Thomson Reuters Foundation – Visitors to Singapore’s Orchard Road, the city’s main shopping belt, will find fancy malls, trendy department stores, abundant food courts — and a small farm. Comcrop’s 600-sq.-metre farm on the roof of one of the malls uses vertical racks and hydroponics to grow leafy greens and herbs such as basil and […] Read more
Tag Archives food security — page 12
Farms perched atop malls
City state of Singapore gets serious about food security
Researchers zero in on farm level food waste
It’s harder to track and even harder to fix than waste higher in the value chain
A first-of-its-kind Canadian study has found that there’s more food loss at the production level than previously thought. The “Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste” study found that 24 per cent of food volume wasted is lost at the production level. A further 34 per cent of the food wasted is lost at the processing level. […] Read more
Opinion: Drinking the plant-based Kool-Aid
When the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published a 51-page report laying out a plan for a sustainable “planetary diet” that transforms how we eat and live, it made a big splash. The group of 37 experts, all members of the so-called EAT-Lancet Commission — brought together by the Stockholm-based non-profit EAT, which works to […] Read more
Public trust in agriculture declines
A yearly study found that trust declined for the first time in several years
Consumers are taking a dimmer view of the Canadian food system, according to an organization set up to improve the perceptions of Canada’s food industry. The Canadian Centre for Food Integrity found in a large-scale study of adult Canadians, that 36 per cent of consumers felt the food system was headed in the right direction, […] Read more
Young entrepreneurs lend glamour to African agriculture
Africa has the world’s youngest population and 65 per cent of its uncultivated arable land
Thomson Reuters Foundation – In a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, expertly navigating eastern Rwanda’s bumpy back roads in a white four-wheel drive, Dieudonne Twahirwa looks nothing like the stereotypical African farmer. The 30-year-old owner of Gashora Farm knows what a difference that makes. “You need more role models,” he said, standing among knee-high rows of […] Read more
Pest-proof bags and bins slim Tanzania’s ‘lean season’
Cheap solutions to food losses are having a big impact on hunger, researchers say
Thomson Reuters Foundation – Improved storage techniques have shown they can cut the loss of harvested corn by 10 per cent in Tanzania, and that could mean that one-third fewer households will go hungry in the lean season, Swiss researchers said. Why it matters: Efforts to protect harvested grain could play a key role in […] Read more
Food policy consultations reveal challenges of creating national direction
The next steps, not yet known, will be important to the success of the program, says CFA president
The public is more concerned with conserving environmental health and ensuring access to affordable food, versus growing more of it, according to public consultations on Canada’s Food Policy. The results of a long public consultation process were released recently and show the challenges that the federal government will have in creating A Food Policy for Canada, […] Read more
No grain self-sufficiency in China without changes to land policies
Solution lies in both preserving and increasing the land under cultivation
If China is to achieve its target of 95 per cent grain self-sufficiency by 2030 it will need to restrict the conversion of arable land to other uses, say researchers from McGill. This may prove challenging in a country with a population of almost 1.4 billion, but with just under 13 per cent of arable […] Read more
Loblaw expects to buy more Ontario produce
Changing ability to produce and store Ontario fruit and vegetables and consumer demand to drive growth in ‘local’
Supermarket chain CEO Galen Weston pledged an increased commitment to Ontario-grown produce and promised to “lean in” to a growing market for vegan foods during a speech to kick off a high-profile, first-ever food security thinktank event in Toronto. Why it matters: Grocery stores are where food trends hit the mainstream, so the food moves […] Read more
Finding agriculture innovation triggers for Africa
The continent doesn’t have access to many of the inputs of developed countries, but that is changing
On much of the African continent, 15 years ago there was an almost total absence of landline telephone technology. Now, with smallholder farmers as much at the forefront as any of their urban small business counterparts, the landline situation remains the same, but the bandwidth of Africa is abuzz with smartphone communications that have transformed […] Read more
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
