World Agrinews

Argentina, once the world’s second- largest corn exporter, lifted a ban on overseas shipments of the grain and wheat, making good on a pledge by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner as planting shrinks.

Enabling the world's poor to feed themselves through sustainable farming will help alleviate the crises caused by one of the most urgent threats facing the world: chronic hunger and its consequences, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says.

"This is an issue that affects all of us, because food security is about economic, environmental and national security for our individual homelands and the world," Clinton said September 26 at a food security conference co-hosted by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Representatives from 130 countries, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations attended the brief conference to address the underlying causes of global hunger.

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.

Mariann Fischer Boel, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, today set out in detail the latest stage of the Commission's ongoing campaign to help European Union dairy farmers out of the current market crisis. The package of measures, presented today to the European Parliament, follows up the Commission's report from July and looks at both short-term measures and actions to secure the longer-term future of the dairy sector. The Commission has already started the process of allowing Member States to pay temporarily aid of up to €15,000 to farmers. It also proposes that the dairy sector should be covered by an emergency clause which already exists for other farm sectors, to allow a quicker response to future market disturbances.