Food & Agriculture

Oil Palm Changes Rural Culture in Brazilian Amazon

By Fabiana Frayssinet
Thousands of small farming families in Pará, in the Amazon jungle in northeast Brazil, have turned to the African oil palm as a new source of income, through contracts with biofuel companies. Strange bedfellows, which poses cultural and economic challenges.

Malawi’s Failed Subsidy Programme Left Millions to Starve

By Mabvuto Banda
Gogo Munthali, from Rumphi, a village over 400 km north of Malawi’s capital Lilongwe, dissolves into tears every morning as she worries about what to feed her five orphaned grandchildren, the youngest of whom has full blown AIDS.

Typhoon Haiyan Exposes Flaws in U.S. Food Aid

By Carey L. Biron
Even as Washington has mounted a strikingly robust response to the humanitarian crisis in the Philippines, the ongoing effort is highlighting important gaps in the United States’ emergency relief capability – gaps that could start to be addressed through legislative reforms currently under debate in the U.S. Congress.

New Hope for Haiti’s Decimated Forests

By Desmond Brown
Small farmers could play an important part in making Haiti – where just two percent of trees are still standing – green again.

Fishing Communities Will Face Warmer, Acid Oceans

By Desmond Brown
Eating fish has been an integral part of the Caribbean's cultural traditions for centuries. Fish is also a major source of food and essential nutrients, especially in rural areas where there are scores of small coastal communities.

Las Pavas Extracts a Miracle from God

By Constanza Vieira
The rural community of Las Pavas in northern Colombia received this year’s National Peace Prize Wednesday in recognition of its peaceful struggle for land that is claimed by an oil palm company, in a case that became an international symbol of the conflict over land in this country.

Q&A: Indonesia Still at High Risk for Catastrophic Fires

By Lusha Chen
In June, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia were enveloped in haze as hundreds of forest fires burned across the island of Sumatra, in the worst pollution crisis to hit Southeast Asia in more than a decade.

Protecting Tanzania’s Farmers from Weather Extremes

By Kizito Makoye
When Habiba Msoga from Kiroka village, in Tanzania’s Morogoro Region, first began applying a method of rice cultivation that was different from what her fellow farmers traditionally used, they laughed at her.

Oil Palm Expands on Deforested Land in Brazil’s Rainforest

By Fabiana Frayssinet
The green of the oil palm plantations is unbroken along kilometre after kilometre of red soil, devastated in the past by loggers and ranchers. The oil palm, a sign of alarm for some and of hope for others, is here to stay in the Amazon rainforest state of Pará in the extreme north of this country.

OP-ED: A Global Green New Deal for Sustainable Development

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Eight decades ago, during the Great Depression, newly elected U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the New Deal consisting of a number of mutually supporting initiatives of which the most prominent were:

Opportunity Knocking

By José Graziano da Silva
A sense of urgency brought on in recent years by food price volatility inspired collective action to reduce the likelihood of further price spikes and food supply shocks.

Ethiopia’s Indigenous Excluded from Rapid Growth

By Ed McKenna
As the construction of a major transmission line to export electricity generated from one of Ethiopia’s major hydropower projects gets underway, there are growing concerns that pastoralist communities living in the region are under threat.

World Headed for a High-Speed Carbon Crash

By Stephen Leahy
If global carbon emissions continue to rise at their current rate, humanity will eventually be left with no other option than a costly, world war-like mobilisation, scientists warned this week.

Insuring Cows and Goats Improves Kenyan Lives

By Miriam Gathigah
“That is the sound I love the most in the whole world,” Hussein Ahmed says as the bells tied to his cattle begin clinking as they return home. Ahmed, a pastoralist in Marsabit district in arid and semi-arid northern Kenya, lost all his animals in 2011 during one of the worst droughts in the region for over 60 years.

Less Food for More Hungry

By Ramy Srour
Deep cuts in food aid for poor people in the United States are poised to bring higher demands on charities and food pantries across the country that provide food to families in need – and which are already overstretched.
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