Via The Guardian, a report on Lester Brown’s concerns that the world may face the worst hunger crisis of our lifetime: Vast tracts of Africa and of China are turning into dust bowls on a scale that dwarves the one that devastated the US in the 1930s, one of the world’s pre-eminent environmental thinkers has warned. […]
Read more »Via Le Monde, an interesting (slightly dated) examination of what the closing of Kansas City’s Mercantile Exchange can teach us about how Wall Street stopped treating food like food: Just off of Country Road 518 in Hopewell, New Jersey, sits Double Brook Farm. It’s run by a self-exiled New Yorker but it’s not one of those now-standard upstart […]
Read more »Via Harper’s, a slightly dated (2014) but interesting article on an Ethiopian billionaire’s outrageous land grab: Forget about diamond heists, bank robberies, and drilling into the golden intestines of Fort Knox. In this precarious world-historic moment, food has become the most valuable asset of them all — and a billionaire from Ethiopia named Mohammed Hussein Al […]
Read more »Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, a look at China’s impact on New Zealand’s agricultural sector: Ken and Patricia Graham have an unwelcome new neighbor on the farm where they retired to raise sheep and cattle and tend a vineyard—a gigantic Chinese-owned infant-formula factory. The US$165 million plant emblazoned with the company’s name—Yashili–in Chinese characters […]
Read more »Via The Nation, a report on Myanmar’s agricultural potential: Myanmar may go back to being one of the world’s major rice exporters in five to ten years, as many Thai and foreign investors are looking to expand in rice mills and farms in the country. Thai traders and experts all believe that Myanmar has great […]
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