Archive for 2012

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on March 20 that it has revised the FAO Statistical Yearbook to make data on food and agriculture more accessible and meaningful.

The yearbook provides a snapshot of related economic, environmental and social trends and issues. It breaks down a myriad of numbers gathered from around the world into four broad thematic categories: the state of the agricultural resource base; hunger dimensions; feeding the world; and sustainability, FAO said.

Each section of the ...

Farming leaders and politicians continue to send out dire warnings about future global food shortages and the need to develop strategies for national food security. Those messages conflict with the facts that Europe continues to waste half of all the food it produces, while countries around the world are diverting arable land from food production to growing crops for renewable energy.

For instance, the practice in the UK to generate electricity from straw will distort market forces in that essential commodity ...

International civilian and military teams aboard the U.S. naval vessel HSV SWIFT have completed their three-week mission of knowledge-sharing and capacity building in Northern Haiti, significantly strengthening the nation in key priority sectors and advancing the Martelly administration’s strategy for decentralization.  Presiding over a ceremony marking the departure of the vessel and crew, Haiti’s Minister of the Interior, Thierry Mayard-Paul, expressed the gratitude of the Haitian government, saying, “Thank you for your training and reconstruction work. This is the cornerstone ...

GRAIN farmers around Australia are frustrated with fluctuating grain prices, following a mostly above average harvest season, according to the Grains Research and Development Corporation.

The group has warned farmers considering storing grain to increase their marketing and profit opportunities to monitor it carefully to protect their investment.

Grain Storage expert Peter Botta said monitoring stored grain was an absolute necessity, particularly in the warmer months.

“Some farmers get their grain into the silo and breathe a sigh of relief, but it does ...

ABARES has predicted a challenging period for Australian grain producers in terms of pricing, flagging a 7pc decrease in world wheat prices over the 2012-13 period, in spite of a recent rally in international futures.

Chicago Board of Trade May 12 futures have risen by US30 cents a bushel over the past fortnight to US672c/bu, but ABARES has said high opening stocks and an expected big production year across the globe will see prices drop once again.

The average price of hard ...

A cruise ship may soon call at Port-Au-Prince, the first such visit in Haiti after a quarter of a century, a milestone that Minister of the Interior Thierry Mayard-Paul welcomed Friday at a gathering in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with the organizers of the cruise that combines tourism with volunteer work, seeing this as another instance of sustainable development for the Caribbean nation’s economy, “breathing new life” into the tourism sector.

“Haiti is at a turning point as a nation,” Mr. Mayard-Paul said at ...

A couple of rumpled aid workers were sucking down a Sunday morning beer at the Hotel Florita here when the minister of tourism rolled to the curb, followed by the interior minister with body guards toting AR-15s, and then the star of the show, New York fashion designer Donna Karan of DKNY.

The notables were in Jacmel, the funky art and carnival capital of Haiti, to plot the transformation of the earthquake-rattled port from the faded flower of the Caribbean to ...

The Kansas City Board of Trade (KCBT) said on Jan. 3 that it set new annual volume records in 2011 for hard red winter (HRW) wheat futures and for the exchange as a whole.

A total of 6,582,673 contracts were traded at the KCBT in 2011, setting a new record with a 15.5% increase over the 5,697,874 contracts traded in 2010.

In the HRW wheat futures contract, a total of 6,342,782 contracts were traded, which also set a ...