A paper published in The Lancet Planetary Health in December 2020 discussed the trade-off between food system innovation and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Emerging trade-offs must be addressed, particularly those involving social aspects like inequality and social justice, in order to achieve true sustainability.

Last month, the sale of cultured meat has been approved for the first time in the world. Cultured meat is meat artificially produced by tissue culture of cells and can therefore reduce the environmental load as compared to livestock. In addition, it can be produced under strict hygienic management and does not require the slaughter of animals. The approval by the Singapore Food Agency on the sale of chicken cultivated in a bioreactor by a US company Eat Just is a milestone for the food industry.

Although the ocean occupies 71% of the Earth's surface, it has long been neglected in the global environmental policy processes. In response to this situation, the prime ministers of Norway and Palau convened the leaders of 14 countries, including Japan, to set up a high-level panel to protect the benefits that humankind has enjoyed from the marine environment.

An editorial published in Nature Food in November 2020 emphasized the importance of systems thinking in tackling the multidimensional problems in the food system. Research methods and frameworks provide the perspectives when analyzing a problem, and the way they are constructed or applied determine the scope of the solutions that can be explored. Therefore, the risks of disengagement from systems thinking should not be underestimated.

In December 2020, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published "The Least Developed Countries Report 2020". According to the report, the GDP per capita of least developed countries (LDCs) is projected to contract by 2.6% in 2020 and to experience their worst economic performance in the last 30 years. It is also predicted that the poverty rate will rise from 32.5% to 35.7% due to the economic crisis caused by COVID-19.

The JIRCAS 50th Anniversary International Symposium “The role of international collaboration in agricultural research to address challenges in the post-COVID-19 global food system” video has been released online.

A paper published in Nature Sustainability analyzed the vegetation trends across the planet’s driest areas using satellite imagery and found that vegetation regeneration is not commensurate with precipitation in developing countries in Asia and Africa. To avoid the negative impacts, it is important to take immediate mitigation measures through an understanding of the relationship between vegetation-rainfall sensitivity and associated drivers in tropical drylands.

Many farmers in developing countries that rely on rainfed agriculture are facing an increasing uncertainty of agricultural production due to the impact of climate change. Even in irrigated agriculture, proper management of water resources is also necessary. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA 2020) addressing the importance of proper governance for agricultural water resource management to ensure global food security and nutrition, and to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Agriculture is the largest contributor to land-use change which tends to increase the incidence of zoonotic diseases by increasing contact opportunities for wildlife, livestock and humans. On the other hand, is there any relationship between global warming itself and the outbreak of infectious diseases? A paper published in Science conducted a global meta-analysis of the thermal mismatch hypothesis about host-pathogen relationships. The resulting model showed that fungal disease risk increased in warm climates whereas the frequency of bacterial disease increased under warm abnormalities in cool climates.