Fifteen companies, ranging from food processors to grocery and fast food chains, make up the inaugural class of "food loss and waste champions," said the EPA and USDA. The companies won the designation by agreeing to reduce food waste 50 percent by 2030, in line with an administration goal to conserve resources and to combat climate change.

Agriculture produces nearly 20 percent of greenhouse gases, which is why the industry should play a fundamental role in mitigating the impact of climate change, said the head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization at climate talks in Morocco.

The head of Donald Trump’s EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, is not only a climate-change skeptic. He also has a history of discouraging pesticide regulations, writes Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, pointing to Ebell's role as the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

At climate talks in Marrakesh, Morocco, leaders from France and the United Nations urged President-elect Donald Trump to rethink his promise to back out of the Paris Agreement, reports Reuters. Trump has said he wants to cancel the U.S. commitment to the treaty, which aims to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Traders and industry analysts say campaign promises by President-elect Donald Trump to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement have spooked the cross-border grain trade as well as driving down the value of the peso, said Reuters.

With Syngenta already under investigation for the alleged misuse of pesticides in Hawaii, the EPA is now looking into Monsanto, Terminix, and Wonder Farm [a Hawaiian agricultural operation] for allegedly ignoring pesticide laws in Hawaii, says Civil Beat.

When the Justice Department filed suit to block Deere & Company, the largest farm equipment maker in the world, from buying Precision Planting, owned by seed giant Monsanto, it said it was trying to preserve competition in sales of high-speed planters. One of Deere's competitors, Kinze Manufacturing, claims Deere may be using the lawsuit to seek access to Kinze's trade secrets.

"At a time when public mistrust of science runs high, and non-experts are hard-pressed to separate fact from industry-sponsored spin, Sense About Science, a charity based in London with an affiliate in New York, presents itself as a trustworthy arbiter," says Liza Gross in FERN’s latest story, "Seeding For Science,” which was co-produced with The Intercept.

The president of the California Farm Bureau says he's optimistic President-elect Donald Trump will see the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a good deal despite campaigning against it, reports Capital Public Radio in Sacramento. Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is to meet Trump on Thursday, says there will be an Asian pivot to a Chinese-led trade pact that would exclude the United States if TPP founders.

Former White House nutrition advisor Sam Kass says food policy advocates "are already nostalgic for the Obama era and will be playing defense for the next four year," says Associated Press in naming potential flash points. Kass says regulations such as the overhaul of the Nutrition Facts label and calorie counts on menus are likely to stay but there will be little additional progress.

The EPA says its reconfigured scientific panel, with four new members, will meet Dec. 13-16 to consider whether glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, poses a carcinogenic risk, said Agri-Pulse. The U.S. examination, which is being made under a law that require periodic assessments of pesticides, will be closely watched because of the 2015 conclusion by the WHO cancer agency that glyphosate is "probably carcinogenic to humans."

The Agriculture Department awarded $200 million through two programs to help 70 agricultural organizations build overseas markets for U.S. farm exports, which generate 20 cents of each $1 in net cash farm income. Most of the money, $173.5 million, will flow through the cost-sharing Market Access Program (MAP).

Fast-growing Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and home to 4 million people, is sprawling ever-further into the countryside and "gobbling up chunks of pastureland," says the New York Times. The result is a "growing clan of metropolitan herders" who graze their cattle and goats along four-lane highways, on the lawns of wealthy homeowners or in cemeteries.

"Sweety con Nutella" is the name that McDonald's gave the new dessert sold at outlets in Italy — "essentially a Nutella 'burger,'" says news site Brand Eating. Sold in a clam-shell box that mimics a hamburger container, "it's two halves of a bun sandwiching a layer of Nutella hazelnut spread."

Eater, a major food-news outlet, says it won’t publish lists of immigrant-owned food establishments because it fears that any such lists could fall into the wrong hands. According to a statement on the outlet's website, Eater readers have written in asking for recommendations of immigrant-owned food businesses because they want to show their support in light of the threat of deportations under the Trump administration.

The world stockpile of cotton reached a record 22.2 million tonnes, with nearly 60 percent of it held by China. The government sold 2 million tonnes of surplus cotton from May to September of this year and the International Cotton Advisory Committee estimates China will sell an additional 1.7 million tonnes, partly because it is restricting the domestic supply by holding imports to the minimums required under trade agreements.