World

There are renewed fears that the deal brokered by the UN and Turkey in July 2022, which guarantees safe passage for grain trapped in Ukraine’s Black Sea ports due to that country’s conflict with Russia, will collapse.

The 2022/23 orange crop in the US is forecast to be the smallest since 1937, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Farmer groups in Italy have welcomed a government-backed bill tabled in that country’s parliament that could ultimately result in the banning of laboratory-produced meat and other synthetic food.

The UN-brokered deal that has created a protected sea transit corridor for grain exported from Ukraine's three ports on the Black Sea expires later this month.

The new EU regulation on deforestation-free supply chains, which comes into effect later this year, has been met with mixed reaction by stakeholders.

Efforts to secure global food supplies are being ramped up due to growing concern about climate change. As a result, the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, located on Norway's Spitsbergen Island, recently received its most diverse batch of seed donations yet, according to Reuters.

Rising costs of food and energy, and their impact on food security and the climate, featured widely at this year’s World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland.

The shortages of fresh produce currently being experienced in the UK and Ireland can largely be ascribed to extreme weather conditions being experienced in Spain and North Africa, where harvests have been negatively impacted by flooding, snowfall and hail.

The Farm Action organisation in the US has attributed record-breaking increases in the price of eggs not to inflation or avian influenza (bird flu), as claimed by egg companies, but to price collusion among that country’s top egg producers.

Soil moisture levels in those regions of Brazil where coffee and sugar cane are produced are currently at their highest levels in seven years, according to data from Refinitiv, an American-British global provider of financial market data.

As the world moves firmly into 2023, a level of market volatility that has not been seen in years is creating uncertainty with regard to global grain supplies.

While the confidence of US farmers in the local agricultural economy is at its highest level in 16 months, farmers are somewhat uncertain of what the 2023/24 season holds, according to the latest monthly Ag Economy Barometer report by Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.