Touch the Soil News #1759 (Feature Photo – FAO Logo – Public Domain) The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations provides monthly updates on what is going on with basic food prices globally. The areas include meat, dairy, cereals, oils and sugar. In August of 2020, the food price index stood at…
Touch the Soil News #1719 (Feature Photo – Food – Public Domain) While it is true that Agriculture has been exempted from most economic lockdowns, in theory there are problems. Community gardens have been shut down and shipping ports have been constricted in the trade of food. However, it is not just the production of…
Touch the Soil News #1664 (Feature Photo – Stressed Crops – USDA Public Domain) The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s latest report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World is sobering. For the third year in a row hunger in the world is growing. The report finds that 2 billion…
Touch the Soil News #1649 (Feature Photo – Cheese – CCA SA 4.0 International, Franck Schulenburg) Called the Great Cheese Emergency, small artisanal cheese companies who relied heavily on restaurants to sell their product have been sent into an economic tailspin. Called the Great Cheese Emergency, warehouses are piling up with artisanal cheeses that cannot…
Positive Future #764 (Feature photo – The World – NASA Public Domain) The New Yorker, one of the nations top weekly magazines, brings us a story by journalist Isacc Chotiner that is worth noting. While news of the covid 19 has dominated the public debate for several months now, is it possible that the covid…
Touch the Soil News #1632 (Feature Photo – Community Gardening – CCA SA 2.0 Generic) CBC News of Canada brings us the ongoing story of people gardening for food for the first time. You can watch the CBC video here: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1738735683858
Positive Future #758 (Feature photo – Clean Air Buttons – Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=167450) It is not secret that coal plants emit particle pollution that has been linked to respiratory health. Inhabitat news portal brings news of how Sweden and Austria just closed their last coal plants. Now three nations in Europe are coal-free – Belgium,…
Positive Future #743 (Feature photo – Cow With Calf – CCA SA 3.0, Uberprutser) Recently the heads of the World Health Organization, The Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Trade Organization warned of the trade shutdowns and the existential risk to food security. In a reversal of fortunes, some dairy farms are now having…
Touch the Soil News #1605 (Feature Photo – Director Generals of WHO, FAO & WTO – By M. Jacobson – Gonzalez – ITU Pictures from Geneva, Switzerland – https://www.flickr.com/photos/itupictures/36433272494, CC BY 2.0, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic,By The White House from Washington, DC – President Trump at Davos, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86339937https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65393569 While shutting the…
Touch the Soil News #1584 (Feature photo – Map of Nations Facing Acute Food Insecurity – courtesy of the Food and Agriculture Organization) While the Coronavirus takes international headlines, the 4,100 flu deaths from coronavirus pale in comparison to some 450,000 other flu deaths that happen every year. More pressing are the acute food insecurity…
