Highlighting sustainable food systems in Mountains for the UN Food Systems Summit 2021

Mountain agriculture and food production sustain the livelihoods of 1.1 billion people living in the mountains and those of a much larger number of people in the lowlands that depend on healthy mountain ecosystems for freshwater and for the conservation of key plant and animal biological diversity. Worldwide, more than 80 percent of all food is produced by small-scale farmers. Small-scale farmers and pastoralists are predominant in mountain regions, where generally harsh weather and limiting topographical conditions prevail. Progress towards sustainable food systems cannot happen without improving the situation of small-scale mountain farmers worldwide

Better, But Not Sustainable: The Impacts of Switzerland’s Sector Agreement on Soy Production in Brazil

The production and expansion of soy feed in Brazil generates various environmental and social harms. The vast majority of this soy is genetically modified (GM) and non-certified. But there is a small share of soy feed production that occurs under certification schemes stipulating social and environmental criteria, as well as a small share of production of non-genetically modified (non-GM) soy. These two production modes partly overlap. Based on a sector agreement, Switzerland exclusively imports certified non-GM soy feed. In the present article, we conduct a literature review to explore who drives this decision for non-GM soy feed and, more importantly, whether it has discernible sustainability impacts on the ground in production areas. Literature and data analysing the impacts of certified non-GM soy feed are scarce. Based on the scant but a little less scarce available data on certified soy, we conclude that the Swiss model represents an improvement, but is not truly sustainable. We recommend that more data be made available which enables robust linking of Swiss consumption to production in Brazil. Finally, we recommend conducting more research into how a sustainable Swiss feed–meat nexus could be designed

Government regulation and public opposition create high additional costs for field trials with GM crops in Switzerland

Field trials with GM crops are not only plant science experiments. They are also social experiments concerning the implications of government imposed regulatory constraints and public opposition for scientific activity. We assess these implications by estimating additional costs due to government regulation and public opposition in a recent set of field trials in Switzerland. We find that for every Euro spent on research, an additional 78 cents were spent on security, an additional 31 cents on biosafety, and an additional 17 cents on government regulatory supervision. Hence the total additional spending due to government regulation and public opposition was around 1.26 Euros for every Euro spent on the research per se. These estimates are conservative; they do not include additional costs that are hard to monetize (e.g. stakeholder information and dialogue activities, involvement of various government agencies). We conclude that further field experiments with GM crops in Switzerland are unlikely unless protected sites are set up to reduce these additional cost