International Reporting
Sea cucumbers are being eaten to death

Two Moroccan divers stood on the rocks an hour before sunrise facing the gray Atlantic. Their wet suits were torn and patched, their flippers held together with tape. Unable to afford proper diving belts, the men wore thick bands of rubber strung with lead weights. Each carried a large black inner tube for floating out… » Read More
‘Every Day You Become More Desperate’

José Ramón Campos López, a 40-year-old farmer from San Carlos Lempa, El Salvador, stares out at his two acres of land. It’s August, harvest time. The field should be full of tall, vibrant corn stalks. Instead, it’s full of weeds, but for a small patch of corn on the edge of the plot that managed… » Read More
India is awash in palm oil, and health takes a hit

Dr. Anoop Misra drew back the flimsy curtain in his office, and the patient stepped down from the exam table, gently tugging the bottom of his shirt so as to obscure a considerable midsection. “I’m not here to give you sweet words,” said the soft-spoken endocrinologist, who, in addition to seeing patients six days a… » Read More
Can farming save Puerto Rico’s future?

Our climate is changing, and our approaches to activism and politics have to change with it. That’s why FERN, in partnership with The Nation, is launching Taking Heat, a series of dispatches from the front lines of the climate justice movement by journalist Audrea Lim. Lim will explore the ways the communities that stand to lose the… » Read More
The end of the ‘panda of the sea’

There is a word, sad and resonant, for the last member of a dying species. The word is endling. Martha, who perished at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, was the endling for the passenger pigeon — the final representative of a bird once so prolific its flocks blackened the sky. The Tasmanian tiger’s endling, Benjamin,… » Read More
Organic or starve: Can Cuba’s new farming model provide food security?

In the town of Hershey, a couple of hours’ drive east of Havana in Mayabeque province, you can see the past and the future of Cuban farming, side by side. More on this story Read more of our reporting on nutrition and food access. Read more of our reporting on farms and labor. Read more… » Read More
The Long, Slow Trek To Get Americans To Eat Camel Meat

The first time Somali-American chef Jamal Hashi put camel meat on his menu in Minneapolis, it didn’t go well. He tried grinding it into a burger and using chunks of it in a spicy stew, but no matter, the texture was bad and the sales were worse. “It was like chewing on a patty of… » Read More
The violent costs of the global palm oil boom

Just after nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning in June, an environmental activist named Bill Kayong was shot and killed while sitting in his pickup truck, waiting for a traffic light to change in the Malaysian city of Miri, on the island of Borneo. Kayong had been working with a group of villagers who were… » Read More
Oil barrens

The one with the gun arrived with a cocky flourish, sauntering through the doorway in a white muscle tee and blue jeans torn at the knees. He settled in on the plastic flooring, lit up a thick clove cigarette, and began animatedly to talk about the 23 critically endangered birds he’d shot from the Indonesian… » Read More