Global food prices continue to rise month after month, driven by longer-term and more recent trends. Financialisation is an important factor among the recent trends. There is strong evidence of correlation among the markets for different financial assets, including stocks/shares, commodities and currencies. Falling asset prices in other financial market segments may thus be more important for explaining the recent surge in food prices than supply constraints or changing demand and other factors underlying longer-term gradual upward price trends.
Expansion of global demand for soy products and biofuel poses threats to food security and the environment. One environmental impact that has raised serious concerns is loss of Amazonian forest through indirect land use change (ILUC), whereby mechanized agriculture encroaches on existing pastures, displacing them to the frontier. This phenomenon has been hypothesized by many researchers and projected on the basis of simulation for the Amazonian forests of Brazil.
Efforts to anticipate how climate change will affect future food availability can benefit from understanding the impacts of changes to date. Here we show that in the cropping regions and growing seasons of most countries, with the important exception of the United States, temperature trends for 1980-2008 exceeded one standard deviation of historic year-to-year variability.
One way of understanding how climate change is likely to affect global food production and food security is to better understand the recent past. That is, how have changes already influenced agricultural activities and production? For example, considerable debate has taken place on whether
Large swathes of the Brazilian Amazon have come to resemble the midwestern United States in recent years, having been planted with soya as far as the eye can see. This development has unnerved conservation organizations, which fear that huge expanses of pristine rainforest are being felled to make way for the lucrative crop. A widespread hope is that large agribusiness, aware of both the need to protect this fragile environment and the importance of good public relations, can be induced to farm more sustainably.
This study focuses on the direct monetary and other effects of growing GM crops that influence farmers‘ income, as represented by the following economic parameters: crop yields, seed costs, pesticides and herbicides costs, labour costs, and gross margins.
A cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Shri Shivraj Singh Chouhan here today endorsed the state's Industrial Promotion Policy-2010 and Action Plan. This policy will remain effective for five years with a view to sustaining the investment climate.
In this study source wise and operation wise energy consumption for soybean production under canal and pump irrigation system conditions were investigated.
A summary of scientific evidence showing that genetically modified (GM) soy and the glyphosate herbicide it is engineered to
tolerate are unsustainable from the point of view of farming, the environment, rural communities, animal and human health, and
economies.
