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This year, as the world celebrates World Earth Day on the 22nd April 2020, Fairtrade Africa is highlighting its stakeholder collaboration towards climate action. Environmental degradation and climate change in the last couple of decades have reached alarming levels and global action is urgently ...
Plant breeding has considerably increased agricultural yields in recent decades and thus made a major contribution to combating global hunger and poverty. At the same time, however, the intensification of farming has had negative environmental effects. Increases in food production will continue ...
The spread of COVID-19 across the globe has led to never-before-experienced lockdown situations—which in turn are having a significant impact across agricultural systems—threatening food security for increasing numbers of people around the world.
Empty shelves lining supermarkets, farmers dumping milk and abandoning fields of crops, restaurants laying off staff—the American food landscape has changed dramatically in just a month, thanks to stay-at-home advisories and social distancing in the age of COVID-19.
The bee is a special creature: of great importance for the conservation of biodiversity and our food. But why does the bee play such an important role and what can you do to help it? Nienke Vennik – editor for Slow Food Netherlands – interviewed a local beekeeper and found out.
Said Al-Ajani looks proudly over his lush date plantation, which recently survived a plague of red weevils—a destructive insect wreaking havoc across the Middle East and North Africa.
I started my post-graduate work on potato in 1947 at the Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi. Growing up in Tamil Nadu, I had witnessed the damage to the potato crop by a disease called late blight (caused by Phytophthora infestans) in the Nilgiri Hills.
There are currently no lack of visitors at Eosta, the market leader in the European organic fruit and vegetable sector. "The turnover is exploding and organic fruit and vegetables are in high demand. We have seen this often in times of crisis, the demand for bio is growing exponentially. In one ...
When Antony John first started growing organic produce on a quarter acre of land for restaurants near his farm in Stratford, Ontario, he met with the perplexed reactions of loan officers at the bank. “They were willing to lend us money, but you had to prove yourself to them every year with a cas ...
When it comes to climate change there is no doubt – Mzansi’s agricultural community has seen it all. From increasing floods to devastating droughts. As if that’s not enough, our farmers are in constant combat with another threat – pests or disease outbreaks.
Severe restrictions will be placed on imports of some very popular trees and plants in an effort to halt a deadly infection. Xylella fastidiosa has wreaked havoc on olive plantations in parts of Italy and has also been found in France and Spain. To prevent the disease spreading to the UK, import ...
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has exposed a crisis in the global food system, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) — a panel of developmental economists, agronomists, nutritionists and sociologists from 18 countries — said in April 2020.
The expansion of farmlands to meet the growing food demand of the world's ever expanding population places a heavy burden on natural ecosystems. A new IIASA study however shows that about half the land currently needed to grow food crops could be spared if attainable crop yields were achieved gl ...
Tofu, soy milk and veggie mince. More and more Danes are opting to supplement or completely replace their consumption of animal-based proteins with plant-based proteins. Climate considerations are part of their reasoning.
The diversity of ecosystems that characterize the Kenyan territory lend themselves particularly well to beekeeping activities. From the arid areas of the northern part of Kenya to the montane forests in the center of the country, beekeeping has for centuries represented an important interface be ...
One of southern Europe’s most important staples, olive oil, is under pressure from a potentially deadly disease that new research shows could infect nearly all of the productive areas of Italy, Greece and Spain.
The launch date of the highly-anticipated new EU food policy, the Farm to Fork strategy (F2F), is currently under review and an updated programme is due to the published in the coming weeks, a Commission official told EURACTIV.com.
“The problem of the global COVID-19 pandemic is often related to the market of ‘exotic’ meat, but the truth is that the model that allows the emergence of these diseases is the intensive model itself much practiced in European countries, in the United States and even in Brazil,” says Glenn Makut ...
A team of retirees that scours the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct—the largest number ever unearthed in a single season by the non-profit Lost Apple Project.
As global supply chains grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, the safeguarding of food security is of dire concern to governmental and agri-food stakeholders. Speaking to representatives of the world’s leading seed vaults, FoodIngredientsFirst explores the role of gene banks in conserving crop di ...
In a clearing around his modest smallholding, farmer Arcadio Barajas stands before a sea of coffee plants, cloaked in the shadow cast by a wall of verdant forest that covers the San Lucas mountains of northern Colombia.
Around the world, nearly 5 billion acres of land — an area larger than Russia — are degraded. Degradation can take many forms: clearing of forests; soil erosion; or the decline of nutrients in the soil, all of which result in less productive land. The loss of soil fertility is dragging down agri ...
Aastha Bhusal and Laxman Khatri from the Nepali NGO LI-BIRD share their first-hand insights of how farmers are gaining knowledge of climate-smart practices and boosting their communities’ resilience in Gandaki province, Nepal.
In the mid-20th century, the so-called Green Revolution changed humanity’s relationship with agriculture. A series of technological advances in high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat seeds, along with irrigation systems and new fertilisers and pesticides – which marked the official entry of t ...
I push the spade beneath the neat rosette of leaves, trying carefully not to castrate the plant. Castrate may seem an odd choice of word, I am after all just digging up a plant to move it, but hidden in the soil, underneath that Garden of Eden fan of greenery, there are two oval tubers, and they ...
Pathogenic fungi pose a huge and growing threat to global food security. Currently, we protect our crops against fungal disease by spraying them with anti-fungal chemistries, also known as fungicides.
A recent impact report published by the European Commission lays bare the terrible mismatch between the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the bloc’s biodiversity objectives, writes Jabier Ruiz.
Soil is a natural resource that we often overlook and abuse just because of its supposed abundance. Some call it "dirt" and many times we attribute to stains and things we should rid ourselves of in the name of cleanliness.
The nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement typically include afforestation and reduced deforestation as additional carbon sinks. The first Biennial Transparency Reports for NDCs submitted in 2015 are due in 2022 for developed countries to 2024 for developing countries. ...
The researchers found that farms with diverse crops planted together provide more secure, stable habitats for wildlife, and are more resilient to climate change than the single-crop standard that dominates today’s agriculture industry.
As panicked consumers flock to grocery stores, emptying shelves in preparation for homebound quarantines that could last for weeks, the coronavirus pandemic is revealing an alarming longer-term concern about the world's growing appetites and the stresses they impose on a warming planet.
Several local authorities have included major tree planting initiatives as part of their climate declarations – but can we plant our way to carbon neutrality by 2030? 1st Vice President of the Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport (ADEPT) and Chair of the Local Adaptation Advi ...
Online consultations have begun this week for the National Farmers Federation’s Australian Farm Biodiversity Certification Scheme Trial.
An ageing population of farmers, huge barriers to land ownership and an unprecedented environmental crisis sparks renewed investment in small, ecological farms.
How we farm can guard against climate change and protect critical wildlife — but only if we leave single-crop farms in the dust, according to a new Stanford study.
People are keener than ever to make ethical, environmentally friendly food purchases. But a spate of bad press about the environmental impact of organic produce may leave some people scratching their heads.
The International Potato Center (CIP) recently joined 34 other organizations across the globe in depositing more than 60,000 seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a biodiversity bunker in a mountainside of an Arctic island in Norway.
Can the European Agriculture Policy finally reorient to boost nature and health or is it destined to drive factory farms, chemical-laden monocultures, and global deforestation?
There is much to be learned from Sweden on integrating our farm systems, naturally, with the local ecosystems. It seems I brought the snow to Sweden. Like us, they have had a mild, wet winter, and even in Dalarna, towards the middle of the country, barely a scrap of the white stuff has fallen.
If extreme climate events were to occur due to rising global temperatures, Himalayan biodiversity might collapse. This eventuality could devastate our agriculture, leading to an apocalypse for Nepal.
A traditional farming system in the Southern Espinhaço Mountain Range of the Minas Gerais State in Brazil has been recognized as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS), managed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It is the first time a Brazilian site has won the ...
Agriculture and climate change are deeply intertwined. Agriculture is responsible for almost 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is the root cause of 80 per cent of tropical deforestation.
A more complete approach to pesticide environmental risk assessment should replace the current system, which represents real world conditions poorly.
Zero-budget natural farming is a form of agricultural system redesign being practised at scale in India, particularly in the state of Andhra Pradesh. It is an emerging set of agricultural practices designed dramatically to reduce farmers’ direct costs (hence “zero-budget”) while boosting yields ...
As has been discussed both here and elsewhere at length, there’s a hidden world of environmental destruction and human misery behind some of the most in vogue food products in the Global North, from avocados to almonds. Demand for the latter has exploded in recent years, driven by partly a rise ...
European Union member states are trying to adopt more sustainable agriculture practices, amid debates over subsidies and protests from the sector.
n the southern African nation of Eswatini, women, who already have too many household chores, have had to spend many hours for days on end in the fields, tilling and weeding the soil. But thanks to the gradual introduction of Climate-Smart Agriculture, some are beginning to harvest the gains of ...
Qu Dongyu, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told negotiators on Monday that as agriculture and food systems are “at the heart of the concept of sustainable development”, they are central to deliberations regarding the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework, which is exp ...
An Arctic "doomsday vault" is set Tuesday to receive 60,000 samples of seeds from around the world as the biggest global crop reserve stocks up for a global catastrophe.
In the last years of the 20th century, Glenfeshie, a 17,000-hectare estate in the Scottish Highlands, was in steep decline. Decades of overgrazing by deer had reduced its hillsides to clipped lifelessness.