International Reporting

Who should profit from Mexico’s nitrogen-fixing corn?

By Photography by Citlali Fabian

In a 1979 visit to Totontepec, a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, naturalist Thomas Boone Hallberg marveled at the local maize. The plants grew nearly 20 feet high in nutrient-poor soil, even though local farmers did not apply any fertilizer. The maize had aerial roots that grew a mucous-like gel just before harvest season. It… » Read More

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    Yale Environment 360

Fifty years later, a daunting cleanup of Vietnam’s toxic legacy

By Photography by Cuong Tran and George Black

In the thriving industrial city of Bien Hoa, about 20 miles east of Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, there is a large air base, just beyond a sweeping bend in the Dong Nai River. During the American war in Vietnam, it was said to be the busiest airport in the world. Since the… » Read More

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Toronto restaurant fights food waste by chopping menu prices till all the dishes are gone

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It’s 3:51 p.m., and Chef Ashley MacNeil is busy planning how to run out of food. Sunday brunch service has ended at Toronto’s Farmhouse Tavern, and she has already cubed and deep-fried the morning’s excess biscuits into croutons to adorn tonight’s house salad. Now she’s fretting over an excess of shaved Brussels sprouts, which aren’t… » Read More

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    NPR'S THE SALT

Sea cucumbers are being eaten to death

By Photography by William Daniels

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

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    National Geographic

‘Every Day You Become More Desperate’

By Photography by Frederick Meza

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

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    The Weather Channel

India is awash in palm oil, and health takes a hit

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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

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    The Nation

Can farming save Puerto Rico’s future?

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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

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    The Nation

The end of the ‘panda of the sea’

By Photography by Corey Arnold

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

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    Pacific Standard

Organic or starve: Can Cuba’s new farming model provide food security?

By Photography by Roger Atwood

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

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