Replacement of Contentious Inputs in Organic Farming Systems (RELACS) – a comprehensive Horizon 2020 project

Organic farmers adhere to high standards in producing quality food while protecting the environment. However, organic farming needs to improve continuously to keep meeting its ambitious objectives. The project ‘Replacement of Contentious Inputs in Organic Farming Systems’ (RELACS) will foster the development and adoption of cost-efficient and environmentally safe tools and technologies to further reduce the use of external inputs on organic farms across Europe as well as in Non EU Mediterranean countries. Project partners will provide scientific support to develop fair and implementable EU rules to improve current practices in organic farming. Farm advisory networks in 11 European countries will reach out to farmers to ensure effective dissemination and adoption of the tools and techniques

RELACS: a new EU-project on the Replacement of Contentious Inputs in Organic Farming Systems

Organic farmers adhere to high standards in producing quality food while protecting the environment. However, organic farming needs to improve continuously to keep meeting its ambitious objectives. The project ‘Replacement of Contentious Inputs in Organic Farming Systems’ (RELACS) will foster the development and adoption of cost-efficient and environmentally safe tools and technologies to: - Reduce the use of copper and mineral oil in plant protection, - Identify sustainable sources for plant nutrition, and - Provide solutions to support livestock health and welfare

An Overview of the Ethics of Eating and Drinking

Eating and drinking are ethical acts. When we make decisions about what to eat and what not to, we are making decisions that impact our own health, the well-being of those who work in the food system, animal welfare, and the environment. Food ethics is the interdisciplinary study of how what we eat – including the way it is produced, distributed, marketed, prepared, and ultimately consumed – impacts human, animal, and planetary health and well-being. Food ethics also analyses the justice or fairness of these impacts. Food ethics raises many difficult questions that do not always have clear or easy answers, such as how do we produce enough food to feed everyone well and equitably; how do we ensure that everyone has access to high-quality, nutritious food that is culturally appropriate; how do we do this in a way that treats workers fairly and respectfully, is considerate of animal welfare, and is environmentally sustainable; and how do we shift power across the food system in favor of the public good over multinational food companies. This chapter will explore these questions and more, hopefully encouraging thoughtful discussions and potential solutions for the future

Measuring food access using the Cost of a Healthy Diet (CoHD): Insights from retail prices worldwide

Since 2020, measuring a population’s access to sufficient nutritious food for an active and healthy life has been done with a new metric known as the Cost and Affordability of Healthy Diets (CoAHD), computed annually for all countries by the World Bank and the FAO, and also used by researchers and national governments to track spatial and temporal variation within countries. This new kind of cost and affordability data measures food access using market prices of the least expensive locally available items that would meet nutritional criteria adopted by national governments, as summarized in a Healthy Diet Basket (HDB) level of intake balanced among six complementary food groups: starchy staples, vegetables, fruits, fats & oils, animal source foods, and legumes, nuts or seeds. CoAHD metrics reflect the definition of food security introduced during the World Food Summit of 1996, and complement earlier measures of global food security used by UN agencies and governments, which are the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) based on total national availability and intake distribution of calories, and the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) based on survey data asking whether a household ran out of resources to acquire their usual diets. This paper briefly discusses the evolution of global food security measurement, then highlights updates to the methods used to compute CoAHD indicators and presents newly available CoAHD data obtained using this methodology and updated price data