Agriculture

ISSUES

Yield and environment don't necessarily go hand in hand

Agricultural practices vary a lot. Industrialised countries practice heavily mechanised and subsidized intensive farming Intensive mechanised farming also exists in emerging countries and in the 19 industrialised Cairns Group countries, but it is not subsidized and to a varying extent utilizes agricultural inputs (pesticides, fertilisers) In developing countries, farming is also slowly becoming mechanised ; but it does not use many agricultural inputs and in some countries, such as India, it may be subsidized, For major producers (wheat, rice, coffee, etc.), this very much depends on the fluctuation of world prices. In mountainous regions and in semi-arid areas, animal husbandry conducted responsibly presents many advantages such as : upgrading of a poor biomass which cannot be used for other activities ; production of high quality goods ; good landscape management and creation of jobs and thus income for the farmers

NEWS

North Koreans in rice belt 'starve to death'

Worst drought in 50 years takes toll in northern Brazil

Kiwifruit detectives trace disease to China

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DEBATES

In Fast-Track Technology, Hope For a Second Green Revolution

Richard Conniff

With advances in a technique known as fast-track breeding, researchers are developing crops that can produce more and healthier...

Rebuilding Afghanistan’s irrigation network

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is boosting its...

Water is key to food security

The vulnerability of rain-dependent food production systems...

FOCUS

2011, year of forests : Acid rain

In the 1970s and 1980s, tens of millions of hectares of forest in Canada and Europe were damaged by a phenomenon about which little was known at the time: acid rain. Even in France, notably in the Vosges Mountains, many trees were affected by this rain as acid as...

VIDEOS

09/05/2012	In Mali, a Libyan multinational has been given 100,000 hectares of prime...	08/02/2012	The mobile phone has revolutionised the lives of the rural poor across the...
27/09/2011	A surge in financial speculation on maize is causing vastly inflated...	02/08/2011	Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN's World Food Program, talks about why,...

GREEN TIPS

Farmers have a say/ their say

The organisation Radios Rurales Internationales, which is based in Ottawa is a local radio network installed...

INDICATORS

Arable land
Undernourishment
Degraded soils
Pesticide use

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