Digital innovations for monitoring sustainability in food systems.

Monitoring systems that incentivize, track and verify compliance with social and environmental standards are widespread in food systems. In particular, digital monitoring approaches using remote sensing, machine learning, big data, smartphones, platforms and blockchain are proliferating. The increasing use and availability of these technologies put us at a critical juncture to leverage these innovations for enhanced transparency, fairness and open access, rather than descending into a dystopian landscape of digital surveillance and division perpetuated by a powerful few.

Research and policy for the food-delivery revolution.

Implications for nutrition, environment, and work may be considerable.

Sustainability standards in global agrifood supply chains.

Agrifood supply chains contribute to many environmental and social problems. Sustainability standards-rules that supply chain actors may follow to demonstrate their commitment to social equity and/or environmental protection-aim to mitigate such problems. We provide a narrative review of the effects of many distinct sustainability standards on different supply chain actors spanning multiple crops.

Post-farmgate food value chains make up most of consumer food expenditures globally.

Progress towards many United Nations Sustainable Development Goals depends on interventions in food value chains, yet data and methods have thus far limited the production of cross-nationally comparable estimates of food value chains' magnitudes. Here we develop a standardized method and data series to estimate the distribution of consumer food expenditures between value-added activities on farms and in the post-farmgate value chain. Using data from 61 countries over 2005-2015, representing 90% of the global economy, we show that farmers receive, on average, 27% of consumer expenditure on foods consumed at home and a far lower percentage of food consumed away from home.

Smallholder farmers and contract farming in developing countries.

Poverty is prevalent in the small-farm sector of many developing countries. A large literature suggests that contract farming-a preharvest agreement between farmers and buyers-can facilitate smallholder market participation, improve household welfare, and promote rural development. These findings have influenced the development policy debate, but the external validity of the extant evidence is limited.