Food loss and waste have a negative environmental impact due to the water, land, energy and other natural resources used to produce the wasted food, along with post-consumption disposal costs. Reducing food waste will thus help improve sustainability and decrease the environmental impact of the food system. Using food waste for animal feed is of growing importance in terms of the policies targeted at tackling food waste but the current legal framework in the European Union (EU) strongly restricts the possibility of using food waste for this purpose. The aim of this work is to evaluate the feasibility of innovative measures for feed production in the EU and to identify the best strategies to implement them. First, a technical evaluation of a case study is presented, which is a process developed in the United States for urban food waste transformation into animal feed. Second, there is an analysis of the potential application of this process in the European Union within the current legal framework. The results reveal that the feed product derived from food waste is compliant with EU safety requirements and is nutritionally valuable. This work also suggests that the implementation of this kind of process in the European Union has great potential, provided that food surplus is recovered and treated before it turns into waste and that the different types of food surplus identified are used as feed for the right animal type in accordance with European legislation (i.e., livestock, aquarium fish, pets). On these terms, pet food can be the most concrete strategy for using food waste within the European context. In general, the implementation of feed-from-food measures to reduce food waste in Europe is already possible and does not need to wait for further policy interventions.

Sustainable development is more often considered by media, public opinion, and politicians to be the main goal our society should attempt to pursue in the coming years. To this aim, academic researchers have made sustainability one of the main objects of their studies. This work focuses on environmental sustainability and presents a brief overview of how it is taken into consideration in the agricultural economics field by considering this topic from different perspectives and thus highlighting how this field is gradually broadening its scope to include sustainable development objectives. Our analysis shows that the path towards sustainable development is strongly correlated to the protection of the environment. Therefore, agricultural policies aimed at protecting and preserving the environment, and, more in general, innovation along the agri-food chain, together with consumer attention towards environmental issues, can play an important role in achieving this objective.

The use of plants as biofactories for the production of medical products and vaccines has a long history, but the recent COVID-19 pandemic has caused this set of technologies, for their potential to contribute to the development of innovative solutions for tackling pandemic spread worldwide, to rise in prominence. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the global innovation scenario of plant-based vaccine production. Methods: Patent search using a specific set of technical classification codes and keywords was performed using the Questel-Orbit database, with a final output of 180 patent families, corresponding to 1397 single patents. Results: Plant-based vaccines production is an innovation sector with positive development especially in the last five-year period (30% growth). Fifty percent of the patents were registered in the United States, standing out as the most attractive patent system worldwide. The inventive activity was led by private firms owning the 49% of the patent families, and the key-players group includes the companies that successfully developed plant-based COVID-19 vaccine candidates, indicating a strong connection between the expertise in innovation production and the capacity to adapt inventions to the current pandemic vaccine demand. Virus-like particles technology has increased in importance over the past few years. Conclusion: Patent data confirm their relevant role as indicators of innovation and technological evolution. Plant-based vaccines are expected to acquire an increasing role over the next few years as the current pandemic acts as an innovation catalyst.

The 2010 Eurobarometer on life science and biotechnology reveals an overall suspicion of GM foods amongst the public: the 61% of Europeans agree that GM food makes them feel uneasy and a higher proportion, 70%, think that GM food is fundamentally unnatural. In the economics literature many studies investigate the factors that drive public resistance: ethical concerns, low public trust in regulatory institution, risk misperception, absence of perceived benefits and media bias. In particular, public attitudes and risk perception about agricultural biotechnology are proved to be influenced by press media communication. This paper aims at gaining insight into the visual communication to which Italian population is exposed about GMOs, in order to investigate if images could have contributed to shape their negative public perception. A set of 500 images collected through Google search for “GMO” in Italy are classified considering fearful attributes (i.e. alteration of color, shape or size of plants or animals, mention to death or war, presence of DNA double helix or syringe) and an index that accounts for the scary impact of these images is built. Then the relationship between the index and a set of variables that refer to the context in which images appear is estimated. Preliminary results reveal that the order of appearance of images negatively affect index, namely that the first (and most viewed) Google result pages contain the most frightful images. It suggests that Italian population is subject to overstated negative inputs about GMOs. In addition, it emerges that web contents that show positive or neutral GMO attitudes are barely accompanied with objective and balanced visual communication. Implications and future research are then discussed.