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Just Warming Up Cassava isn't afraid of a changing climate For poor farmers in the tropics, there are few upsides to climate change. Cassava, however, is set to take off under higher temperatures –…

Resilient Rice For half the world, rice makes up 80% of every meal. Thus, it's a concern for all of us that rice is so vulnerable to the escalating impacts of natural disasters. The 2004 Indian…

Sorghum: Lessons from a survivor Sorghum comes in a strong fifth among the world's important cereal crops – and nothing else matches its diversity of forms and uses. A stalwart of hot and dry areas,…

Potatoes, the Underground Heroes The potato is the world's number three food, feeding more than a billion people. But potato late blight may be the world's number one plant disease threat. The…

Pigeonpea: Food for Drought Drought is a terrifying prospect for all farmers, and a matter of life and death for many. A nutritious legume that can produce harvests with just 65 cm of rain a year,…

Planet Wheat Every year farmers grow around $150 billion worth of wheat, providing 23% of the calories we live on. But some years it all goes wrong. 2010 was a bad year for wheat: a heat wave in…

Chickpea: The Economist and the Falafel The Big Mac Index determines the purchasing power of different currencies by comparing prices of McDonald’s hamburgers in different countries, but in the…

Bananas, Bruised but Not Beaten At least 1,000 hectares of banana farms in Southern Mindanao have been destroyed so far by Fusarium, a disease with no known cure that organic farming advocates said…

Gardens in the South Pacific Ocean Sometimes you can find the most telling information in a newspaper not in the articles, but in the ads. A supermarket circular in the South Pacific tells its…