Food, in brief

China's private soybean crushers - the mills that press beans into cooking oil and the protein meal fed to farm animals - cannot cover the last three months of the year. [1]

Brazil's crop is nearly all sold, and American beans still carry China's 10% import tax on US farm goods. [1]

Brazilian farmers had sold 82% of this year's crop by the end of July, against 78% a year earlier, and an analyst at Safras & Mercado puts it near 85% now. [1]

Brazil's next harvest is not due until early 2027, so for the next few months the only large supply left is the American one. [1]

The mills are hoping Xi Jinping's visit to the United States this month gets the tax lifted. [1]

Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, says there will be announcements on farm goods and non-tariff barriers at the summit, without saying what they are. [1][2]

Even without the tax, buying American beans for October to January would lose money. Analysts put crushing 150 to 230 yuan a tonne in the red, about $22 to $34. [1]

Chicago soybean futures, the world's reference price, are up nearly 12% from their June low on poor US weather, Chinese state buying and fears of an El Nino. [1]

November beans settled at $13.10 a bushel and soybean meal at $355.10 a tonne on 4 September. [3]

Chinese state traders bought about 11 million tonnes of American soybeans after Xi met Donald Trump in May. The private mills stayed out. [1]

Importers have booked 4.8 million tonnes for November, around 60% of what they expect to need, and December and January buying has barely started. [1]

Demand is falling at the other end too. China is shrinking its pig herd this quarter to clear an oversupplied meat market, and pigs are what soybean meal feeds. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether the 10% tax comes off at the summit. Then watch whether anyone actually buys, because one Chinese mill said it would recalculate its margins first, and the sums are negative either way. [1]

Reuters looked at European crop data and found harvests arriving far earlier than they used to. [4] Hermann Greif heads the Bavarian farmers' union in Upper Franconia. He said his maize harvest has moved from around 14 September to the start of the month, and his wheat from mid-August to late July. [4] A plant moves between growth stages by soaking up heat, so warmer air runs it through faster. [4] France's farm office, FranceAgriMer, rated 27% of the grain maize crop good or excellent on 31 August, its worst score since records began in 2011. [4]

Why it matters. France's agriculture ministry expects maize production down 35% on last year, and analysts think it could halve to the smallest crop since 1976. [4] That lands first on European livestock farmers, who buy maize as feed.

The National Audit Office, the watchdog that checks how the British government spends money, said the country has not done enough to prepare for disruption to its food supply. [5] Britain imports more than a third of its food and most of it arrives through four ports: Dover, Felixstowe, Southampton and London Gateway. [5] The watchdog found that Defra, the department responsible, has spoken to food companies far less often since the pandemic. [5] Its last national test of a food emergency was in 2023, and it left out most supply-chain businesses. [5]

Why it matters. Food is one of thirteen sectors the British government calls critical national infrastructure. The cold stores and transport hubs that keep it moving are not on that list, so their electricity is not protected in a blackout. [5]

European farms feed their animals on imported protein, mostly soybeans, and researchers modelled what would happen if that stopped. [6] They tested a complete cut-off of protein imports to the European Union and the United Kingdom, measured against 2030. Farmers would put an extra 1.5 million hectares under peas, beans and lupins, and it would still not replace the imports: soybean prices rise about 150% and livestock output falls 3%. [6] What farms actually plant, the study found, follows the money rather than the agronomy. [6]

Why it matters. It is the same squeeze as the lead story, seen from the buyer's side. Europe's animals eat beans somebody else grew, and the paper finds policy support raises legume growing only moderately, with little effect on the market. [6]

The United States began importing about 660 million pounds of beef free of tariffs on 1 September, and the arrangement runs for 90 days. [8] Trump's proclamation says the meat must sell for 25% less than American beef. [8] It is not steak. It is lean frozen trimmings from among the 16 countries cleared to send raw beef to the US, ground with fattier American cuts into hamburger, a New York Times opinion piece argued this week. [7] American producers counted 86.2 million cattle in January, the smallest herd since 1951. [8]

Why it matters. Beef cost 9.4% more in July than a year earlier, and Tennessee farmers selling spring-born calves say the imports push their price down while fuel, feed and vet bills do not move. [8] A herd takes years to grow, so nothing arriving inside 90 days builds one. [8]

General Mills has now taken petroleum-based dyes out of every cereal it sells in the United States. [9] Kraft Heinz, Nestle USA, Tyson, Hershey and Walmart have all made similar pledges for 2026 and 2027. [9] A report for the National Confectioners Association, written by the research group RTI International, says the replacements may not exist. [9] The US certified 21.4 million pounds of synthetic FD and C dyes in 2025, while the whole plant-colour market is about 12 million pounds. [9] Plant colour is weaker, so matching a synthetic shade can take ten times as much of it. [9]

Why it matters. Industry people told RTI that a full switch would raise demand for plant colours by 400% to 500%, more than today's farms and processing plants can supply. [9] The promises fall due in 2027 and land on crops nobody has planted. [9]

Save the Children said the oil price jump caused by the US war with Iran has added $13 million to what it costs to deliver aid. [10] That is money which would otherwise have reached another 1.5 million children. [10] The charity works in about 110 countries, and its health and nutrition programmes reached more than 30 million children last year. [10] Willem Zuidema, its global supply chain director, said every spike in fuel prices raises the cost of every truck, every shipment and every box of supplies. [10]

Why it matters. Getting food to hungry people is mostly a transport bill, so a fuel price is a hunger number. [10] The International Energy Agency calls this the largest disruption to oil supplies in history, and poorer countries have been hit hardest. [10]

Since the 1940s, factories have pulled unreactive nitrogen out of the air and turned it into fertiliser, which is why the world grows enough food. [11] A review in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment gathered global nitrogen figures back to 1955 and found that the amount entering living systems each year has risen fivefold since the 1960s. [11] What goes back to the atmosphere rose only 12% over the same stretch. The difference stays where it was put: roughly 50 million tonnes a year has been building up on land since 1959. [11]

Why it matters. That build-up shows up as polluted soil, rivers and air, and it lands on whoever lives downstream of a fertilised field rather than on whoever spread it. [11]

Researchers used 25 years of readings from MODIS, a NASA instrument that watches plant growth from orbit. [12] They worked out how much plant matter Egypt's coastal drylands grow for each millimetre of water they lose. [12] The answer varied hugely along the coast. Thinly vegetated ground managed under 1.0 thousandths of a gram of carbon per millimetre of water; land reclaimed for farming reached 2.9. [12] Cropland and reed beds did best, while spreading towns raised evaporation and cut efficiency. [12]

Why it matters. Egypt feeds itself partly on desert it reclaims, and the study puts a number on that choice: the same water grows nearly three times as much on reclaimed farmland as on bare ground. [12]

Southern blight is a soil fungus, Agroathelia rolfsii, that rots soybean plants at the stem and resists chemical control. [13] Researchers took Pseudomonas JDE115, a bacterium that already lives inside soybean root nodules, and tested it against the fungus. [13] In dishes and in greenhouse pots it stopped the fungal threads and collapsed the hard survival lumps the fungus forms, and treated plants stayed free of symptoms. It attacks by several routes at once, including two airborne chemicals, 1-undecene and dimethyl disulfide. [13]

Why it matters. This is greenhouse work, not a field trial. [13] But it is the crop at the centre of today's lead story, and the candidate replacement for the fungicide was already living inside its roots. [13]

For decades the Taqi Baba intake carried irrigation water to six villages in Baraki Barak district, in Logar province, Afghanistan, and every flood season the river wrecked it. [14] Farmers there grow wheat and barley through winter, then tomatoes, onions, maize and beans in summer, with alfalfa for their animals. [14] When it broke they piled stones, brushwood and sandbags on the bank to push water back into the canal, sometimes for days, in the planting season. [14] The UN's food agency rebuilt it in concrete in 2025, and this year's floods left it undamaged. [14]

Why it matters. Three hundred hectares of farmland and six villages depended on one structure on one river, and the failure arrived on schedule every year. [14]

The Trump administration imposed tariffs of up to 100% on imported drones on Thursday, aimed at Chinese manufacturers. [15] Drones over 55 pounds, or carrying thermal imaging, pay the full 100%; smaller ones pay 25%. [15] The US Commerce Department had judged reliance on foreign drones and their parts a national security risk. [15] Separately, the US telecoms regulator, the FCC, is weighing restrictions on common drone technology including thermal imaging and aerosol spraying. [15]

Why it matters. Aerosol spraying and heat imaging are farm jobs, so a rule written about national security reaches the machines that put chemicals on crops and look for thirsty patches in a field. [15]

Primary sclerosing cholangitis is a long-running inflammation of the bile ducts that can end in liver failure or bile-duct cancer, and it travels with bowel disease and a disturbed gut community. [17] Researchers writing in Nature Metabolism report that imidazole propionate, a compound gut bacteria make from the amino acid histidine, is a driver of it. [17] People with the condition carry more of it in their blood, and higher levels predicted shorter survival. Given to mice over time, it produced liver inflammation and scarring. [17]

Why it matters. It is a traceable path from what gut bacteria are fed to damage in an organ. [17] It also names the compound, rather than the bacteria, as the thing a drug could aim at. [17]

Cadmium is a toxic metal that collects in farm soil and stunts what grows there. Researchers exposed onions to rising doses of cadmium chloride and watched roots and shoots shrink. [18] They then added Lactiplantibacillus plantarum 10CH, a lactic acid bacterium of the kind used to ferment food. [18] It survived cadmium up to 100 micromolar, and its genome carries genes for binding, storing and pumping the metal out. [18] Treated onions grew larger, held less cadmium, and recovered amino acids the metal had stripped away, among them arginine and glutamic acid. [18]

Why it matters. Cadmium reaches people through crops grown in contaminated ground, so a soil microbe that keeps it out of the plant keeps it off the plate. [18]

About 700 species of bacteria live in a human mouth, alongside viruses and fungi, and each prefers a different surface: the enamel of a tooth, the tongue, or the crevice between tooth and gum. [16] Streptococcus mutans sits on enamel and turns sugar into the acid that eats it. [16] The BBC reported on research into feeding the useful species rather than the harmful ones, and named fruit and cheese among the foods that help. [16]

Why it matters. Dental advice is usually about brushing and cutting sugar. This is the same problem read as a question about what goes in rather than what is left out. [16]