Across West and Central Africa’s tropical agricultural belt — and one of the world’s greatest biodiversity hotspots — cacao farming has taken off as demand for chocolate rises in the…
Sheikh Sirajul Islam, a smallholder farmer in Bangladesh’s southwestern Satkhira district, sowed the wet-season aman rice in his four acres of land this August. He is hopeful for a good…
RUMPHI, Malawi — In the villages below Nyika Plateau in northern Malawi’s Rumphi district, coffee rules. It’s one of the most common bushes in the region, grown in back and…
In the last few years in mid-western Bangladesh, the trend of planting different types of fruit orchards, like mango, lychee and papaya, has gone up in three districts together commonly…
KATHMANDU — On the morning of Aug. 1 in Dodhara-Chandani, a town on the banks of Mahakali, which serves as the western border between Nepal and India, a 23-year-old woman…
KARKAYE, Krim Krim, Chad — In the vibrant fields of Karkaye, a village in southern Chad, Eunice Mbernodji, a mother of nine, is turning once-barren, dry land into a lush…
UBUD, Indonesia — Inside the small, open-air stone temple in the center of the Lotudunduh rice fields, a farmer wraps a sarong and sash around his mud-spattered work clothes. Suitably…
For Indigenous communities in Colombia’s Amazonian and Andean forests, coca is sacred. Many ancestral traditions, such as healing and shamanic practices, include the use and cultivation of the plant. But…
A recent study reveals Bhutan's potential to store 68% of its greenhouse gas emissions by converting crop residues into biochar, the highest among 12 countries noted in the report. This…
In July 2023, botanist Andrea Bianchi was driving in the Nguru Mountains of eastern Tanzania when the broad pods on a tree growing in a maize field near the road…
Zimbabwe’s Mbare agricultural market in Harare, the biggest local market in the country’s capital city, opens at 5 a.m. and bustles. Between morning and noon, traders arrive from different parts…
In the western Himalayas of Kashmir, mountain communities are eating their way to preserving traditional knowledge. Local food advocates are trying to get more of the rich array of wild…
When José Rodrigues do Santos first saw the enormous canyons in Gilbués, in Brazil’s Piauí state, he didn’t imagine that he would spend the rest of his life there. He…
As millions of farmers suffer each year from crop and livestock deaths due to pests and diseases, some growers in Africa are turning to a host of advanced technologies, artificial…
A new report has found that investors and agribusiness in Latin America are increasingly buying up small parcels of land with abundant water access, thus securing control over the vital…
XOCHIMILCO, Mexico — Xochimilco is known for its beautiful flowers. From the trumpet-shaped brugmansia to the sun-loving bushy dahlia, it’s no surprise that the word xochimilco means “place of the…
A court in Suriname has halted development on hundreds of thousands of hectares of Amazon Rainforest, much of it occupied by local and Indigenous people. The landmark ruling could give…
In Ayacucho province in Peru’s southern Andes, a three-hour drive from the provincial capital, Huamanga, stands the snowcapped mountain of Rit’ipata, popular among tourists. Every January, high summer in the…
Tea's history in Bangladesh as a popular recreational drink is almost a hundred years old. However, with economic development, the popularity of coffee is growing gradually in urban areas of…
Growers in Nigeria are suffering huge losses due to a disruption of farming seasons caused by unusual and extreme weather conditions. Mallika Nocco, an assistant professor and extension specialist in…
JAKARTA — Funding from the New Zealand government is helping Indigenous farmers in Indonesian Borneo improve their livelihoods while protecting their ancestral forests. The funding, channeled through the Farmers For…
For long, cucumbers and pumpkins remained the only popular squash vegetables in Bangladesh. When Bangladesh Agricultural Extensions introduced zucchinis to farmers in the late 1990s, there was some confusion among…
Bangladesh plans to phase out diesel-powered irrigation pumps for solar ones to cut carbon emissions, but the country’s farmers have expressed concern about the availability of power during bad weather…
This story is part of a Mongabay series on female environmental defenders in the Amazon. Read about the lives and work of Soraida Chindoy, Maydany Salcedo, and Alis Ramírez. It…
For months, residents in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand have been fighting for the introduction of land laws that would prevent agricultural land from being sold to people from outside…
It was in 2015 when researchers were attempting to capture tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) in the Brazilian Cerrado to install monitoring collars so they could study the species. While trying to…
TOKYO — The train to the farm rose from Tokyo’s labyrinthine subway network, revealing a hodgepodge of gray and tan buildings stretched on either side. The world’s largest metropolitan area,…
Vietnam’s struggling population of spotted softshell turtles received a helping hand in December 2023 when researchers released 50 captive-bred hatchlings into a freshwater lake in a northern province. Now, new…
An alliance announced at the 2021 U.N. climate summit in Scotland has already allocated $240 million for projects that align increased agricultural productivity with environmental preservation in Brazil. The IFACC,…
American agroforestry initiatives got a big boost of funding in 2022 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which allocated $60 million to help farmers transition toward this style of…
A machine learning model of ammonia emissions from the world’s rice, wheat and corn crops shows that optimal fertilizer management could slash ammonia air pollution from these crops by 38%.
There is an “inland archipelago” of mountains stretching across southern Malawi and northern Mozambique — a chain of hard granite inselbergs lifted high above the surrounding landscape as it weathered…
