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Dying lands: Farmers fight to save the “skin of the Earth”

China Jiangxi crops

ROD NICKEL, AYENAT MERSIE, DAVID STANWAY and XIAOYU YIN, of Reuters, report on how human efforts to preserve soil are proving no match for increasingly extreme weather, which is damaging the living system and depleting its ability to produce food…

Tiny AI devices aim to enrich farmers and their soil

Rome, ItalyThomson Reuters Foundation A piece of paper no bigger than a business card could enrich struggling coffee farmers and their soil, a growing challenge as temperatures rise and prices fluctuate. Enveritas, a US non-profit, signed an agreement with International Business Machines Corp on Thursday to pilot the AgroPad, which analyses soil samples remotely and […]

Stop soil erosion now or face starvation soon, scientists warn

Maasai herder

RomeThomson Reuters Foundation The world’s food production is in jeopardy because the fertile layer of soil that people depend on to plant crops is being eroded by human activities, scientists said on Wednesday. Climate change is likely to make it worse even as demand from a grown population is soaring, they said. A Kenyan Maasai […]

More than a billion live on degraded land, at risk of hunger, says UN

Thomson Reuters Foundation More than 1.3 billion people live on agricultural land that is deteriorating, putting them at risk of worsening hunger, water shortages and poverty, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) said this week. People’s use of the earth’s natural reserves has doubled in the last 30 years. Now a third of […]