The excited bleating of sheep crescendos as farmer Sarah Keiser approaches.
“Hi babies,” she says as she steps over a deactivated electric fence and greets the eager flock. It is late July, it hasn’t rained for two months, and the hills around the town of Penngrove, in northern California, have turned a dull brown.
In the Somalian coastal town of Hobyo, thousands of residents—some of whom settled there to flee the country’s civil war—are starting to leave. Why? Their homes are being engulfed by sand.
This article was produced as part of a China Environment Forum and Ohio State University Cultivating U.S. and Chinese Climate Leadership on Food and Agriculture initiative. A version of this article also appeared on China Daily.
China is Brazil’s main trading partner and accounts for over a quarter of all Brazilian exports. Yet two of the largest products in this trading relationship—beef and soybeans—are also crops that drive deforestation in the Amazon. Brazil’s deforestation rates declined substantially between 2004 and 2012, but forest clearage needed to raise cattle reversed the trend: The Amazon lost 10,476 square kilometers of rainforest in 2021, the highest total in the decade.
To better understand the complex dynamics of global hunger and the urgent need for more collective action to address this humanitarian crisis, Chase Sova, Senior Director of Public Policy and Research at World Food Program USA, and his colleagues recently launched a new report, “Dangerously Hungry.” In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP Program Coordinator and Communications Specialist, Abegail Anderson, speaks with Sova about the report’s analysis on the current state of global hunger and its devastating impacts on vulnerable populations.
In recent years, a new narrative has appeared on Chinese social media: that a warmer and wetter climate in Northwest China will herald a return to the “golden age” of the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD).
Climate change will bring benefits, so the story goes, as historically China has flourished during warmer and wetter periods – conditions becoming common once more in the Northwest, a region extending from the province of Shaanxi to Xinjiang in the far west.
When Kevin Chen began his agricultural research 20 years ago, most dairy farms in China were small and family-owned. People of his generation did not grow up with milk deliveries or ice cream. Today, however, these farms have been replaced by massive agri-businesses raising tens of thousands of dairy cows, and dairy is a regular part of many people’s diets in China, thanks to rising incomes and years of governmental promotion of cheese, yogurt, and milk.