Food, in brief

Ivorian cocoa traders, cooperatives and buying agents say they cannot work the national tracking system that became compulsory on 1 September. [1]

From that date every cocoa purchase in the country must go through an electronic producer card, so each bag can be traced back to the farm it grew on. [1]

The card exists because of a European law: from 1 January 2027 the European Union will refuse cocoa grown on land cleared of forest in recent years. [1]

Ivory Coast produces about 40% of the world's cocoa and sends around 70% of its own crop to Europe. [1]

Exporters say cooperatives and field agents have still not received the payment terminals, bags and seals the system needs. [1]

The Coffee and Cocoa Council, the state body that runs the sector, says it has bought 20,000 new terminals and is handing them out by last season's purchase volumes. [1]

Its director, Yves Brahima Kone, says the difficulties are real but not serious, and that buying will pick up over a few months. [1]

Exporters expect deliveries to run late through October and November, the months when most of the season's beans are bought. [1]

Ghana's cocoa regulator has proposed paying its farmers about 6% more, at 2,737 cedis per 64-kilogram bag, up from 2,587. [2]

That is roughly $240 a bag, and it widens the gap over the price next door in Ivory Coast, which risks more beans being carried over the border. [2]

Nestle, one of the world's biggest chocolate makers, is meanwhile buying more cocoa in Brazil, where farms were replanted after a fungus destroyed the old plantations in the 1970s. [5]

The same European law covers wood, and only 11% of timber companies can currently prove that 90% of their wood was not cut from recently cleared forest. [3]

Why it matters. Watch the October and November buying months: if the card system is still short of terminals, the first sign will be Ivorian exporters missing shipment dates rather than any announcement.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has published its main report on food trade, looking at wheat, maize and rice, the three crops most of the world eats. It finds that when bad weather wrecks a harvest in a big exporting country, that country's exports drop at once and usually recover within about six months. [6] It also finds that governments banning exports to protect their own shoppers make the shortage deeper for everyone. [6] Global food trade is now worth about $2 trillion a year, almost five times what it was in 2000. [6]

Why it matters. Cereals supply about 45% of the calories in countries that import most of their food, so a price jump abroad reaches those kitchens fast. [6]

The European law that is forcing Ivorian cocoa onto an electronic card also covers wood and paper. [1][3] Importers will have to give the exact map coordinates of the plot each shipment came from. Only 11% of timber companies can currently prove that 90% of their wood was not cut from recently cleared forest. [3] Wildfires caused about 30% of the world's tree cover loss between 2001 and 2025, and logging about 25%. [3] Demand for wood is expected to rise 37% by 2050. [3]

Why it matters. The illegal timber trade is worth up to $152 billion a year and about a fifth of it is thought to reach Europe, so if the rule holds that wood has to find buyers who do not ask. [3]

Japan burns wood pellets alongside coal in its power stations and counts them towards its renewable energy targets. Indonesia has become its biggest supplier. New research by the groups Earth Insight, Auriga Nusantara and an Indigenous peoples' alliance counted at least 45 biomass permits already granted in Indonesia, covering more than 750,000 hectares of natural forest. [7] Timer Manurung, who runs Auriga Nusantara, said the biomass industry has become a new driver of deforestation there. [7] Bioenergy use worldwide rose more than 55% between 2015 and 2024. [7]

Why it matters. Isolated forest communities such as the Polahi live inside some of those permit areas, and many scientists say burning wood can release more carbon than the coal it replaces. [7]

Fighting in Yemen has made the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea dangerous for shipping. Somali importers used to bring goods from Asia through Gulf ports in the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia. Mohamed Ali Nur, who directs the port of Mogadishu, said it has now taken in a ship carrying sugar directly from Sri Lanka for the first time. [8] The UN migration agency said more than 85,000 people have been displaced inside Yemen since the start of this month. [8]

Why it matters. Somalia buys most of its everyday food by sea, so a longer or more complicated route eventually shows up as a higher price in Mogadishu's markets. [8]

American law gives a livestock buyer one business day to pay for animals it has taken. The US Department of Agriculture says Bluegrass Lamb Company of Glendale, Kentucky, and its owner Valerie Samutin failed to pay $231,815 for livestock between February and April 2024. [9] The department filed a complaint in April this year and signed a settlement on 25 August, announced on 9 September. [9] At the time of the complaint $164,712 was still owed. [9] The company agreed not to operate as a meat packer until a Kentucky court case is resolved. [9]

Why it matters. The sellers are individual sheep farmers, and the payment rule exists because a farmer who has already handed over the animals cannot get them back. [9]

Danone, Mars and Nestle will each host panels on regenerative farming at Climate Week in New York, which starts on Monday. [10] Sponsors include the grain trader ADM, the snack and drinks maker PepsiCo and the retailer Walmart. [10] Regenerative farming broadly means building up the health of the soil, but the term has no legal definition in the United States and no inspection behind it. [10] A Consumer Reports survey in June found nearly a quarter of Americans had heard of it, up from 18% three years ago. [10]

Why it matters. Organic food took until 1990 to get a written US government standard with inspections, and regenerative claims are spreading years before anyone has agreed what they mean. [10]

Carbon projects pay farmers to grow trees among their crops and sell the carbon those trees store to companies elsewhere. Researchers writing in Nature asked smallholders in rural Uganda what it would take to join one. The answer came out at about $54 per hectare per year. [11] Every extra dollar offered raised the chance of joining by about 1%, and farmers who had grown trees among crops before were 22% more likely to sign up. [11] Uncertainty about the price cut it by about 4%. [11]

Why it matters. The same payment looked generous to one farmer and not worth the risk to another, depending on what else they had to fall back on. [11]

The trade publication FoodNavigator set out ten points where a warming climate is already slowing food down. Recent European heatwaves have caused about 1.8 billion euros of damage, and no major European crop escaped this year's droughts. [4] Heat makes cows give less milk and hens lay thinner-shelled eggs. [4] Steel railway lines expand and buckle in heat, and about 9.9% of the world's food moves by rail. [4] Low water from drought has slowed ships through the Panama Canal, which carries close to three-quarters of Japan's maize. [4]

Why it matters. Nearly 59% of the distance food travels is over water, so a canal or a strait is a narrower point in the system than any one farm. [4]

American farmers are expected to harvest a record 4.52 billion bushels of soybeans this year, according to the US Department of Agriculture. [12] At 60 pounds to the bushel that is roughly 800 pounds for every American, and almost none of it is eaten as a bean. [12] Soybean oil is in salad dressing, mayonnaise, baked goods, infant formula and fried food, and soy lecithin holds chocolate and bread together. [12] Between 1942 and 1972 American butter fell from 16.4 to 5 pounds a person while margarine rose from 2.9 to 11.1. [12]

Why it matters. A federal rule finalised in March raised how much renewable fuel refiners must blend, which pulls more soybean oil away from food and into diesel. [12]

Too much iron in the body can scar the liver and weaken the heart. Some people inherit a condition that makes them absorb too much of it from food, and others build it up from repeated blood transfusions. Researchers reviewed 40 sources on food, drink and supplements. [13] Tea contains polyphenols, plant substances that latch onto iron from plant foods and make it harder to take in. [13] In one trial of 18 people, those drinking tea with every meal stored about a third less iron over a year. [13]

Why it matters. The trial was small and the difference between the tea and water groups was not statistically significant, so the reviewers put diet alongside medical treatment rather than in place of it. [13]

xFarm, an Italian company that sells software for running farms, has bought Sibium Analytics of Brazil. [14] Sibium maps sugarcane fields from satellites and produces what it calls audit-ready sustainability certificates for mills and biofuel plants. [14] The purchase takes xFarm to 24 million hectares across more than 600,000 farms, and is its sixth acquisition in four years. [14] Brazil grows around half the world's sugarcane and makes roughly 9% of its own electricity from it. [14]

Why it matters. Proving how a crop was grown is becoming something a company buys, at the same moment European rules start demanding that proof. [14]

AgFunderNews publishes a weekly roundup of money moving through farming and food technology. This week it reported that Agronutris, one of France's largest insect-protein farms, has been placed under court-supervised receivership. [15] It also listed NotCo, a Chilean plant-based food company, selling its Brazilian business, and the European Investment Fund putting 30 million euros into a Nordic food-technology fund. [15] The African Development Bank announced a plan worth up to $5.1 billion to cushion energy and fertiliser shocks. [15]

Why it matters. Insect protein and plant-based meat were two of the last decade's big bets in food technology, and both of the names here are shrinking rather than expanding. [15]

The US Food Safety and Inspection Service says its rulemaking on how fast slaughter lines may run is now underway. [16] Waivers already letting some plants run faster will stay in place while comments on the rule are considered. [16] The agency also named Gabrial Eddings as head of its Office of Public Health Science and Glenn Tillman, who has worked there for over 25 years, as his deputy. [16] It is field-testing dashboards that flag risk patterns from weekly listeria questionnaires. [16]

Why it matters. Line speed decides how many seconds an inspector has to look at each carcass, so a waiver is a food-safety decision as much as a productivity one. [16]

India's packaged food market grew to $137.25 billion this year from $129.18 billion last year, and the research firm IMARC expects it to reach $238.83 billion by 2034. [17] About 6 billion of the meals eaten in India each year are Maggi instant noodles, made by the Swiss company Nestle and launched there in 1983. [17] India has more than 101 million people living with diabetes and 136 million more showing early signs of it, according to figures from the drugmaker Novo Nordisk. [17]

Why it matters. Nestle makes Maggi with palm oil in India and with pricier sunflower oil in Britain, and its Indian KitKat carries less cocoa than the Australian one; the company says its recipes follow local taste, ingredient supply and climate. [17]