According to Barbara Buchner, global managing director of the Climate Policy Initiative, following the crisis triggered by COVID-19, food production companies are becoming aware of the fragility of the system and are increasingly making use of documents on the environmental sustainability of the supply chain to understand the impact that food production has on society and on the planet. The interest is also in the inverse relationship, i.e. how much social and climatic changes can impact on food production and what measures must be taken to avoid disruptive effects.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and CropLife International have renewed and strengthened their commitment to work together and find new ways to transform agri-food systems and promote rural development through investment and innovation on the ground. CropLife International is a trade association that promotes agricultural technologies such as pesticides and plant biotechnology.
Farmers in the Seychelles marketing their products as organic will need to be certified under new legislation being worked on by the National Biosecurity Agency (NBA). According to the chief executive of the NBA, when the legislation comes into force, any farmer who is marketing their products as organic without being certified might be forced to remove their items on the market.
Global investors managing $4.1 trillion in assets have warned Indonesia's government that a recently approved contentious job creation bill could pose risks to the country's tropical forests. They also said they feared the legislation could hamper efforts to protect Indonesia's forests, which would in turn undermine global action to tackle biodiversity loss and slow climate change.
The European Commission has threatened to take every EU government to court if they continue to flout the rules on reducing the environmental impact of pesticides and securing the welfare of farm animals. EU Health and Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides demanded that the countries “ensure immediate and full compliance with EU requirements” linked to the Farm to Fork strategy.
The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has called on the British government to make a legal commitment to ban chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef from supermarket shelves. NFU president, Minette Batters, has demanded that UK’s standards of animal welfare should also be imposed on imports.
More than 60 leaders signed a new agreement to protect nature at the UN summit this week. A new framework for defending the environment is emerging across the world allowing people to sue on behalf of the environment. Rivers and ecosystems in at least 14 countries are considered as physical entities and therefore entitled to exist and flourish.