News

As the International Monetary Fund(IMF) and the World Bank annual meetings approach as another arena for policy makers to discuss ways to resume and sustain growth, the world economy is scrabbling on the way out of the deepest recession since the 1930s.

The United States is getting back into the work of helping poor, developing countries increase their agricultural output, a policy it abandoned nearly three decades ago, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said.

"We moved away from investments in agricultural productivity, toward emergency food aid [in 1981]," Clinton said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York September 25. "Revitalizing global agriculture will not be easy. In fact, this is one of the most ambitious and comprehensive diplomacy and development efforts our country has ever undertaken."

 In the next 50 years the world's population will eat as much food as it has consumed over human history, a top scientist has warned.
In a world where carbon and water will have a price, it is a challenge not seen before and science will have to lead the way, CSIRO chief executive Megan Clark said.

HANFORD, Calif. — Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers.

Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country — and the timing could hardly be worse.
The dairy industry is in crisis, with prices so low that farmers are selling their milk below production cost. The industry is struggling to cut output. And yet the wave of excess cows is about to start dumping milk into a market that does not need it.