Food Systems Lab

We live in a century in which climate change and other forces will cause increasingly challenging and disruptive events. Thus, actions to build resilience in our food supply chain are needed urgently. This white paper seeks to provide advocates, policymakers, and other interested Californians with a snapshot of challenges and opportunities in the meat processing sector, addressing specific needs of small- and mid-scale producers and their linked processors andmarketing systems, which seek to produce and sell high quality meat. It ends withrecommendations that we believe can support development of a promising sector of California’s agricultural economy while, at the same time, building resilience in our meat supply chain.

This report documents a sustainability assessment for banana production in Ecuador. The overarching goal of this assessment was to aid the Ecuadorian banana industry in improving its sustainability footprint for the entire industry—at a national level.  The starting point for improving system‐wide sustainability was to conduct a baseline assessment of the current sustainability situation to identify and measure a suite of indicators for use as a benchmark in both guiding strategies and measuring progress. This assessment was designed to review the state of the banana sector and correlated activities within Ecuador and not function as a comparative assessment against other countries or actors – which would require a similar assessment for each actor.