Statistically, drinking water in Europe is the safest in the world. But according to the World Health Organisation every year more than 300.000 Europeans are falling ill due to contaminated tab water. ...

Holstein cattle - the black-and-white dairy cows you might see in a child’s picture book - have been bred in northern Europe for hundreds of years.

Food scare make authorities uneasy. In previous cases, national food safety agencies have not always known how to react , making the public wary. For example, in 2011, the German health authorities incorrectly linked the deadly E.

You may think that climate change is being caused by burning oil, coal and gas. But not so fast! The emission of methane from cattle is a surprisingly important factor .

Grass could be used to produce biofuels. The advantage of using grass crops is that they can be grown in marginal lands that would otherwise not be used .

Drinking water flowing from your tap can contain harmful bacteria, viruses and single-cell animals. And most countries do not routinely test for all these bugs.

The main concern of food producers has always been to bring safe fruit and vegetables to European plates. But now, expectations have been stepped up one notch as pressure mounted to reduce factors, related to climate change, susceptible to affect the safety of food .

The life that inhabits the world’s oceans has almost infinite variety. It remains an untapped source of diversity.

The barely explored marine environment has already thrown-up a vast treasure-trove of high-value biomolecules .

In Europe, irrigated agriculture is the chief water consumer for food production. Yet water resources are in limited supply.  One way out of this problem is to take more care with the water we use , and reduce the estimated 60% water waste.

For 700 million people in Africa and the Far-East, yams and cassava represent important crops for food security and as a source of income.

Might it be possible to make better plants more quickly than we do today? And without the public objection that accompanies genetic manipulation? Climate change means that this is now an urgent question.

Many people in Europe are critical of genetically modified (GM) food, due to safety concerns. A Eurobarometer survey, published in 2010, revealed that the European public tends to be worried on a “mediate level” about GM food , with people in Austria being particularly concerned.

Scientist Peter Freeman is managing a project that is probing the clock and metabolism of plants, called TiMet . Partners to the project include star biologists in the Germany, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, all working to gain better insights into what make plants tick.

Climate change and socio-economic factors are interdependent . If agriculture intensifies in a particular region, that would have an impact on water sector, resulting from the irrigation use.

We know when something is valuable to our everyday lives. We do not need a price tag. This is precisely what the HighARCS project attempts to do:  to measure the socio-economic value of ecosystem services , but without counting in euros, renminbi or dollars.

The European Commission, on 29 th April 2013, slapped a two-year ban on insecticides suspected of killing off bee colonies. This follows the European Food Safety Authority finding that they pose a high acute risk to honey bees.

The amount of nitrogen that is excreted by livestock is directly proportional to the amount it is fed . This is according to Chris Reynolds a researcher in nutritional physiology of ruminants  at  the University of Reading , UK.

Food processing of cereal and fruits creates a rather voluminous amount of by-products . The London, UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers recently estimated that anywhere between 35% and 50%--or 1.

Riots, political instability and a spike in malnourishment cases blighted the years 2007 and 2008, particularly in developing countries.