In line with the development of international trade, environmental concerns have arisen as a global problem. International trade has the potential to increase environmental externalities such as transboundary pollution, deforestation, transportation and production relocation avoiding environmental standards. The share of agricultural goods in total export reached 15% in 2017. Since 2002, the proportion of unprocessed agricultural products have more than doubled, while the volume of processed goods in global trade has tripled. Despite the importance of agricultural trade worldwide, the number of studies exploring the trade-agriculture-environment nexus has so far been limited. This paper aims to provide an overview of the environmental impacts of agricultural trade based on the international economics literature published in recent years by way of a systematic literature review. Results suggest that most recent environmental studies do not view extended trade or trade liberalization in agriculture favourably. Only a limited number of papers state that a country or countries’ environment could benefit from agricultural trade, and only a few researchers have found that agricultural trade did not have any significant influence at all, or have instead found the effects on the environment to be ambiguous. Finally, the research reveals the most important consequences of pollution and offers potential solutions.

Significant emphasis has recently been placed on measuring companies from a sustainability perspective by environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores, resulting in a considerable amount of financial, accounting, business, and management research on the subject. We provide a concise and harmonized systematic literature review of the current trends within this area for a broader range of academic researchers and practitioners. This work comprehensively explains ESG ratings, scores, and reports and aims to summarize how CSR activities are accounted for as non-financial information. The review aims to provide information and a better understanding of the complexity of corporate ESG aspects for those interested in this area. The results suggest that diverse methodologies, subjective elements, and some complexity of ESG measurement exist, leading to companies unconsciously using ESG ratings based on incorrect measures. Scoring methodologies are controversial, highlighting the need for more certainty about the validity of the ratings. ESG ratings need more reliability, and ESG reports do not help increase credibility, transparency, or accountability. Greenwashing emerges from loose regulation, measurement complexity, and the absence of transparency, emphasizing the need for more auditing and regulations in sustainability reporting and rating. Our results also demonstrate that ESG reporting is an ever-growing issue in sustainability and finances, and regulators must focus on it. Inconsistencies and uncertainties exist in ESG ratings and reporting; therefore, education is needed for decision-makers to understand better how this emerging topic works in practice.

Since late 2019, an outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread all over the world, challenging the sustainability of global agri-food markets. Although its full impact on agricultural and food markets is not yet evident, we have some early evidence on the different impacts. The aim of this article is to summarize the early evidence by screening global newspaper articles and sites written on the topic until 10 April 2020. The most read English-based newspaper articles were downloaded and accessed together with a Google search on specific keywords in order to have a complete picture of the topic. Results suggest that agriculture-related pandemic effects can be grouped into supply, demand, labour, food security, food safety, trade and other effects. It is also evident that the first impacts are not one-sided: what helped some hurt others. This article can serve as a basis for future research on the topic by identifying and highlighting the key topics as well as summarizing the earliest evidence available.

For decades, global food security has not been able to address the structural problem of economic access to food, resulting in a recent increase in the number of undernourished people from 2014. In addition, the FAO estimates that the number of undernourished people drastically increased by 82–132 million people in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To alleviate this dramatic growth in food insecurity, it is necessary to understand the nature of the increase in the number of malnourished during the pandemic. In order to address this, we gathered and synthesized food-security-related empirical results from the first year of the pandemic in a systematic review. The vast majority (78%) of the 51 included articles reported household food insecurity has increased (access, utilization) and/or disruption to food production (availability) was a result of households having persistently low income and not having an adequate amount of savings. These households could not afford the same quality and/or quantity of food, and a demand shortfall immediately appeared on the producer side. Producers thus had to deal not only with the direct consequences of government measures (disruption in labor flow, lack of demand of the catering sector, etc.) but also with a decline in consumption from low-income households. We conclude that the factor that most negatively affects food security during the COVID-19 pandemic is the same as the deepest structural problem of global food security: low income. Therefore, we argue that there is no need for new global food security objectives, but there is a need for an even stronger emphasis on poverty reduction and raising the wages of low-income households. This structural adjustment is the most fundamental step to recover from the COVID-19 food crises, and to avoid possible future food security crises.