Food, in brief

The UN's world food price index rose 1.9% in August to its highest level since the end of 2022, led by grains, sugar and dairy. [1][2]

In southern Ukraine the opposite is happening. Farmers there had a bumper harvest and say the price at the farm gate has collapsed, because nobody wants grain that cannot leave the country. [3]

Russia and Ukraine have spent almost two months attacking each other's ships and ports in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, cutting grain exports from both. [4]

Between them the two countries sell more than a quarter of the world's exported wheat, plus large amounts of barley, maize and sunflower oil. [4]

Wheat futures, the price a buyer and seller agree today for wheat delivered months from now, are at a three-year high. [4]

Strikes in July killed more ship crew than the whole war had up to that month, the Guardian reported. [5]

Moving food got dearer in the same week. Diesel in the United States hit a record average of $5.85 a gallon on Friday, against $3.76 before the six-month war with Iran began. [6][7]

In Britain, red diesel, the lower-taxed fuel farm machinery runs on, rose by 10p to 14p a litre in four days, about 10%, a farmer-owned buying co-operative said. [8]

Farmers in the United States who still have a crop to sell are gaining from it. Maize futures are up about 15% since the end of July, above $5 a bushel and at their highest since 2023. [9]

British shoppers are paying for it. Prices of tinned and packaged food rose 2.5% in the year to August, against 1.1% in July, and fresh produce is up 3%. [10]

Viktor Zvirishyn, 57, farms in the Mykolaiv region of southern Ukraine and is still rebuilding the house and farm destroyed under Russian occupation in 2022. He says there is almost nowhere left to put this year's crop. [3]

Why it matters. Watch how much longer Ukraine's barns hold. They are already full of wheat in Mykolaiv, and if the ports stay shut through the maize harvest there is nowhere left to put it. [3]

Diesel reached an average of $5.85 a US gallon on Friday, the highest ever recorded there, according to the motoring association AAA. [6][7] It cost $3.76 before the six-month war with Iran began, and the old record was $5.81 in June 2022. [7] Diesel runs almost everything that carries food: tractors, lorries, trains, and about 90% of America's 500,000 school buses. [7] In Britain, red diesel, the lower-taxed fuel farm machinery uses, rose about 10% in four days, a farmer-owned buying co-operative said. [8]

Why it matters. Every mile between a field and a shelf now costs more, which is why the same crop can be worth less to the farmer and more to the shopper at the same time. [8]

An EU ban on animal products from Brazil took effect on Thursday, covering about $1.84 billion of exports a year, mostly beef and chicken. [11] The EU announced it in May, after saying Brazil had not guaranteed that banned antimicrobials, the medicines given to livestock to stop infections, were kept out of production. [11] Brazil sold $1.05 billion of beef and $763 million of chicken meat to the bloc in 2025, about 5.86% of its beef export earnings and 8% of its chicken. [11] An EU inspection of Brazilian poultry this week gave that industry some hope, but a quick resolution is not expected. [11]

Why it matters. Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany buy the higher-value cuts, so European butchers lose a supplier and Brazilian meatpackers have to find someone else to take the same meat. [11]

The US Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday that 17 people have now been made ill by E. coli traced to recalled frozen blueberries, six of them taken to hospital, with no deaths. [12] The illnesses were reported between 11 May and 2 August, in Florida and Georgia. [12] The fruit came from Frutas y Hortalizas del Sur of San Carlos, Chile, which first recalled it in July; the grocery chain Publix then pulled its own GreenWise organic frozen berries. [12] On Wednesday the Chilean company widened the recall to a lot of Great Value frozen organic mixed berries sold at Walmart. [12] The products reached 19 states. [12]

Why it matters. Frozen fruit sits in a freezer for months, so a recall issued in July is still finding people in September. [12]

Danish farmers drove tractors into Copenhagen, Denmark's capital, to protest against a proposed crackdown on how much fertiliser they may spread. [13] Denmark's government says the limits are needed to protect its waters from nitrates, the nitrogen compounds in fertiliser that rain washes off fields into rivers and the sea, where they feed algae that use up the oxygen fish need. [13] The proposal has not been settled and the farmers are opposed. [13]

Why it matters. It is the argument running under most of European farming right now. Danish water carries the nitrates, Danish farmers carry the smaller harvest, and the rule decides which of the two gives way. [13]

A study published in Frontiers in Public Health on Wednesday estimates 402 to 433 million cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning among farmers and farm workers every year. [14] Against a world farming population of 934 million, that is about 46% of them. [14] It uses publicly available data from 2006 to 2023 and was commissioned by Pesticide Action Network, a campaign group. [14] Southern Asia had the most cases, then south-east Asia and east Africa; Burkina Faso had the highest national rate, with nearly 84% of farm workers reporting a poisoning. [14] The authors also estimate 11,000 deaths a year, almost 60% of them in India. [14]

Why it matters. Nobody counts these cases directly, so this is a model rather than a tally. It is also the clearest price yet put on cheap pest control, and the people paying it are the ones holding the sprayer. [14]

Chilled sections in Kenyan supermarkets are close to empty, and retailers are raising the price of milk and limiting how much each shopper may buy. [15] Milky tea, chai, is a daily staple in Kenya and is served at meetings and on social visits, often several times a day. [15] Kenya's government blames drought, which has cut the pasture dairy cows graze on and reduced how much milk they give. [15] The industry regulator has itself admitted to supply constraints and low stock levels across the country. [15] A Nairobi restaurant owner who normally buys more than 70 packets of fresh milk told the BBC she could not find any and asked where the milk had gone. [15]

Why it matters. Fresh milk cannot be shipped in from far away and still be fresh, so a shortage in the pasture becomes an empty shelf within weeks and stays there. [15]

Twenty-three business organisations wrote a joint letter to John Swinney, Scotland's first minister, asking him to scrap a planned legal cap on the price of some food and drink. [16] His party promised at the election to force large supermarkets to limit what they charge for essentials such as milk, eggs, cheese and rice. [16] Swinney says people are struggling to afford a basic shop and that he has a public health responsibility to make a nutritious diet affordable. [16] The signatories, who include the Scottish Retail Consortium, Scottish Bakers and Dairy UK, say a cap would not touch the root causes: the rising cost of production, refrigeration and distribution. [16]

Why it matters. Both sides agree the price is too high. They disagree about which part of the chain is putting it there, and a cap only reaches the last one. [16]

Growers in England say this summer's extreme heat made fruit and vegetables grow in unusual shapes and colours, and that retailers will not buy them. [17] James Pullen, a potato grower at Tintinhull near Yeovil, said he faces £200,000 of losses because his crop is bruised or did not grow at all. [17] The farmers want the British government to update the appearance standards that decide what may be sold. [17] Andrew Opie of the British Retail Consortium said shops have to balance supporting growers against selling what customers expect, and that a good year yields about 25 tonnes of potatoes an acre while this year will be nearer 20. [17]

Why it matters. The food exists, the growing has already been paid for, and it still cannot reach a shelf. The whole loss sits with the grower. [17]

The British government is consulting on animal welfare laws that would, for the first time, cover the pheasants and partridges bred for shooting in England. [18] Millions of the birds are released into the countryside each year, many brought from France as chicks and eggs and reared by gamekeepers until the autumn shoots. [18] Farmed chickens have minimum cage space, perches and things to peck at, and their farms are inspected; game birds have neither the standards nor the inspections. [18] Ministers are also considering licences for shoot organisers, which would bar anyone linked to wildlife crime such as poisoning birds of prey. [18]

Why it matters. It is the same question the rest of poultry farming settled decades ago, arriving late for birds that are reared to be shot rather than sold in a shop. [18]

Delegates from more than 60 countries and the UN gathered for five days in Paro, in Bhutan, a small country in the Himalayas, for what the organisers call the world's first conscious food summit. [19] It puts governments and farmers in the same room as teachers of meditation and yoga therapists, and promotes farming methods meant to rebuild soil, alongside Indigenous knowledge. [19] Bhutan's prime minister, Tshering Tobgay, said food sits where hunger, poor nutrition, poverty, climate change and biodiversity loss all meet, and that changing food systems needs inner as well as outer change. [19]

Why it matters. It is a small country making an argument the large farm ministries do not make, with the UN in the room to hear it. [19]

Researchers used a border closure in May 1998, which cut Ethiopia off from iodised salt, to measure what iodine does, comparing children born just before it with children born just after. [20] Rural children with fewer months of iodised salt before birth and in infancy died more often as babies and in early childhood, and years later scored lower on standardised secondary-school exams. [20] The effect was strongest in districts where the soil and water hold little iodine. [20] Iodine is needed to make the thyroid hormones that build a brain. This is a statistical comparison of whole populations, not a trial. [20]

Why it matters. It puts a number on something nobody can see: a trace mineral missing from a salt packet, turning up a decade later in a teenager's exam paper. [20]

A modelling study mapped waterlogging, soil so saturated that roots cannot get oxygen, across Ethiopia's rain-fed farmland in 500-metre squares, using weather from 1981 to 2010. [21] It found land prone to waterlogging inside 39% of those squares. [21] Chickpea suffers most, losing 34% of its yield in mild cases and up to 97% in extreme ones, followed by wheat, barley and faba bean at 18% to 92%. [21] Maize and sorghum mostly cope. [21] The authors say drainage and tolerant crops could recover much of the loss. This is a computer model of soil and climate, not a field trial. [21]

Why it matters. Drought is what Ethiopian farming is known for, and this says too much water takes a comparable bite out of the same fields without anyone naming it. [21]

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a US-funded service that aid agencies use to see hunger crises coming, stopped publishing on Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen, then restored them. [22] Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, noticed a grey blank where Somalia's colour-coded famine map should have been, with nothing posted since June. [22] The three countries were also dropped from a regular Peak Food Assistance Needs briefing published on 14 August. [22] Somalia's worsening food crisis affects an estimated 6.5 million people, and the Trump administration had already cut aid funding to all three countries. [22]

Why it matters. Food aid is ordered and shipped months ahead off these maps, so a gap in the data now is a gap in what arrives later. [22]

The US Department of Agriculture rated 58% of Nebraska's maize and 65% of its soybeans good to excellent on 31 August. [23] Large rains through August let farmers stop watching their irrigation pivots constantly and gave the unwatered fields a break after heat and drought during flowering, an agronomist working across north-eastern Nebraska and western Iowa said. [23] Flowering is when a maize plant sets how many kernels it will carry, so heat then caps the yield before any grain has started to fill. [23] Two thirds of the state is still in moderate to exceptional drought. [23]

Why it matters. Rain after flowering saves the kernels that are already there. The ones July's heat stopped the plant from setting are gone. [23]

Successful Farming asked agronomists across Illinois for one word to describe what August did to the maize crop, and one working in west-central Illinois and Missouri chose relief. [24] The August rains arrived in time for grain fill, the few weeks when the plant packs starch into each kernel and the final weight is decided. [24] They also broke July's heat, which had already pulled some yield potential off the crop. [24] Southern Illinois and south-western Indiana saw few storms, so the stalks are still standing well, which matters at harvest. [24]

Why it matters. Grain fill is a maize plant's last chance to add weight, so an inch of August rain is worth more to the final yield than the same inch in June. [24]

Two farmers who have run Windy Hill, a local landmark in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, for 40 years are retiring and putting the property up at $4.5 million, on one condition: whoever buys it has to farm it. [25] That condition is what makes the sale difficult, the New York Times reports. [25] Farmland near wealthy areas is usually worth more to somebody who wants the view than to somebody who wants to grow on it. [25]

Why it matters. It is one couple's answer to a problem no farm policy has solved. When land is worth more as scenery than as a farm, the next farmer cannot afford to buy it. [25]

Tim Downes, the third generation on his family's dairy farm at Longnor in Shropshire, England, said the hot dry summer burnt off the fields his cows normally graze, so he has been feeding them the silage stored for winter. [26] The Met Office says this summer is on course to be Britain's hottest on record, and July was the driest in England and Wales since records began in 1836. [26] Britain's environment department says it has added a £65 million drought package, including £50 million for farm resilience agreements. [26]

Why it matters. Feeding winter stores in September means buying feed in January, which is when the cost of a dry summer actually lands on a dairy farm. [26]

Danes get through 57kg of sugar a person a year against 44kg in Britain, and are still among the slimmest populations in Europe. [27] About one in five Danish adults has a body mass index above 30, the usual threshold for obesity, against roughly one in three Britons. [27] Researchers writing in The Conversation call it the pastry paradox, and use it to argue that no single ingredient explains a country's weight. [27]

Why it matters. Food and health is usually reported one ingredient at a time, and here the country eating more of the villain is the thinner one. [27]

More than 6,000 children have now been treated at England's Complications from Excess Weight clinics, a network of 39 NHS hubs for severe childhood obesity. [28] The BBC reported the case of Ibbie, 16, from Doncaster, who ate more through the Covid lockdowns. [28] By 12 she weighed nearly 22 stone, about 140kg, and was told she might need a liver transplant if she did not lose weight. [28] She was bullied about her size and stopped attending school entirely in her first year of secondary. [28]

Why it matters. These clinics treat the child in front of them, which is the far end of everything else on this beat: what is grown, what is cheap, and what is sold near a school. [28]

The European Union adopted Regulation 2026/1388 on 17 June, covering plants made with what it calls new genomic techniques, mainly gene editing, which changes a plant's own DNA rather than adding a gene from another species. [29] Writing in Nature Plants, researchers note that the law it replaces dates from 2001, before those techniques existed, and that a European Commission working group started looking for something more suitable in 2007. [29] It took nineteen years from that group to the vote. [29]

Why it matters. European plant breeders have been working under a law written for a technology nobody had invented, and now know which rules their crops will be judged by. [29]

Researchers built a system that estimates crop yields in every producing country by combining official yield statistics with satellite readings and other geographic data, run through random forest models, a method that averages the answers of many decision trees. [30] They tested it against three disruptions: the Covid pandemic, the Australian wildfires and the war in Ukraine. [30] Accuracy was good globally and best in the large producing countries that already keep good farm statistics. [30] It is a model checked against past events, not a live forecast. [30]

Why it matters. Governments set export bans and buying plans on yield expectations, so the countries whose own statistics are weakest are the ones this helps least. [30]

The Al-Qarara Seed Bank, run by one family in Gaza, was destroyed during the war and is running again, handing out seed to people trying to grow their own food during acute shortages. [31] A seed bank keeps the seed of local varieties so that after a bad year, or a war, growers still have something suited to that soil to plant. [31]

Why it matters. Seed is the one farm input that cannot be flown in and still be local. If the varieties that suit Gaza's ground are lost, no aid convoy replaces them. [31]

France will announce about 1 billion euros of aid for farmers hit by this year's weather, the French broadcaster BFM TV reported on Friday, in a report relayed by Reuters. [32] The size and shape of the package are as the broadcaster described them, and nothing had been published by France's government at the time of writing. [32]

Why it matters. It is the second national weather-damage package on this beat inside a week, after Britain's £65 million drought money. [26][32]

About 700 species of bacteria live in a human mouth, along with viruses and fungi, and each prefers a different surface: the teeth, the tongue, the gaps between. [33] The BBC reports that researchers are starting to link this community to health beyond the teeth, and that diet shapes it much as it shapes the gut. [33] Sugar feeds the bacteria that cause cavities, and fruit and cheese are among the foods named as helping the useful ones. [33]

Why it matters. Food and health is usually counted in calories and nutrients. This counts which organisms inside a body get fed. [33]