Young people are shunning Africa’s agricultural sector despite high levels of unemployment and food insecurity. This underscores the need to demonstrate the profitability of agriculture.
The latest Great Barrier Reef report shows some improvements to water quality over the past five years, but there’s still a lot to do on one particular problem: nitrogen.
High demand for coffee has pushed growers toward sun or ‘reduced-shade’ plantations that require more water and pesticides while reducing biodiversity.
Japanese negotiators in Maui appear to be bending to American pressure to accept more US rice imports. The flood of grain, local farmers say, will end their way of life.
Indonesia’s shock decision to cut imports of Australian beef signals two things: Indonesia’s desire to focus on domestic cattle farming, and Australia’s lack of alternative options for exporting its own herd.
The recent Lancet Commission report rightly pointed out that climate change is a huge risk to global public health. But it shied away from one of the main issues: the world consumes far too much meat.
African economic history has had a renaissance and its most valuable contribution has been to show that Africans have not always been poor, nor are current poverty levels an inevitable destiny.
The coast alongside the Great Barrier Reef is home to ports, farms, holiday resorts, and more than a million people. It all puts pressure on the Reef, and it’s time for some firms plans to manage it.
Successive plans to curb the sediments, nutrients and pesticides flowing into the waters around the Great Barrier Reef have fallen short, leaving the corals that call the reef home highly vulnerable.
Australia’s cattle industry is keen to begin live exports to the United States. But America is very different to existing live export markets such as Indonesia, making the move much more ethically fraught.
Monocultures - vast expanses of a single crop - may look pretty, but mounting research shows they are likely bad for environment. And in turn that’s bad news for farms as well.