Defra has granted the English sugar beet industry an emergency authorisation to use neonicotinoid-treated seed due to the risk posed by virus yellows.

For the 2022 sugar beet planting season, growers will be allowed to use seed treated with Syngenta’s neonicotinoid Cruiser SB (thiamethoxam) to stave off the threat of virus yellows, which is spread mainly by aphids and can result in yield losses of up to 50%.

Announcing the decision, Defra secretary George Eustice said he had considered the joint application from NFU and British Sugar and decided the emergency authorisation should be granted subject to strict conditions.

Global food prices reached a 10-year high in 2021, according to latest analysis by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The FAO’s Food Price Index showed that across 2021, international food prices were 28.1% higher than in 2020, with the cost of vegetable oils and cereals rising most significantly.

FAO senior economist Abdolreza Abbassian warned that while high prices would normally be expected to give way to increased production this might not happen imminently. “The high cost of inputs, the ongoing global pandemic and ever more uncertain climatic conditions leave little room for optimism about a return to more stable market conditions even in 2022,” he said.

Yara and Lantmännen have signed a commercial agreement to bring green fertilisers to market, with an 80-90% lower carbon footprint than current products.

The green fertilisers, produced using renewable energy, are 'crucial' for decarbonising the food chain and offering consumers more sustainable food choices, both organisations said on Monday.

Yara, a global fertiliser producer, and Lantmännen, a Sweden-based farming cooperative, began testing the commercial viability of the fertilisers in 2019. The collaboration has now resulted in a commercial contract, which will be produced by Yara and marketed by Lantmännen in Sweden starting in 2023.

Defra’s new Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme puts domestic food production at risk and increases the likelihood of a rise in low-standard imports, a parliamentary committee has warned.

In a damning new report on ELM, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said it was not convinced the department understands how its environmental and productivity ambitions will affect the food and farming sector over the next decade.

“Farmers will be required to free up land currently used for food production to produce environmental benefits, for example converting farmland to forestry,” the document reads. “This may result in an increase in food imports and possibly the price of food into the UK, potentially exporting the UK’s environmental impacts through food being produced in other countries where environmental standards are lower.”

World meat consumption is expected to continue growing by 1.4% a year over the next few years, according to the EU Agricultural Outlook produced by the European Commission.

The report suggests this growth is a result of increasing population and higher incomes in developing countries. In order to fill this demand, an additional 3.4m tonnes of meat will need to be produced.

The EU internal market is not expected to follow the wider global trends. EU meat consumption is expected to drop 2.8kg a person from 2018 levels to 67kg a person by 2031, reflecting changing consumer attitudes.

A person in the South West of England has contracted avian influenza, the government has confirmed amid the UK's largest ever bird flu outbreak.

The UK Health Security Agency said on Thursday that the person acquired the infection from "very close, regular contact with a large number of infected birds". The agency added that the person had kept the birds "in and around their home over a prolonged period of time."

Bird-to-human transmission of avian flu is very rare and has previously only occurred a small number of times in the UK.

Britain's farming and environment minister George Eustice said on Thursday that government legislation to ease the regulatory regime for gene editing after breaking away from EU rules would initially focus on crops, not farm animals.

The minister announced last year that regulations related to gene editing in agricultural research would be eased following a public consultation but more widespread use of the technology would require primary legislation.

"We will start in the first instance with crops since I think the ethical concerns on livestock are harder, do need a little bit more thought and we don't have to do everything in one go," Eustice told the annual Oxford Farming Conference.

Northern Ireland’s Agriculture Minister, Edwin Poots, has warned the UK could be ‘walking into a food crisis’. Speaking at the Oxford Farming Conference, Mr Poots said a crisis may not happen in the next five years, but Covid had shown it could happen ‘much more quickly than people anticipate’.

He made clear his Government’s post-Brexit agriculture policy was focusing heavily on maintaining domestic production in order to protect food security. The Northern Irish plan includes four key aims which farm support should be targeted at: increased productivity, improved resilience, environmental sustainability and a responsive supply chain.

Farmers and landowners in England could be paid to turn large areas of land into nature reserves, or to restore floodplains, under new government agriculture subsidies.

When the UK was part of the EU, farmers were given grants based on how much land they farmed. Following Brexit, the government has pledged to pay based on how farmers care for the environment. But environmental groups say the new plans lack detail and may not deliver.

In what the government describes as "radical plans", landowners and farmers will be allowed to bid for funding to turn vast areas of land - between 500 and 5,000 hectares - over to wildlife restoration, carbon sequestration, or flood prevention projects. "What we're moving to is a more generous set of incentives for farmers doing the right thing," Environment Secretary George Eustice told the BBC. "We can have both sustainable, profitable food production, and see a recovery for nature as well."

Farmers should focus on reducing their own emissions before considering the trading of their carbon to offset pollution in other sectors, according to researchers.

A new two-part report has been released today which focuses on quantifying, qualifying and ensuring good governance in the trading of natural capital and carbon.

It states that the market potential value of UK land-based carbon credits alone could equate to as much as £1.7 billion annually. However, the report's authors say that the governance of these markets is crucial to make the marketplace a credible and practical reality.