tropics

The world has added 398 million harvested acres of food grains, feed grains, and oilseeds since the start of the 21st century, mostly in tropical nations, said four analysts writing at the farmdoc daily blog. “Only with significant changes in its production technology” would U.S. agriculture, accustomed to being a world leader in row crops, benefit from this expansion, they said.

With new leaders in office, Brazil and Colombia dramatically reduced their loss of mature tropical forest in 2023, said Global Forest Watch in an annual report on Thursday. Nonetheless, the world’s tropics lost 3.7 million hectares (more than 14,000 square miles) of primary forest. Losses have run at 3 to 4 million hectares annually for the past two decades.

The only tropical rainforest in the United States is El Yunque National Forest, on the northeastern corner of Puerto Rico and one of the tourist attractions of the island. "Hurricane Maria was like a shock to the system...The whole forest is completely defoliated," Grizell Gonzalez of the International Institute of Tropical Forestry told the New York Times.

Six indigenous farmers were brutally killed in Peru by land traffickers trying to make way for a palm oil plantation, adding to the more than 120 environmental and land defenders who have been murdered around the world in 2017 alone.