Ivory Coast has lost more than 80 percent of its forests in the last 50 years, mainly to cocoa production. The government has a plan to turn over management of former forest to international chocolate manufacturers: Is it a conservation strategy or a land grab?
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"I really don't like their policies of taking away your car, taking away your airplane flights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ or ‘you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!'” So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, his first campaign-style salvo against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution. There will surely be many more.
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There's a price war raging in the grocery aisle—but the people who actually grow and gather our food may be the battle's true losers. Meet the produce pickers of Texas's Rio Grande Valley, whose penny-per-bunch harvest helps stock your pantry for less. Our food is cheap—by some measures, cheaper than it’s ever been. But the inexpensive supermarket fare that consumers now expect doesn’t come without a hidden human cost.
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Valentine’s Day is almost here and if you’re one of the 70% of people in the U.S. who expresses your feelings with chocolate and flowers, we need to talk. That heart-shaped box of chocolates and dozen roses are the end products of supply chains that are anything but loving to farmers, their workers, and the planet.
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If you believe all the headlines, in a few short years or even less time, the way meat is grown will radically change. Brewing like tanks full of dividing cells will replace farms and factory farms raising livestock, thus no more animals will be slaughtered, all environmental issues- including climate change and water scarcity- will be resolved, world hunger will no longer exist, and deforestation will no longer be necessary.
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Most of us wish we could eat with the confidence that everything on our plate has a story we can feel good about, a story about taking care of both people and the environment. In the food system (as elsewhere) these twin issues, justice and sustainability, have often been talked about as if they were unrelated, independent problems with separate solutions.
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When Philip Howard of Michigan State University published the first iteration of his now well-known seed industry consolidation chart in 2008, it starkly illustrated the extent of acquisitions and mergers of the previous decade: Six corporations dominated the majority of the brand-name seed market, and they were starting to enter into new alliances with competitors that threatened to further weaken competition.
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Animal waste and fertilizer runoff are two of the largest contributors to water pollution and contamination. Rising productivity on industrial factory farms is single-handedly impairing drinking water supplies across the country, polluting with key culprits like nitrogen, phosphate, insecticides and pesticides.
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As many in the United States agriculture community breathed a sigh of relief that the recently passed Farm Bill isn’t as bad as it could be, our neighbors to the south are moving forward quickly and decisively with bold new plans to transform their food and farm system. Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador took office on December 1 with an inaugural address outlining 100 promises for the transformation of the country’s government and economy.
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