News

For the first time, “safeguarding food security and ending hunger” was included in the final deal reached at the UN’s Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.  Will this lead to the radical and rapid change to food systems that is needed if global heating is to be capped at 1.5 degrees? While food and agriculture and their links to the climate crisis have ha…

Gender inequality, the double burden of malnutrition, and global food systems were all discussed at this enlightening online panel event which took place on Thursday, 10th November, 2022.  The event was organised in conjunction with Cambridge Reproduction and was chaired by Professor Alice Reid. Members of the panel were: Dr Akanksha Marphatia, Hon…

Shailaja Fennell, Professor in Regional Transformation and Economic Security at the University of Cambridge writes about proposed changes to agriculture in Pakistan, following the devastating floods of 2022.  Read her full article in The Conversation here.The UN estimates that the floods which besieged Pakistan in the summer of 2022 have affected 3…

This very well attended online panel event, organised with Cambridge Public Health, took place on Monday 11th October, and focused on how and whether public policy should shape our diet.  Professor Carol Brayne, chairing, started the event by reminding the audience that the subject has resonance beyond food; all public policy can be a political foo…

Cambridge Sustainable Food are running a packed programme of events this Saturday at the Cambridge Museum of Technology. There'll be lots going on throughout the day exploring the festival’s theme - Climate Action on a plate!More information here: FREE: Food For the Planet Festival @ The Museum of Technology — Cambridge Sustainable Food

On 23 September Dr Carol Ibe of the JR Biotek Foundation started the Michaelmas term of our ECR Coffee Break Seminars discussing: Democratizing plant science research to accelerate food and nutrition security in sub-Saharan Africa. Dr Ibe and the group discussed the vast opportunities, challenges and prospects in Africa's agriculture, and agreed on…

Joeva Rock recently joined the University of Cambridge as an Assistant Professor in Development Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies. An anthropologist, she uses ethnographic methods to study the interplay of food, politics, and development. She is a fellow of Murray Edwards College and a member of Cambridge Global Food S…

Actions to successfully restore tropical agroecosystems are described in a new paper published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution (TREE), written by a team led by Dr Michael Pashkevich, Marshall Sherfield Fellow in the Insect Ecology Group at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge.The authors present nine actions to guide restoration, sup…

Cowpea, a crop that is integral to Ghana’s food security, looks set to become the first genetically modified crop grown there - a major milestone. In late June 2022, GM cowpea cleared the first of the three regulatory hurdles en route to commercialisation in Ghana. Biotechnology proponents have been working for decades to integrate GM crops into Gh…

Women are invited to apply for a new MPhil in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.  This project aims to find new approaches to drive greater consumption of sustainable seafood for societal health. Seafood can be an incredibly rich source of nutrition, which is particularly important at a time when billions of people are overco…

The Covid Pandemic, rising cost of food and scarcity of some foodstuffs, have all focussed attention on how local areas can meet the challenges of a fractured food system. Local Food Partnerships (LFPs) play an essential part in this and are key to delivering local and national food priorities. 1LFPs are partnerships between local authorities, othe…

To celebrate the 2022 International Women's Day theme of promoting women's equality, and to honour the work that women do to help make our world more food secure, this year we are profiling women who work in gender development. In this interview, Patricia Biermayr-Jenzano reflects on the important roles that women hold in agricultural value chains.…

Trials will evaluate whether enhancing the natural capacity of crops to interact with common soil fungi can contribute to more sustainable, equitable food production.A field trial of genetically modified and gene edited barley is due to be planted this April. The research is evaluating whether improved crop interactions with naturally occurring soi…

With a current human population of 7.6 billion, and an expected growth to 9.8 billion by 2050, demands for nutrient-rich foods are increasing. Current estimations suggest that over 2 billion people world-wide suffer from a micronutrient deficiency (MND), which may increase with global population size unless current food practices change. This, in t…

To celebrate the 2022 International Women's Day theme of promoting women's equality, and to honour the work that women do to help make our world more food secure, this year we are profiling women who work in gender development. In this interview, Alessandra Galiè reflects on how gender norms in Ghana impact female livestock farmers' access to veter…