This report draws attention to the multiple benefits and threats of human nutrient use. It highlights how nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers are estimated to feed half the human population alive today, and how they will remain critical in the future, especially given increasing population and potential bioenergy needs. Yet high nutrient use has created a web of pollution affecting the environment and human health, while insufficient access to nutrients has led to soil degradation, causing food insecurity and exacerbating loss of natural ecosystems.

By 2050 the world’s population will rise to 9 billion. To satisfy demand, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has predicted that food production will need to increase by 70 per cent. Meanwhile, land and water resources are increasingly being degraded and depleted, which has serious implications for developing countries, and in particular for the African continent.

Investing in agriculture is essential for reducing hunger and promoting sustainable agricultural production. Those parts of the world where agricultural capital per worker and public investments in agriculture have stagnated are the epicentres of poverty and hunger today. Demand growth over the coming decades will place increasing pressure on the natural resource base. Eradicating hunger sustainably will require a significant increase in agricultural investments, but also an improvement in their effectiveness.

Currently 925 million people are undernourished and 195 million children under five years of age are stunted. At the same time, over 1 billion people are overweight and obese in both the developed and developing world. Diseases previously associated with affluence, such as cancer, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease, are on the rise.

This book offers a broad introduction to food policies in the United States. Real-world controversies and debates motivate the book’s attention to economic principles, policy analysis, nutrition science and contemporary data sources. It assumes that the reader’s concern is not just the economic interests of farmers, but also includes nutrition, sustainable agriculture, the environment and food security. The book’s goal is to make US food policy more comprehensible to those inside and outside the agri-food sector whose interests and aspirations have been ignored.

In this book, the authors present topical research in the study of the nutrition, consumption and health benefits of bean products. Topics discussed in this compilation include the chemical composition and food properties of six cultivars of African yam bean flours; food-grade soybean consumption and nutrition; proteinase inhibitors from legumes; lectins in legumes; seed yield in mungbean as correlated with root length density and total dry matter; defensins in beans; nutritional quality of beans and growing conditions; bean by-products and the angiotensin I-converting enzyme inhibitory and antioxidant activities of protein hydrolysates from four tropical legumes.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 presents new estimates of undernourishment based on a revised and improved methodology. These show that progress in reducing hunger during the past 20 years has been better than previously believed, and that, given renewed efforts, it may be possible to reach the MDG hunger target at the global level by 2015.

FAO has launched the new and revised Statistical Yearbook 2012. This publication is the foremost collection and reference point for statistical data on food and agriculture globally.

The 2012 edition of the FAO Statistical Yearbook represents a break away from FAO tradition. Through employing data from global statistical providers, including FAO, the publication presents a visual synthesis of the major trends and factors shaping the global food and agricultural landscape and their interplay with broader environmental, social and economic dimensions. In doing so, it strives to serve as a unique reference point on the state of world food and agriculture for policy-makers, donor agencies, researchers and analysts as well as the general public.

This timely study addresses the pressing issue of food security through a range of interdisciplinary contributions, providing both scholarly and policy-making perspectives. It sets the discussion on food security within the little-studied context of its international legal and regulatory framework. The expert contributors explore the key issues from a development perspective and through the lens of existing governance and policy systems with a view to articulating how these systems can be made more effective in dealing with the roots of food insecurity.

Drawing on the author’s extensive and varied research, this book provides readers with a firm grounding in the concepts and issues across several disciplines including economics, nutrition, psychology and public health in the hope of improving the design of food policies in the developed and developing world.

The focus of food science and technology has shifted from previous goals of improving food safety and enhancing food taste toward providing healthy and functional foods. Today’s consumers desire foods that go beyond basic nutrition—foods capable of promoting better health, or even playing a disease-prevention role. To meet this need for innovation, academic research must be combined with the development and commercialization strategies of industry.

This book examines the state of food insecurity in the world and provides an overview of the Obama Administration’s global hunger and food security initiative, called "Feed the Future".