South Africa faces a double burden of hunger and malnutrition, on the one hand, and obesity with associated non-communicable diseases (NCDs), on the other. In many countries, in both the global North and South, malnutrition and obesity frequently co-exist in the same people. This is a condition known as “hidden hunger”.
Family farms are central to our nation’s identity. Most Americans, even those who have never been on a farm, have strong feelings about the idea of family farms — so much that they’re the one thing that all U.S. politicians agree on.
China has the third-largest dairy industry in the world. That’s a very new development; dairy was highly localized and not very popular nationwide in China up until the Soviet influence of the 1950s.
It’s time for agricultural researchers to take better advantage of the massive amount of data they produce and move into an era of “big science.” Open data—data that are publicly available and have been intentionally prepared for reuse and innovation by others—is the path to the research breakthroughs of the future. But to make that move, agricultural science must change in significant ways.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on June 11 forecast the carryover of wheat on June 1, 2020, at 1.072 billion bushels, down 69 million bushels from the May outlook and down 30 million bushels from a downwardly revised 1.102 billion bushels in 2018-19 (the 25-million-bushel decline in the 2019 carryover reflected a 25-million-bushel hike in estimated 2018-19 exports to 950 million bushels). As forecast, the 2020 wheat carryover would be the smallest since 976 million bushels in 2016 and compare with 1.022 billion bushels as the recent five-year average carryover.
Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, credits some recent public policy successes to the application of behavioural science. He helped establish this field and its “nudge” approach to changing the behaviour of large groups of people.
