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Front Cover -- Advances in Food Security and Sustainability -- Copyright -- Contents -- Contributors -- Preface -- Chapter One: Managing diversity for food system resilience -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Determining and enhancing resilience of food systems -- 3. Resilience management through diversity -- 4. From diversity to response diversity -- 4.1. Response diversity is not equal to cultivar or genetic diversity -- 4.2. Response diversity enhances yield resilience -- 4.3. Crop diversity in response to weather may depend on soil types -- 4.4. Managing supply chain resilience through response diversity -- 5. What about the trade-off between resilience and efficiency? -- 6. How to measure response diversity -- 6.1. Step 1: Selecting the critical factors of change and variation -- 6.2. Step 2: Estimating component responses to the factors -- 6.3. Step 3: Validating the responses with other data -- 6.4. Step 4: Constructing the response diversity index -- 6.5. Step 5: Assessing response diversity -- 7. Retooling to enable resilience management -- 8. Conclusions -- References -- Chapter Two: Looking at complex agri-food systems from an actor perspective: The case of Northern Thailand -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Food systems and agrarian change -- 3. Methodology -- 4. The case of Mae Chaem and its engagement in global food systems -- 4.1. The animal feed maize incorporation process into global food systems -- 4.2. Animal feed maize supply chain in Mae Chaem -- 4.3. The nature of dependency: Both as producers and consumers: And degrees of agency -- 5. Discussions and conclusions -- References -- Further reading -- Chapter Three: The evolution of food security policy in Lao PDR: Continuity and change in the era of the sustainable deve ... -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Food security policy in Lao PDR from independence to 2000.

Food policy has long been viewed as an essential part of the public health agenda, but this book identifies the importance of environmental damage and social inequalities to these issues. The authors offer a review of current and past food policy, proposing the need for a new ecological public health approach to food policy

To address the policy malfunctions of the recent past and present, UK food policy needs to link policy areas that in the past have been dealt with in a disparate manner, and to draw on a new ecological public health approach. This will need a shift within the dominant trade liberalization–national economic competitiveness paradigm that currently informs UK food policy, and the international levels of the EU and the WTO trade rules, and grants the large corporate players in the food system a favoured place at the policy–making tables. The contradictions of the food system have wrought crises that have engendered widespread institutional change at all levels of governance. Recent institutional reforms to UK food policy, such as the FSA and DEFRA, reflect a bounded approach to policy integration. Initiatives seeking a more integrated approach to food policy problems, such as the Social Exclusion Unit's access to shops report, and the Policy Commission on the Future of Food and Farming, can end up confined to a particular policy sector framed by particular interests—a process of "policy confinement". However, the UK can learn from the experience of Norway and Finland who have found their own routes to a more joined–up approach to public health and a sustainable food supply by, for example, introducing a national food policy council to provide integrated policy advice. Also, at the local and community levels in the UK, policy alternatives are being advanced in an ad hoc fashion by local food initiatives. More structural–level interventions at the regional and local governance levels are also needed to address the social dimensions of a sustainable food supply

Food policy is high on the public policy agenda, but still suffers from a lack of overview and integration. The paper reviews examples of policy limitations where tighter and more explicit links could usefully be made between environmental, social and public health considerations. The paper proposes a new ecological health approach to public policy. This offers marked advantages over the present "productionist" approach to food policy. With this old policy regime in crisis, the paper reviews current moves towards adoption of the ecological health model in Britain, Europe and globally.

Traceability – the ability to track a product from farm to plate – is now widely used in the food sector for a range of purposes: it allows companies to improve efficiency, facilitates product recall, and helps producers flag the specific characteristics of their goods. But traceability systems are mainly designed and used by the people directly involved in the food chain. The people at the end of the food chain – food consumers – have little say in which attributes are traced, and can rarely access the information stored in traceability systems. This book draws on philosophical discourses (like ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of law) around food ethics and empirical research in three important food chains (UK bread, Danish bacon and Greek olive oil) to argue that ethical traceability systems could be used to communicate food information to consumers, allowing them not only to make food choices consistent with their own values, but also to play a more informed role in the way food is produced and distributed. It will appeal to academics, students and policy makers with an interest in traceability, food ethics and food policy.

A variety of antimicrobials and antiparasitics are used to treat British cattle and sheep to ensure animal welfare, a safe food supply, and maintain farm incomes. However, with increasing global concern about antimicrobial resistance in human and animal populations, there is increased scrutiny of the use of antimicrobials in food-producing animals. This systematic review sought to identify and describe peer and non-peer reviewed sources, published over the last ten years, detailing the usage of, and resistance to, antimicrobials and antiparasitics in sheep and cattle farming systems in Britain as well as identify knowledge gaps. Applying the PRISMA review protocol and guidelines for including grey literature; Scopus, Web of Science, Medline, and government repositories were searched for relevant articles and reports. Seven hundred and seventy titles and abstracts and 126 full-text records were assessed, of which 40 scholarly articles and five government reports were included for data extraction. Antibiotic usage in sheep and cattle in Britain appear to be below the UK average for all livestock and tetracyclines and beta-lactam antibiotics were found to be the most commonly used. However, the poor level of coverage afforded to these species compared to other livestock reduced the certainty of these findings. Although resistance to some antibiotics (using Escherichia coli as a marker) appeared to have decreased in sheep and cattle in England and Wales over a five-year period (2013-2018), levels of resistance remain high to commonly used antibiotics. The small number and fragmented nature of studies identified by this review describing anthelmintic usage, and the lack of available national sales data, prevented the identification of trends in either sheep or cattle. We recommend that additional efforts are taken to collect farm or veterinary level data and argue that extraction of this data is imperative to the development of antimicrobial and antiparasitic resistance strategies in Britain, both of which are needed ...