Animal welfare receives more legislative attention in the European Union (EU) than in many other regions of the world. Animal welfare standards for poultry are generally taken to be higher in the EU than in producing countries exporting to the EU, particularly developing countries. The recent action plan for animal welfare introduced by the European Commission aims to further expand the body of regulatory standards. In broiler production worldwide, birds are mainly kept on litter. Recently the EU agreed on a new Directive to set standards for maximum bird density. However, this is not considered likely to have a great impact on global trade. At present, the difference in animal conditions, including bird density, in Brazil and Thailand is limited compared to the EU. In egg production the majority of commercial layers are kept in laying cages. There is wide variation in space allowance per bird from 300 to 400 cm² in Brazil, Ukraine and India towards the current minimum of 550 cm² per hen in the EU. After 2012, hens in the EU will be kept in enriched cages with a minimum space allowance of 750 cm² per hen. It is expected that this will have an impact on world trade in egg products and especially egg powder. Trade in table eggs will continue to be limited to the local region. The EU is considering the use of labelling to provide consumers with more information concerning the standard of production. Another option could be to use financial mechanisms such as taxes or tariffs to prevent imports from other countries with lower standards. The likelihood of a measure being challenged would depend on how difficult it was for exporters outside the EU to meet the requirements.

Steering the EU food system towards a sustainability transformation requires a vast and actionable knowledge base available to a range of public and private actors. Few have captured this complexity by assessing food systems from a multi-dimensional and multi-level perspective, which would include (1) nutrition and diet, environmental and economic outcomes together with social equity dimensions and (2) system interactions across country, EU and global scales. This paper addresses this gap in food systems research and science communication by providing an integrated analytical approach and new ways to communicate this complexity outside science. Based on a transdisciplinary science approach with continuous stakeholder input, the EU Horizon2020 project ‘Metrics, Models and Foresight for European SUStainable Food And Nutrition Security’ (SUSFANS) developed a five-step process: Creating a participatory space; designing a conceptual framework of the EU food system; developing food system performance metrics; designing a modelling toolbox and developing a visualization tool. The Sustainable Food and Nutrition-Visualizer, designed to communicate complex policy change-impacts and trade-off questions, enables an informed debate about trade-offs associated with options for change among food system actors as well as in the policy making arena. The discussion highlights points for further research related to indicator development, reach of assessment models, participatory processes and obstacles in science communication.

This work provides an internationally comparable consumer food waste dataset based on food availability, energy gap and consumer affluence. Such data can be used for constructing meaningful and internationally comparable metrics on food waste, such as those for Sustainable Development Goal 12. The data suggests that consumer food waste follows a linear-log relationship with consumer affluence and starts to emerge when consumers reach a threshold of approximately $6.70/day/capita level of expenditure. These findings also imply that most empirical models overestimate consumption by not accounting for the possibility of food waste in their analysis. The results also show that the most widely cited global estimate of food waste is underestimated by a factor greater than 2 (214 Kcal/day/capita versus 527 Kcal/day/capita). Comparison with estimates of US consumer food waste based on national survey data shows this approach can reasonably reproduce the results without needing extensive data from national surveys.

Ce texte présente le projet européen SUSFANS.This paper defines the research agenda of the SUSFANS project, describes its history and its potential societal impacts. It contributes to balanced and encompassing views on how to strengthen food and nutrition security outcomes in the EU and how to improve the performance of the food system in the EU from the perspective of social, environmental and economic sustainability. The research is led by the notion that improvements in the diets of the European consumer must come from, and be supportive of, sustainable food systems. Its holistic, integrative approach builds a set of metrics, models and foresight tools, useable for navigation on sustainable food and nutrition security. This results in a coherent and supported vision on sustainable food and nutrition security in the EU and globally, and underpins a perspective on how EU policies on farming, fishing, food and nutrition could contribute to that vision with greater efficacy than today

This study examined the use of the household dietary diversity score (HDDS) to assess household nutrient adequacy in Ethiopia. It also examined the correlates of HDDS following the food systems framework. Results show that the average nutrient consumption in Ethiopia varies by place of residence and by income profile, where households in urban areas and those in the higher income quintiles rank favorably. Among 13 nutrients under study, we found nutrient inadequacy for fat, calcium, zinc, riboflavin, niacin, folate, vitamin C and vitamin A ranging between 46% and 89%, and the prevalence of inadequacy for vitamin B12 to be up to 100%. Econometric results showed that HDDS is a strong predictor of a household’s mean probability of nutrient adequacy (MPA), and that an HDDS of 10 is the minimum threshold at which HDDS can improve household MPA. We found suggestive evidence within the food systems that improving household-incomes, access to health and transport services are beneficial to improve HDDS and nutrient consumption in Ethiopia.