to make an informed choice between LCIA methods

Making sense of the minefield of footprint indicators

In recent years, footprint indicators have emerged as a popular mode of reporting environmental performance. The prospect is that these simplified metrics will guide investors, businesses, public sector policymakers and even consumers of everyday goods and services in making decisions which lead to better environmental outcomes. However, without a common “DNA”, the ever expanding lexicon of footprints lacks coherence and may even report contradictory results for the same subject matter.(1) The danger is that this will ultimately lead to policy confusion and general mistrust of all environmental disclosures. Footprints are especially interesting metrics because they seek to express the environmental performance of products and organizations from a life cycle perspective. The life cycle perspective is important to avoid misleading claims based only on a selected life cycle stage. For example, the water used to manufacture beverages may be important, but if a beverage includes sugar, irrigation water used to cultivate sugar cane could be a greater concern. The focus on environmental performance distinguishes footprints from technical efficiency measures, such as energy use efficiency or water use efficiency, which typically only make sense when applied to a single life cycle stage as they lack local environmental context. However, unlike technical efficiency, which can usually be accurately measured and verified, footprint indicators, with their wider view of environmental performance, are usually calculated using models which can differ in scope, complexity and model parameter settings. Despite the noble intention of using footprints to evaluate and report environmental performance, the potential inconsistency between different approaches acts as a deterrent to use in many public policymaking and business contexts and can lead to confusing and contradictory messages in the marketplace

Value Chains and Diet Quality: A Review of Impact Pathways and Intervention Strategies

Low and middle-income countries increasingly face a triple burden of malnutrition encompassing undernutrition, micronutrient deficiency, and excessive energy consumption contributing to overweight and obesity. Food systems are also becoming more complex, supported by investments in food processing and retailing. Traditional approaches addressing hunger, typically based on agricultural development, are deemed insufficient alone to address the problem and attention is now being directed to food value chains, although experience is currently limited. To assess the state of science and identify knowledge gaps, an integrative review of the broad topic of value chains and diet quality was undertaken, with particular focus on interventions and their related impact pathways. Interventions were classified according to their primary orientation: to increase the availability, accessibility, or desirability of nutritious food. We identified 24 separate interventions associated with 10 different impact pathways, demonstrating the numerous entry points and large potential for value chain interventions to influence diet quality. However, case study evidence regarding effectiveness remains scant. Most studies addressed individual nutrient-rich commodities that could address a nutritional deficiency in the community of interest. Rarely was overall diet quality assessed, and future studies could benefit from taking a wider perspective of dietary patterns and food substitutions. The value chain analytical approach was deemed valuable due to its consumer orientation that seeks to understand how food products are used and what motivates their choice. The systems perspective is also important as it considers the roles of actors involved in food production, distribution, marketing, and regulation. However, few studies directly engaged with the subject of the local food environment as the bridge connecting food production and food choice. The challenge is to combat the increasing prevalence of processed foods of low nutritional value through interventions that lead to nutritious food becoming more conveniently available, affordable, and desirable

An Alternative Nutrient Rich Food Index (NRF-ai) Incorporating Prevalence of Inadequate and Excessive Nutrient Intake

Most nutrient profiling models give equal weight to nutrients irrespective of their ubiquity in the food system. There is also a degree of arbitrariness about which nutrients are included. In this study, an alternative Nutrient Rich Food index was developed (NRF-ai, where ai denotes adequate intake) incorporating prevalence of inadequate and excessive nutrient intake among Australian adults. Weighting factors for individual nutrients were based on a distance-to-target method using data from the Australian Health Survey describing the proportion of the population with usual intake less than the Estimated Average Requirement defined by the Nutrient Reference Values for Australia and New Zealand. All nutrients for which data were available were included, avoiding judgements about which nutrients to include, although some nutrients received little weight. Separate models were developed for females and males and for selected age groups, reflecting differences in nutrient requirements and usual intake. Application of the new nutrient profiling models is demonstrated for selected dairy products and alternatives, protein-rich foods, and discretionary foods. This approach emphasises the need to identify foods that are rich in those specific nutrients for which intake is below recommended levels and can be used to address specific nutrient gaps in subgroups such as older adults. In addition, the new nutrient profiling model is used to explore other sustainability aspects, including affordability (NRF-ai per AUD) and ecoefficiency (NRF-ai/environmental impact score)