tropical agriculture

During the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, as economic activity ground to a virtual standstill, Mother Nature flirted with recovery. With so many factories closed and far fewer vehicles on the road, Greenhouse gas emissions plummeted. Air and water quality temporarily improved. Overall, the global economy shrank by roughly 4 percent in 2020, and yet one disturbing trend continued apace: forest destruction worldwide, largely as a result of agriculture. No paywall

In September 2015, UN member states set a goal of halting deforestation by 2020 as part of its “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” But according to Frances Seymour, distinguished senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, “we seem to be going in the wrong direction.” Satellite data gathered by the University of Maryland and recently released via Global Forest Watch, an online forest monitoring platform directed by the WRI, indicate that 2019 was the third highest year for tropical primary forest loss since the turn of the century.

Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, credited with saving a billion people from starvation through the Green Revolution of high-yielding grain crops, created the World Food Prize to recognize stellar achievements in improving the world's food supply. Sixth-generation seedsman Simon Groot is the 2019 winner of the $250,000 prize, sometimes called the Nobel of agriculture, officials announced on Monday.

Cuba imports about 70-80 percent of it food, spending roughly $2 billion annually, but it has enormous potential to produce far more on its own and even export high-value crops to the U.S., due to its incredibly rich soils, says Pedro Sanchez, a renowned tropical soils specialist at the University of Florida.