Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse, but up to 80 per cent of the farms are small, family-run businesses, and a significant number are struggling. High interest rates, an outdated, over-complicated credit system, and a lack of bank branches in rural areas have led to a loans crisis for those most in need. The private sector is filling some of the holes, but critics say much more needs to be done.
With the move to more sustainable agriculture practices becoming increasingly urgent, a new blended finance fund is helping small-scale farmers in rural China transition to lucrative and environmentally friendly chilli pepper farming.
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The coronavirus pandemic has been catastrophic for the hospitality industry but some restaurant businesses are stronger now than ever before.
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Soil stores about 25 per cent of the world’s fossil fuel emissions each year. How can carbon farming become more ecologically and economically viable?
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Plant-based milk makers are whipping up billions in investment and trade with new products, but traditional dairy may prove hard to topple.
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Innovative greenhouse designs are using waste heat from sewage treatment plants to grow fruit and veg. But can they make enough profit to cover huge costs?
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Kenyan agritech startup Apollo is using a combination of technology and local communication networks to provide a scalable solution for small-scale farmers to become commercial producers.
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New Zealand’s wine industry was the first in the world to have a national sustainability programme and more than 96 per cent of its vineyards operate according to specific environmental standards.
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Traditional rice farming has a heavy environmental impact, but new strains of rice, and a new way of farming it could help. Convincing farmers and governments to change their ways isn’t easy though.
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Commonly used bottom-trawling nets threaten fish stocks and the marine environment. Now pioneering, AI net designs promise a more sustainable, selective and eco-friendly way to fish.
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Rabobank and Microsoft have joined forces to create an online, carbon removal unit marketplace that connects large corporations with smallholder farmers who can sequester carbon through agroforestry.
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A host of new innovations using artificial intelligence are boosting our potential to create a healthier, more sustainable food system.
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In Mexico, they call avocados ‘green gold’, because they’re worth nearly $3bn in exports every year. In some parts of the country, the lucrative industry is even controlled by organised crime.
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Limited land resources mean that seaweed farming could play a part in satisfying our ever growing demand for food and animal feed.
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Half a century on from 'Diet for a Small Planet', what have we learnt about eco-friendly food?
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How can impact investors maximise their returns - both financially and environmentally?
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Their cost-effective business model may also help them weather the pandemic.
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Meat consumption is high, but there is also a strong appetite for alternatives.
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Coronavirus has made it clear the need for a more robust and responsive food system.
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Artificial noses and antimicrobial mats can help, but there are no magic bullets.
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The days of consumers turning a blind eye to labour standards may be numbered
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Cows get a lot of blame for climate change, but a new virtual fencing system is enabling cattle to be a part of the solution.
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Covid-19 has affected the supply of meat in the short term due to numerous slaughterhouse closures, but as the FT’s Emiko Terazono explains, even before the pandemic, meat consumption was showing signs of having peaked in developed countries.
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The hospitality industry can be incredibly wasteful, but a growing number of restaurants are moving toward a zero-waste policy of sustainability.
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The global pet food market is predicted to be worth $113bn by 2025. It’s a big business, but one that takes a toll on the planet.
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We owe our lives to Earth’s forests and yet we’re losing them at a rate of one soccer field every second.
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Agriculture accounts for almost half of greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand. It’s one reason the government is encouraging farmers to grow trees for carbon credits, which can then be sold, mainly to large companies looking to offset their emissions.
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We may not realise it, but every day, decisions we make about food could be influenced by behavioural nudges.
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While investors have long included global agribusinesses or food manufacturers in their portfolios, their interest in the mucky business of farming is increasingly focused on assets that advance two critical global goals
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Global cocoa yields have tumbled by 12 per cent since 2006 as a combination of old trees, poor soil conditions, pests, disease and dated agricultural practices has started to reverse decades of progress.
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In late July, Nordea Asset Management, which controls assets worth $230bn, excluded the Brazilian meat behemoth JBS from its portfolio following a flurry of scandals
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Food is at the nexus of practically every major sustainability issue: what we eat today determines not just our own health tomorrow, but also that of the planet.
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The French are embracing unconventional organic farming methods. In Paris, the FT’s Harriet Agnew visits what will be the world’s largest rooftop farm, and a company growing strawberries and herbs in shipping containers.
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In 2020, Swedish oat milk brand Oatly became the world’s first plant-based company to enter into a sustainability-linked loan agreement (SLL).
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A typical teaspoon of agricultural soil contains more than a billion living organisms.
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In Australia, droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, reducing agricultural output in a $36bn industry. Till the rains came early this year, farmers in New South Wales had suffered their worst drought on record.
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If you’re living in the UK, surely an apple imported from NZ has a bigger carbon footprint than one grown at home? Not necessarily, because factors at every stage of a food’s life cycle contribute to its overall carbon footprint, not just transport.
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Bees are the guardians of global food security performing 80 percent of all pollination worldwide, but a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder is seriously threatening their numbers and impacting food production.
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Many people have far from healthy diets. At the same time, food production is exacting an enormous toll on the planet. Anjana Ahuja explores a diet created to address both problems.
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Demand for dairy is putting pressure on biodiversity; there’s no quick fix, but in the Netherlands a collaborative scheme across the value chain is unlocking sustainable entrepreneurship in an attempt to develop future-proof solutions.
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By 2050 it’s estimated there’ll be over 6.5 billion people living in urban spaces, and vertical farming could play a growing role in feeding them. The farms use far less space, water and transport than traditional methods of farming.
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Every year, around 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted, enough to end world hunger many times over. One often-mooted solution to the problem is buying more so-called ugly food.
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Ruud Zanders is an unlikely candidate to be running a farm producing the world’s first carbon-neutral eggs.
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Eating a mouthful of Magnum, Cornetto or Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream, the typical consumer has little concern for the precise temperature at which it has been transported from the factory.
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The rise of industrial-scale livestock farms in the US has put cheap meat on consumers’ plates, but it also has environmental costs. Among them are emissions of methane.
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Sarah Singla is a cereal farmer who does not know how to plough. That is a sign not of professional laxness, but of her dedication to the conservation agriculture that her father embraced.
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Rampha Khamhaeng, a farmer in central Thailand’s rice-growing Suphanburi province, was sceptical when she first heard about a new farming method for paddy fields that could reduce both water use and greenhouse gas emissions.
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Emissions are likely to rise in the short term — but there is also a chance to build a more resilient food system.
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The Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of food. But right now, its livestock sector is facing a controversial environmental challenge: reducing its nitrogen emissions.
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The Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of food. But right now, its livestock sector is facing a controversial environmental challenge: reducing its nitrogen emissions.
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In just three decades’ time, the world will have two billion more mouths to feed, requiring food production to ramp up by more than 50 per cent.
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Lessons from Brazil could have wider implications for global food production. This is the first audio feature for a series of FT Special Reports on sustainable food and agriculture.
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After being shot in the gut, a young pepper farmer lies still and silent in a rickety hospital bed in the farming town of Miango in Plateau State, central Nigeria.
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For many across the world who eat Nutella, it is simply a tasty hazelnut cocoa spread that can be enjoyed on toast or sometimes straight out of the jar.
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Aldo Sánchez surveys a field of lofty banana trees, with cacao plants bursting with fruit nestled beneath. “Two and a half years ago, this was pure pasture,” he says. Indeed, his neighbour’s field is just grass.
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The southeastern corner of the tiny island of Príncipe, about 200km from mainland west Africa, hosts the raw material to make some of the world’s best chocolate, says local farmer Arlindo dos Ramos, taking a golden cocoa pod from a short tree.
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The most enjoyable science activity of my middle years at school involved soil biodiversity. We poured jugs of mustard water on to squares of grass and earth — and counted how many earthworms and other invertebrates escaped the irritating liquid.
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Sitting in an anonymous science park a few kilometres north of Nara, an ancient Japanese capital, the Keihanna plant looks like any other factory churning out auto transmissions or electronic components.
Read moreThe coronavirus pandemic has been catastrophic for the hospitality industry but some restaurant businesses are stronger now than ever before. Food writer Tim Hayward and the FT's Daniel Garrahan travel to Bristol in England’s west country to visit Wilsons, which sources produce from its own market garden, and Little French, which used lockdown to support local suppliers and expand its operations.
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