News

A VALERIE project workshop took place in Brussels on 1st June, which was attended by Julie Ingram together with representatives of national & regional farmer unions, AKIS Working Groups, the EIP-AGRI Service Point & EIP Operational Groups.

The CCRI has welcomed Camille Glasson, a French student from AgroSup Dijon, who has come to the CCRI for three months to work on the PEGASUS project.

Janet Dwyer will be speaking at the Rural Services Network (RSN) 2016 rural conference, which will be held at the Park Campus, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, on 6th and 7th September.

The CCRI welcomes today Marco Della Gala from the University of Calabria, who will be working in the CCRI for 20 months on a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. Through an EU Horizon 2020 funded project called SOFIA, Marco will be creating ICT based tools, in particular mobile applications, to help people access local food.

CCRI researchers have co-authored two new books, which are available for free download. The first, 'Governance in City Food Systems', provides the reader with a general overview of urban governance of food systems. The second book follows on from the previous text and, through 8 case studies, explores the major issues that characterise the debate on the governance of food systems. Both publications are edited by Mark Deakin, Davide Diamantini and Nunzia Borrelli. Damian Maye, Dan Keech and Matt Reed are the contributing CCRI authors.

This week’s CCRI Seminar presentation examines the variability in performance of English farms, which will be presented by Steve Langton, a freelance statistician working mainly with ecological and agricultural data.

Matt Reed is working with a University of Gloucestershire research team in a study to determine to what extent consumers currently use existing front of packaging (FOP) traffic light nutrition labeling to make their food choices, or whether an alternative receipt-based summary may be a more useful tool instead.

Matt Reed gave us some ‘fish for thought’ last week on BBC Radio Gloucestershire last week in an interview with Faye Hatcher regarding heavy metals in fish. Matt’s interview can still be listened to until 7 June - read the news article for full information.

Damian Maye and Rhiannon Naylor contributed to a paper which has been accepted for publication by Preventive Veterinary Medicine. The paper stems from research, contracted by Defra and the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency in 2012, to undertake an exploration of factors that influence the expansion of the area affected by endemic bTB.