FT FOOD REVOLUTION
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A less damaging way to grow rice?
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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Trawling for a sustainable future with smarter nets
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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A marketplace for change: how small-scale farmers are helping companies offset emissions
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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Building a more sustainable food system with AI
A host of new innovations using artificial intelligence are boosting our potential to create a healthier, more sustainable food system.
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Mexico’s avocados: curbing the thirst of the country’s ‘green gold’
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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Seaweed: sustainable crop of the future?
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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Could carbon labelling soon become routine?
Half a century on from 'Diet for a Small Planet', what have we learnt about eco-friendly food?
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Audio feature: how to eat sustainably
How can impact investors maximise their returns - both financially and environmentally?
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Zero-waste restaurants tap growing appetite for sustainability
Their cost-effective business model may also help them weather the pandemic.
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China wakes up to the need for a greener diet
Meat consumption is high, but there is also a strong appetite for alternatives.
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Pandemic prompts rethink of food supply chains
Coronavirus has made it clear the need for a more robust and responsive food system.
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Tech start-ups tackle mountain of food waste
Artificial noses and antimicrobial mats can help, but there are no magic bullets.
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Why sustainable food could mean a better deal for workers
The days of consumers turning a blind eye to labour standards may be numbered
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How technology is helping cows capture carbon
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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Is the world reaching ‘peak meat’?
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 restaurants moving towards zero waste
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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Can meat-free products curb pet food's environmental impact?
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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Forests, farmers and food: The triangular challenge of building a sustainable food system
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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Carbon farming: fighting New Zealand’s agricultural emissions
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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Behavioural nudging: an effective way to promote food sustainability?
We may not realise it, but every day, decisions we make about food could be influenced by behavioural nudges.
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Investors show healthy appetite for food sector
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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Blended finance eases burden for farmers in poor countries
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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High-tech tools shine a light on sustainable farming
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 proves hard for ESG investors to digest
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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French organic farming explores the unconventional
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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Sustainability-linked loans: banking on a sustainable food system
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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Metagenomics: mapping the mysteries of soil
A typical teaspoon of agricultural soil contains more than a billion living organisms.
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The future of farming in drought-hardened Australia?
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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What’s the real carbon footprint of your food?
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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Pollination 2.0: Could machine learning save the bees?
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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A diet designed to save us, and the planet
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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Restoring biodiversity by rewarding farmers
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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Vertical farming: a future way to feed urban populations?
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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Buying more ugly food: an imperfect waste solution?
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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Dutch farmers face pressure over intensive practices
Ruud Zanders is an unlikely candidate to be running a farm producing the world’s first carbon-neutral eggs.
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How green is your ice-cream?
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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Methane from manure offers green fuel revenue for US farmers
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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Soil offers key to curbing climate change
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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Thai rice farmers step up to tackle carbon footprint
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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Audio feature: will coronavirus reduce food’s carbon footprint?
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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Fighting agricultural pests, the natural way
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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Tackling Dutch agriculture’s emissions headache
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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What's on the menu in 2050?
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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Audio feature: on the frontline of deforestation in the Amazon
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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Conflict over fertile lands threatens Nigeria’s food security
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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Hazelnut sourcing spreads discontent for Italy’s Nutella
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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Planting crops with trees drives ‘magical’ reforestation in Costa Rica
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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São Tomé and Príncipe grows premium cocoa in fragile tropical soil
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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Scientists probe soil biodiversity’s effect on crops and carbon
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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Vertical farming finally grows up in Japan
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.
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