And as global warming makes Canada’s northern regions more hospitable to agriculture by opening once frozen land to farming, the opportunities are growing.

Bordering on Alaska in northwestern Canada, the Yukon has given away nearly 8,000 acres (3,208 hectares) of farmland in the past decade, a senior government official told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. A dozen new applications are under consideration.

Now is a good time to start farming in the Yukon, say government officials.

“Our territory is expected to get wetter and warmer,” said Rod Jacob, a government official with the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources in the capital Whitehorse.

“We may see opportunity with an increased growing season,” Jacob told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an email.

“A number of programs help farmers to become more resilient to climate change, including funding to increase access to water for irrigation or to have better water efficiency,” Jacob said.

The Yukon is larger than Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands combined but only 40,000 people live there, according to government data.

Free land in the area is only available for Canadians and permanent residents who have been living in the Yukon for more than a year, Jacob said.

Would-be farmers who want a free 65 hectare (160 acre) plot of land, the maximum allowed under the program, must pay for surveying, pledge to make investments in the property and meet other conditions in order to join the initiative.

People who receive free land must farm on the property for at least seven years before they can sell it, Jacob said, in order to stop speculation. These rules do not apply to investors who want to purchase farmland through traditional investment.

On average, the government doles out about 10 parcels of free land per year, Jacob said, with most concentrated around Whitehorse.

The region’s agriculture industry is relatively small, the official said, with farmers producing mostly vegetables, hay, meat and other products.

Free land in the Yukon has been on offer since 1982 and some analysts believe demand for farms in the northern region will increase as the region heats up.

Canada’s far north is considered the “canary in the coal mine” by environmentalists, as global warming is felt there first and often with more intensity than other areas.

Average temperatures in the Yukon have climbed by two degrees Celsius in the past 50 years due to climate change, said a 2016 Canadian study, more than twice as fast as the planet as a whole.

Winter temperatures in the territory have risen an average of four degrees Celsius over the past half-century, the study said.

Rising temperatures have seen the population of caribou – an important food source for indigenous people in Canada’s northern boreal and Arctic regions – crash. But it has also opened up new areas for agriculture in some of the far north with a longer growing season.

The winter months are still harsh, however. In January temperatures in the Yukon still frequently drop to minus 20 degrees or lower, according to 2017 government figures.

The post Want free farmland? Grab your parka and head North appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Restaurant Brands International, one of the world’s largest fast-food restaurant operators, has been criticized by activists for buying soy and beef from newly deforested land in Brazil and other South American countries.

It its first sustainability report, the firm, which also owns Tim Hortons and Popeyes, committed to making sure its suppliers stopped clearing primary forests or disturbing lands with a high conservation value by 2030.

“It is our intention to report regularly on our progress towards eliminating deforestation,” RBI said in its report released on Thursday.

The company also pledged to respect the land rights of communities who live in areas where its suppliers cultivate soy, cattle and other farm products to make sure local people grant informed consent concerning development on their land.

“As a company with global operations and a complex supply chain, we know we have a key role to play in promoting sustainable business practices,” company spokesman Patrick McGrade said in a statement.

Campaigners, however, say the promised changes are too slow and do not go far enough.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S.-based advocacy group, said the company’s environmental pledges are “embarrassingly weak.”

The firm should commit to ending deforestation in its supply chain by 2020 in line with other large restaurant chains rather than 2030, Sharan Smith, the group’s spokeswoman said.

“When it comes to protecting forests, Burger King means fast food and slow action,” Glenn Hurowitz from the U.S.-based campaign group Mighty Earth said in a statement.

Over the past 13 years, 271 million acres of rainforest has been destroyed around the world to make room for products like Burger King’s Whopper sandwiches, Hurowitz said.

“Burger King is sending a message that it’s OK… to keep revving up the bulldozers.”

RBI did not respond to interview requests from the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Deforestation accounts for about 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to climate change, the Union of Concerned Scientists said.

— Chris Arsenault reports for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters for coverage of humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience.

The post Burger King pledges to end deforestation by 2030 appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Protesters who marched across several cities on International Women’s Day said pension reforms and other changes to social security will make it harder for family farmers to stay on the land.

Brazilian officials say the changes, including raising the minimum retirement age for rural workers to 65 years and higher pension contributions, are crucial for South America’s largest country to escape a fiscal crisis and recession.

“Rural workers live on the margins,” said Sejane Alexandre, a protester in Tocantins State in central Brazil’s agricultural belt.

“The rural worker does not have the same longevity and access to healthcare (as urban employees),” she said, according to local media.

In Recife, on Brazil’s northeastern coast, around 1,000 female land rights activists occupied the government’s social security office, the Pastoral Land Commission campaign group said in a statement.

Officials from Brazil’s social security ministry known locally as the INSS, which was targeted by protesters, were not immediately available for comment.

Farmers say they should be able to retire at a younger age than other workers because they are engaged in hard manual labour that feeds the urban population.

About 70 per cent of the food consumed by Brazilians is produced by family farmers, according to the United Nations, but small producers often complain about unequal land distribution and poor government services in rural areas.

Government officials say pension reforms and other changes are necessary to tackle the country’s budget deficit and improve fiscal sustainability in South America’s largest country.

— Chris Arsenault reports for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters covering humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience.

The post Brazil’s female farmers occupy government offices appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

While inequality of land ownership is more often associated with developing nations, Scotland embarked on a campaign to ensure land was an asset for the many, not the few, with a landmark bill introduced to the Scottish parliament in 2015.

The move came amid growing tension over the dominance of large, often absent, landowners whose hold over the country dates back to an era when Scotland was a largely agricultural nation run by the wealthy gentry.

“This is about local communities taking control over their own destiny from absentee landlords,” Peter Peacock, a former member of the Scottish parliament, campaigner and co-author of a briefing paper on the reforms, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Scotland’s land grabs took place a couple of hundred years ago… now communities are trying to get some balance of ownership.”

Common good

The package of changes, contained in the 2015 Land Reform Bill, defines land as a finite resource that must be protected in law for the common good and in the public interest.

The third stage of a detailed, 10-part bill passed in March and paves the way for a new Land Register to ensure greater transparency of land ownership and improvements to community rights to roam common land.

Part of the push to re-balance property interests is also designed to encourage young people back to live and work in rural and wilderness areas, particularly the Scottish highlands.

To help them, the Scottish government has been offering free land grants to community groups, so long as they live and work in the area, said Peacock who is also Policy Director of campaign group, Community Land Scotland.

Under a Scottish government initiative, half a million acres of Scottish land, an area larger than London, have been given to local communities in the past decade with the objective of reaching one million acres over the next four years, Peacock said.

The Scottish Environment Ministry would not provide additional comments on its land reform policies as the region is in the midst of an election campaign, a government spokeswoman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Aileen McLeod, Scotland’s Environment, Land Reform and Climate Change Minister, has committed more than $14 million annually until 2020 to help communities buy land.

“Owning land can help communities realize their aspirations and dreams and make a real difference to long term sustainability,” McLeod said in a statement last month.

“This bill will allow more communities than ever the opportunity to be involved in the decisions about land that affect them.”

Security

Community Land Scotland’s campaign to double community land holdings in rural Scotland is part of an international movement mostly focused in the developing world to increase the amount of land formally held by communities.

A 2014 report for the Scottish government found that 432 individuals own 50 per cent of the land in rural Scotland.

It said half of the territory’s land is owned by 0.008 percent of the population of more than 5.3 million people, an “exceptional” level of inequality for a democracy.

Peacock said much of Scotland’s land inequality can be traced back to a system of aristocratic inheritance, coupled with a violent campaign in the 1800s to clear small farmers and residents off their land to make way for large sheep holdings.

This gap between individual owners and local communities has been further exacerbated by large purchases led by wealthy investors, including celebrities, who bought vast swathes of Scottish territory in times of economic turbulence, he said.

One of the most famous investors is U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Half-Scottish, Trump has spoken proudly of his Gaelic heritage and owns two golf courses in Scotland.

The Land Reform Bill also aims to increase community land control by giving tenant farmers new rights to keep their land available for tenants when they retire.

After expressing concern about political rhetoric lambasting property barons, Scottish Land and Estates, a landowners’ association, issued a cautious statement on the bill.

“We support community land ownership as part of a diverse range of publicly and privately funded ownership models,” David Johnstone, chairman of Scottish Land & Estates, said in a statement.

Peacock said in some cases, new government programs will also allow farmers to buy back land from absentee owners, even if the owners do not want to sell. In this instance, they would have to show the land is being neglected or improperly managed.

Sarah Boden, who raises sheep and cows on the island of Eigg off the coast of Scotland, is one of the residents to benefit from the government’s land plan.

“You can apply to a community trust for a parcel of land, and effectively get it for free and build your property,” Boden said in an online video promoting the land campaign.

“It gives me a feeling of security and belonging that I haven’t felt anywhere else.”

— Chris Arsenault reports for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, covering humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking and climate change.

The post Scotland moves against wealthy gentry dominating land appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The report by three U.N. agencies claims that number is a reduction of 167 million people over the last 10 years.

“This is good news,” Jose Graziano da Silva, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told reporters.

Only 72 of the world’s 129 developing countries, 56 per cent, met the MDG of reducing the proportion of hungry people by half in the last 15 years, said the report, State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015.

South Asia faces the highest burden of hunger, where as many as 281 million people lack sufficient food, U.N. agencies said.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence of hunger, with more than 23 per cent of the population not getting enough to eat, the report said.

Poor governance, violent conflicts and protracted crises are holding back many African nations. In 1990, 12 countries across the continent were facing food crises. Twenty years later the number has risen to 24, including 19 that have been in crisis for more than eight of the previous 10 years.

The regions that made the most progress include South America, where less than five per cent of the population faces hunger today, a reduction of more than 50 per cent since 1990.

Central Asia, South East Asia and parts of North Africa also showed significant progress, the FAO and other Rome-based U.N. agencies said.

Economic growth alone often isn’t enough to end hunger, instead governments should focus on “inclusive growth,” the report recommends.

Support for the poor through social investments, such as cash transfer programmes, employment projects, food distribution schemes, health care and education helped successful countries reduce the number of hungry residents, U.N. agencies said.

Strong harvests in much of the world, coupled with reduced oil prices, mean that global food costs are nearing a five-year low.

These trends, along with economic growth and other factors, helped reduce the number of hungry people worldwide by 10 million in the past year, according to the FAO.

In the developed countries, some 15 million people also suffer from hunger, the report said.

“When we talk about these numbers, we need to remember we are talking about people,” said Josefina Stubbs, a senior official with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

“The next 10 years will be fundamental for eradicating hunger.”

— Chris Arsenault reports on food politics for the Thomson Reuters Foundation from Rome.

The post Number of hungry people worldwide drops below 800M, U.N. says appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Certain wild crops — varieties not often cultivated by today’s farmers — could prove more resilient to a warming planet than some popular crop breeds, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.

But these wild strains are among those most threatened by climate change.

Ensuring food security and protecting at-risk species in the face of climate change is one of “the most daunting challenges facing humankind”, the paper said.

Between 16 and 22 per cent of wild crop species may be in danger of extinction within the next 50 years, said the FAO paper. They include 61 per cent of peanut species, 12 per cent of potato species and eight per cent of cowpea species.

“In a warmer world with harsher, more variable weather, plants and animals raised for food will need to have the biological capacity to adapt more quickly than ever before,” FAO deputy director-general Maria Helena Semedo said in a statement.

“Preventing further losses of agricultural genetic resources and diverting more attention to studying them and their potential will boost humankind’s ability to adapt to climate change.”

To improve the resilience of food systems, the paper recommends strengthening gene banks to include crops now considered “minor,” a review of breeding practices, the creation of community seed banks, and improving seed exchanges between farmers in different regions.

Seeds and genetic material from crops under threat should be preserved in labs when they are not safe in the wild, said the paper.

New regions

World food production will need to rise by an estimated 60 per cent by 2050 to feed a growing population, the FAO said, and climate change will make boosting yields tougher in many regions.

Cropping areas are set to shrink in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, India and northern Australia, while warming temperatures will open new regions to agriculture in the northern U.S., Canada and much of Europe.

Farming systems — and crops themselves — will need adapt to cope in these new environments, the paper said.

Scientists worry that certain crop varieties and animal breeds could be abandoned by farmers and livestock keepers in the face of climate change without steps to conserve them.

Breeders will need to identify genetic resources with suitable traits for developing varieties that can thrive in extreme climatic conditions, the paper said.

— Chris Arsenault reports on food politics from Rome for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, an international journalism and legal aid organization focused on free and independent reporting, human rights, women’s empowerment and the rule of law.

The post Food diversity under siege from global warming, UN says appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Due to changes in migration patterns because of violence, the world’s youngest country is seeing increased strife in once reasonably peaceful areas, said Sue Lautze, a representative of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in South Sudan.

Fighting erupted in South Sudan in December 2013, two years after it declared independence from Sudan.

The U.N. says the civil war has killed more than 10,000 people, caused over a million to flee and driven the country of 11 million toward famine.

“We are seeing pastoralists moving into farming areas with automatic weapons,” Lautze said in a phone interview from Juba, the capital. “We can feel the pressure mounting.”

The U.N. could not provide numbers on how many have died in recent violence, as much of the fighting is happening in hard to access areas.

“Silent emergency”

The increased movement of livestock has led to diseases including East Coast Fever, foot-and-mouth disease and trypanosomiasis spreading to previously uninfected areas, hurting the cattle industry, a key source of sustenance for much of the population.

The spread of diseases due to unusual livestock migrations because of conflict and environmental pressure represents a “silent emergency”, Lautze said.

In some areas such as Renk County, in the northeast Upper Nile region, agricultural planting has dropped by up to 40 percent due to insecurity, the FAO said, driving up prices for basic crops by as much as 400 percent.

The U.N. this week said it had begun delivering food aid to South Sudan via the Nile River for the first time since it became independent from northern neighbour Sudan in 2011 after a civil war, warning the country could face a “hunger catastrophe”.

Aid groups have had difficulty reaching many areas because of the fighting and the lack of tarmac roads in South Sudan which become impassable during rainy seasons.

Following independence, a political battle erupted in 2013 between supporters of President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar and peace talks have shown little sign of progress.

Lautze said the government’s security forces are preoccupied by the political showdown between supporters of Machar and Kiir so troops are not keeping the peace in rural communities.

“Conflicts between pastoralists and farmers, and between different pastoralist groups, are usually constrained by the security forces,” Lautze said. “We expect the conflict to intensify.”

– Chris Arsenault reports on food politics from Rome for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, an international journalism and legal aid organization focused on free and independent reporting, human rights, women’s empowerment and the rule of law.

The post Herders with machine guns intensify South Sudan land, food woes appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

China, the U.S., Britain, Germany, Singapore and a small group of other nations account for the majority of global land acquisitions, although 126 states participate in the trade, according to research by Sweden’s Lund University.

The deals are “increasingly becoming drivers of land change”, the study said. Some food security experts say the large-scale acquisitions could undermine the livelihoods of small farmers, contribute to environmentally damaging mono crop cultivation, and allow rich countries to exploit poorer nations.

“Some… see these kinds of investments as a way to develop countries while others see them as a new wave of colonisation,” Emma Li Johansson, one of the study’s authors, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It depends on your worldview.”

Between 32.7 and 82.2 million hectares were traded through international deals from 2000 to 2012, and land sold in this way accounts for roughly one per cent of agricultural terrain, said the study, published in the November issue of the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Rights groups consider large-scale land investments “land grabs” if local farmers are displaced from their fields by investors, or if the production from farms financed by outside capital is exported away from countries where food is scarce.

The land buyers are concentrated in wealthy Western nations, the emerging economies of Asia, and the Middle East, while countries hosting large scale investments generally come from developing nations, the researchers reported.

Despite their significant scale, the pace of these deals has eased in recent years, according to one analyst.

Some high-profile investments announced between 2006 and 2009 have yet to produce food, due to factors such as local protests, investors who lack agricultural expertise and falling commodity prices, said Michael Kugelman, of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

“A lot of private investors acquired land with no intention of ever farming it (as they wait for the value to increase),” Kugelman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “The idea of fencing off critically needed farmland and just having it sit there is troubling.”

— Chris Arsenault reports on food politics from Rome for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, an international journalism and legal aid organization focused on free and independent reporting, human rights, women’s empowerment and the rule of law.

The post Foreign ‘land grabs’ seeing redrawing global farmland ownership map appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.