Commodities: Drought, storms, poor crops, rising demand from emerging markets and hedge fund speculation is going to keep some upward pressure on agricultural feed products.
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Millions of rural poor growing crops for export earn a pittance and face rising prices of inputs.
Sonesson notes that the majority of uneaten food in places like Sub-Saharan Africa is created at the point of production, largely as a consequence of things like spoiled crops or poor refrigeration.
Biofuels from poor but sunny countries, where crops yield much more energy and costs are lower, tend to be both cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
She suggests that more groups teach local farmers in poor places how to produce their own crops.
The fair trade ethos attempts to iron out the volatility of world commodity markets by guaranteeing farmers in poor countries a minimum price for their crops.
When drought caused fires in the Amazon jungle, and then devastated crops and cattle in the poor north-east, Mr Cardoso and his team seemed slow to react.
Lack of market incentives and funding, rather than intellectual property rights, are the real brakes on research into crops of greatest interest to the poor.
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The problem at present, he says, is that North Korean farmers plant too many poor-quality seeds in a desperate attempt to boost crops, and do so in soil that is becoming increasingly less fertile.
Few legal crops flourish in Putumayo, which is remote and has poor soils.
Andrew Watts, a wheat farmer and the NFU combinable crops board chairman, said farmers had been hoping for a kind autumn after a poor harvest in 2012, but this had not happened.
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