China

Even as China’s coal-fueled factories belch toxic smoke, the biggest abuse on China’s environment comes from agriculture, says Time. The country is trying to solve the problem with some of the most radical changes to its agricultural policy since Mao Zedong forced the People’s Republic onto collective farms in the late 1950s—and 30 million people died of starvation as a result.

Despite a run of record soybean harvests in the U.S., surging demand from China and other importers is expected to cause the U.S. stockpile to drop below the previous year's level for the first time in three years, Bloomberg reports. "Since 2005, China’s imports of the commodity have more than tripled, and it now buys more than 60 percent of the world’s exports," the news service says. "The demand is primarily driven by its livestock sector as a growing middle class consumes more meat."

In an effort to raise the efficiency of its agriculture sector, China announced this week that it will for the first time allow commercial production of GMO soy, reports Reuters. Until now, China has not allowed the production of a GMO food crop out of concern that consumers would react negatively over perceived health risks.

China has sold around 1.6 million tonnes of cotton from its state-owned reserve since daily auctions began in May, sharply reducing the burdensome stockpile, said the International Cotton Advisory Committee.

A Chinese government commission announced the merger of COFCO, the nation's largest food trader, with Chinatex Corp., one of the country's main textile and grain-trading groups, said China Daily. The new company will be "a bigger rival to compete with the so-called ABCD companies." The "ABCDs" are the long-time international farm export and processing companies — ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus.

Global per-capita fish consumption surged beyond 20 kilograms (44 pounds) in 2014, thanks to the booming aquaculture industry in China and elsewhere, according to a report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture organization.

Tea plants around the world are getting too much rain, says Eater. The excessive precipitation is lowering the number of secondary metabolites they produce—the chemicals responsible for caffeine, antioxidants and flavor .

State media say more than 1.9 million hectares of crops were damaged by flooding in central and southern China, reports Reuters. It was not clear whether heavy rains and the resultant floods would affect the summer grain crop, forecast for 140 million tonnes.

The global cotton crop will rise 5 percent, to 23 million tonnes, this year although plantings are declining for the second year in a row, according to the forecast by the International Cotton Advisory Council. The intergovernmental body said market prices, depressed for years, will improve as the worldwide cotton glut shrinks during 2016/17.

The United States exports only tiny amounts of pork to the EU but still may feel the impact of Britain's decision to leave the 28-nation bloc. In the financial turmoil that has followed the vote, the value of the U.S. dollar has risen against the Euro, putting U.S. pork at a disadvantage on the world market, says Purdue economist Chris Hurt.

The worldwide spike in food prices nearly a decade ago set off a land-buying surge by wealthy investors and nations wanting to shore up their food supply by acquiring cropland in developing nations. The surge was decried by critics as land grabs that would displace small farmers and herders. "The emerging new trend we wrote about in 2008 has continued and become worse," says the nonprofit Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN).

The U.S. and China, the world’s largest agricultural producers, pose the greatest threat to other countries when it comes to spreading invasive pests and pathogens, according to a new report led by an international team and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The developing world, and sub-Saharan Africa specifically, is the most vulnerable to the economic damage such species can inflict.

Some 16 percent of U.S. red meat and poultry will be exported this year, a 900-million-pound increase from 2015, according to USDA estimates, which call for a modest increase in the new year. Sales were constrained last year by the strong dollar and trade barriers due to the bird flu epidemic.

Government scientists found the MCR-1 gene, which allows bacteria to overcome the last-resort antibiotics used against disease in humans, in a sample taken from a different pig than the first U.S. discovery, said a CDC official. The initial case, reported on the same day as discovery of a Pennsylvania woman with an infection that carried the MCR-1 gene, raised fears of "superbug" bacteria resistant to a broad array of antimicrobials.

Only three countries show no serious signs of malnutrition: China, Vietnam and South Korea, according to the 2016 Global Nutrition Report. The rest of the world is plagued by such poor nutrition indicators as “stunted toddlers, anemic young women and obese adults,” says The New York Times. In the United States, each obese family member costs families an average of 8 percent of their income in additional healthcare.

A growing number of Chinese activists are calling for the city of Yulin, China, to cancel its annual dog-meat festival, slated for June 21st, says NPR. Since 2010, the city has butchered thousands of dogs, many of which were originally pets that were stolen from their owners, sometimes by gangs who sedate them with poisoned darts. Activists in the UK, Canada and U.S. have long campaigned against the country’s dog-eating traditions. But now that more Chinese citizens own pets, the practice of consuming dog is increasingly unpopular domestically, too.