Agricultural land is a precious good and a special asset. It is essential for food, feed and energy production, and the delivery of public goods. It remains a matter within the competency of each Member State of the European Union on a national level. Yet, the acquisition of farmland and...

The newsletter of May 2017 includes: Latest report by the European Court of Auditors confirms lack of transparency in the allocation of fishing opportunities LIFE members from Finland, France, Denmark and LIFE staff as ambassadors of European small-scale fisheries at the event organized by Slow Food in Genoa (Italy) Other news from around...

The report outlines the results of an EU-wide survey among young farmers carried out by CEJA and DeLaval in all Member States. Based on a questionnaire, the objective was to discover the opinion of young farmers in relation to the sustainability of the agricultural sector, together with the challenges they...

The study “Mapping and analysis of the implementation of the CAP” has three main objectives: (1) to map the implementation of the CAP by the 28 Member States, focusing on their implementation choices, the motivation for these choices and the importance attached to the three CAP general objectives; (2) to...

Community Supported Fisheries have been springing up all over the world. They are every bit as much an answer to industrial fishing as CSA is to agriculture. In North America there are already many thousands of members in an organised network, Local Catch.org. The network has much in common with...

The EIP-AGRI workshop 'Organic is Operational' took place in Hamburg, Germany, on Wednesday 14 and Thursday 15 June 2017.

There is self-evidently a place and a need for both small and larger scale fishing fleets, but this requires first of all establishing a level playing field that ensures fair access to resources, to markets, to sector support, and to decision taking processes for all fleet segments.

Precaution is needed prior to promoting electric pulse fishing as a more sustainable alternative for traditional beam trawling.

The ocean is one of the main systems of our planetary biosphere. It accounts for almost half of the planet's biological production, but a much smaller proportion of human food – about 2% of overall calorie intake and 15% of protein intake. This is no longer tenable given the nutritional...

CEEweb for Biodiversity supports creating and maintenance of sustainable farming systems, which can ensure producing safer and healthier food and provide conditions for a thriving countryside with secured livelihoods for farmers. Well-preserved nature is a pre-requisite for those systems, as it delivers a whole array of benefits for farming, including pollination, appropriate nutrient cycling,...

The Earth’s climate has always undergone periodic changes that have affected the conditions available to life on the planet. Yet recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are the highest in history and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) are unprecedented in at least...

Sjoerd Wartena – founder of Terre de Liens, a French landrights movement – explains to Elisabeth Winkler from the Biodynamic Land Trust, how he and his wife created a civic organisation.

The path to fairer land governance in Europe reached a milestone today, as the European Parliament approved an own initiative report that recognizes the urgent problems of land concentration, and access to land in the EU and demands for adequate responses.

Skylark is based on the belief that in order to achieve sustainability, the whole crop rotation, in fact the whole farm management, should be taken into consideration. The foundation has 400 participating farmers and 60 knowledge and supply chain partners all working towards a more sustainable arable agriculture in the Netherlands....

Fifty-two new programmes aimed at promoting EU agri-food products in Europe and across the world have been approved by the European Commission. Covering a wide range of foods from dairy products and olive oil to fruit and vegetables and meat products, these programmes are supported by grants from the EU's...

'Farm-to-fork' is not just a trendy buzzword but an exciting new ethos for how we eat that's taking hold in all walks of Irish life - from an urban farm in Dublin to an open prison in Cavan and a Michelin-star restaurant in Galway

Dans les années 60, les politiques publiques ont cherché à faire diminuer drastiquement le nombre de petites exploitations agricoles (EA). Et pourtant, aujourd’hui elles, sont toujours présentes dans le paysage agricole européen et français. La persistance des petites EA questionne : ces EA ont-elles développé des stratégies économiques qui les...

Several EU lawmakers from the European Parliament’s agriculture committee expressed their concerns on Wednesday (30 August) about the introduction of new technologies in farming, claiming that it might put smallholders at risk. MEPs discussed a report on precision agriculture conducted by the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment service (STOA), a...

The potential offered by social innovation to improve the livelihoods of remote forest-dependent communities will be at the centre of discussions during a special session of the 125th Anniversary Congress of the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO), to be held in Freiburg, Germany, from the 18th to the...

The digital revolution is now upon us and more and more technologies are available to the agricultural sector. Farmers in the UK, for example, can use Farmbench (farmbench.ahdb.org.uk). Farmbench collects and shares data from across the UK, providing farmers with useful indications on potential changes to their farm management practices which...