Agriculture

An agreement designed to further liberalise trade between the EU and Kyiv came into force on Wednesday.

It will replace the deal in place since 2016, by expanding tariff-free access for Ukrainian goods and services.

However the new agreement has become a political headache for the European Commission, as Hungary, Poland and Slovakia are not lifting bans on Ukrainian agricultural imports.

“We are engaging with all the parties to try to find solutions,” Commission deputy chief spokesperson Ariana Podesta said on Tuesday.

“We believe (the agreement) is a stable, fair framework, that can be reliable both for the EU and for Ukraine, to ensure a gradual integration in our single market, while providing stable trade flows,” Podesta added.

The new deal includes safeguards limiting imports of certain sensitive products such as grains and oil. Nevertheless, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia have refused to lift their national bans on Ukrainian agri-food imports.

These restrictions were first introduced after the EU opened its market completely to Ukrainian agricultural products following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the Black Sea — a vital export corridor for Kyiv — was effectively blocked.

The resulting land corridors into the EU, designed to keep Ukrainian exports flowing, sparked anger among farmers in neighbouring countries who accused Brussels of allowing unfair competition.

Politically charged

The issue became politically charged, weighing on Poland’s 2023 general election and fuelling tensions in Slovakia and Hungary.

“After the war, imports of agriculture to the EU doubled. We have 117% increase compared to the pre-war levels,” Tinatin Akhvlediani, an expert at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), told Euronews.

However, Akhvlediani added that “it has been unnecessarily politicised because these Ukrainian goods were easily absorbed by the neighbouring countries.”

Ukraine’s main agricultural exports — grain, sugar and oil — are largely unprocessed goods.

“This is complementary with the trading of the EU because it mostly exports processed agricultural goods,” Akhvlediani explained.

“Ukrainian goods in fact are highly demanded in the EU market. That explains why Ukraine is the third largest import partner for the European Union after Brazil and the UK.”

The new trade deal includes a “safeguard clause” allowing either side to impose protective measures if surging imports damage domestic industries.

Yet this has not eased concerns in neighbouring countries.

“Although Brussels wants to give farmers’ money to Ukraine, we are protecting the resources, the livelihoods of Hungarian producers and our market,” Hungarian Agriculture Minister István Nagy wrote on Facebook on Monday, as he and his EU peers met in Brussels.

The ongoing dispute illustrates the broader obstacles facing Ukraine’s path to EU membership.

Within the bloc, some are concerned about how Ukraine’s enormous agricultural capacity — 42 million hectares of cultivated land, the largest in Europe — would affect the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which distributes funds based on farm size.

Even if CAP payments were reformed to focus on production rather than land area, “Ukraine remains quite competitive,” Akhvlediani said.

“The solution could be that the EU puts transition measures in the accession treaty which would limit the benefit from certain policies or not benefit from them at all. This could be the case for the CAP. It’s completely up to the EU,” she concluded.

Romanian President Nicușor Dan, whose country also borders Ukraine, is one of the rare EU leaders to have spoken openly about the issue, saying the discussion about agriculture is “pending”.

According to the Romanian president, the risks of imbalances for the EU are “significant”, especially since Ukraine “does not currently meet the standards that we impose on the agricultural sector in the EU.”

“The discussions taking place are that, in terms of agriculture, Ukraine should have a special status so that it can continue to make significant exports to non-European countries while, in all other clusters, it should be treated as an equal,” Dan said.

Voters in Tanzania are heading to polling booths on Wednesday to vote for a new president, as well as members of parliament and councillors, in elections which are expected to continue the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) – or Party of Revolution’s – 64-year-long grip on power.

Despite a bevy of candidates in the lineup, incumbent President Samia Suluhu Hassan, analysts say, is virtually unchallenged and will almost certainly win, following what rights groups say has been a heavy crackdown on popular opposition members, activists and journalists.

Key challengers Tundu Lissu of the largest opposition party, Chadema, and Luhaga Mpina of ACT-Wazalendo, have been barred from standing, thus eliminating any real threat to Hassan. Other presidential candidates on the ballot lack political backing and are unlikely to make much impact on voters, analysts say.

The East African nation is replete with rolling savannas and wildlife, making it a hotspot for safari tourism. It is also home to Africa’s tallest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, as well as a host of important landmarks, like the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. Precious minerals, such as the unique tanzanite – a blue gemstone – and gold, as well as agricultural exports, contribute significantly to foreign earnings.

Central Dodoma is the country’s capital, while the economic hub is coastal Dar-es-Salaam. Swahili is the lingua franca, while different local groups speak several other languages.

Here’s what to expect at the polls:

What are people voting for and how will the elections be decided?

Voters are choosing a president, parliament members and local councillors for the 29 regions in mainland Tanzania. A president and parliament members will also be elected in the autonomous island of Zanzibar.

Winners are elected by plurality or simple majority vote – the candidate with the most votes wins.

Authorities declared that Wednesday would be a public holiday to allow people to vote, while early voting began in Zanzibar on Tuesday.

How many people are voting?

More than 37 million of the 60 million population are registered to vote. To vote, you must be a citizen aged 18 or over.

Voter turnout in the last general elections in 2020 was just 50.72 percent, however, according to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems.

Who is President Samia Suluhu Hassan and why is she regarded as a shoe-in?

Formerly the country’s vice president, Hassan, 65, automatically ascended to the position of president following the death of former President John Magufuli in March 2021, to serve out the remainder of his term.

Hassan is presently one of only two African female leaders, the other being Namibia’s Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah. She is the sixth president and the first female leader of her country. She was previously minister of trade for Zanzibar, where she is from.

This will be Hassan’s first attempt at the ballot, and the election was supposed to be a test of how Tanzanians view her leadership so far. However, analysts say the fact that her two strongest challengers have been barred from the polls means the president is running with virtually no competition.

After taking office in 2021, Hassan immediately began reversing controversial policies implemented by Magafuli, an isolationist leader who denied that COVID-19 existed and refused to issue policies regarding quarantines or vaccines.

Under Hassan, Tanzania joined the international COVAX facility, directed by institutions like the World Health Organization, to help distribute vaccines to developing countries, especially in Africa.

Hassan also struck a reconciliatory tone with opposition leaders by lifting a six-year ban on political rallies imposed by Magufuli.

She focused on completing large-scale Magafuli-era development projects and launched new ones, especially around railway infrastructure and rural electrification. The president’s supporters, therefore, praise her record in infrastructure development, improving access to education and improving overall stability of governance in the country.

However, while many hoped Tanzania would become more democratic under her leadership, Hassan’s style of governance has become increasingly authoritarian, analysts say, and now more closely resembles that of her predecessor.

In a report ahead of the elections, Amnesty International found that Hassan’s government has intensified “repressive practices” and has targeted opposition leaders, civil society activists and groups, journalists and other dissenting voices with forced disappearances, arrests, harassment and even torture.

Tanzania’s government has consistently denied all accusations of human rights violations.

Hassan’s campaign rallies have been highly visible across the country – but hers has been nearly the only major national campaign, with smaller parties sticking to their particular regions.

Some opposition parties are now calling for a boycott of the elections altogether. Speaking to Al Jazeera, Chadema party member John Kitoka, who is currently in hiding to avoid arrest, said the elections are “completely a sham”.

How are opposition parties being dealt with?

Last week, Hassan urged Tanzanians to ignore calls to boycott the vote and warned against protests.

“The only demonstrations that will exist are those of people going to the polling stations to vote. There will be no other demonstrations. There will be no security threat,” she said.

Tanzania’s police have also warned against creating or distributing “inciting” content on social media, threatening that those caught will face prosecution. The country routinely restricts access to social media on specific occasions, such as during protests. Only select traditional media have been approved to provide coverage of the elections.

In the autonomous Zanzibar, which will also elect a president and parliament members, there is more of an atmosphere of competitive elections, observers say. Incumbent leader Hussein Mwinyi of the ruling CCM is facing off against the ACT-Wazalendo candidate Othman Masoud, who has been serving as his vice president in a coalition government.

Why have key opposition candidates been barred from standing?

Tundu Lissu, 57, is the charismatic and widely popular opposition Chadema candidate who lived in exile in Belgium for several years during the Magufuli era. His party, which calls for free elections, reduction of presidential powers, and promotion of human rights, has been barred from the vote for failing to meet a submission deadline, and Lissu is currently in custody for alleged “treasonous” remarks he made ahead of the elections.

The move followed Lissu’s comments during a Chadema rally in the southern town of Mbinga on April 3, during which he urged his supporters to boycott the elections if Hassan’s government did not institute electoral reforms before the vote. Lissu was calling on the government to change the makeup of the Independent National Election Commission, arguing that the agency should not include people appointed directly by Hassan.

Government officials claimed his statements were “inciting” and arrested Lissu on April 9.

Three days later, the electoral commission disqualified Chadema from this election – and all others until 2030 – on the grounds that the party had failed to sign a mandatory Electoral Code of Conduct due on April 12.

Local media reported that two Chadema party members attending a rally in support of Lissu on April 24 were also arrested by the Tanzanian police.

Last week, Chadema deputy chairperson John Heche, deputy chairperson of Chadema, was detained while attempting to attend Lissu’s trial at the Dar-es-Salaam High Court. He has not been seen since.

Lissu has been detained often. He survived an assassination attempt in 2017 after he was shot 16 times.

In August, the elections commission also barred opposition candidate Luhaga Mpina, 50, of the ACT-Wazalendo, the second-largest opposition party. Mpina, a parliament member who broke away from the ruling CCM in August to join ACT-Wazalendo – also known as the Alliance for Change and Transparency – was barred for allegedly failing to follow the rules for nominations during the presidential primaries.

Hassan will compete with 16 other candidates –  none of whom are from major national parties or have an established political presence.

What are the key issues for this election?

Shrinking democratic freedoms

Observers say Tanzania’s democracy, already fragile during the presidency of Magafuli, is at risk as a result of the Hassan government’s tightening of political freedoms and crackdowns on the media.

Amnesty International notes that electoral rights violations were apparent in 2020 under Magufuli, but have worsened ahead of this week’s polls.

Human Rights Watch and the United Nations human rights agency (UNHCR) have similarly documented reports of rights violations under Hassan’s government, noting in particular the disappearance of two regional activists, Boniface Mwangi from Kenya and Agather Atuhaire from Uganda, who travelled to witness Lissu’s trial but were detained in Dar-es-Salaam on May 19, 2025.

Mwangi was reportedly tortured and dumped in a coastal Kenyan town, while Atuhaire reported being sexually assaulted before also being abandoned at the border with Uganda.

“More than 200 cases of enforced disappearance have been recorded in Tanzania since 2019,” the UNHCR noted.

Business and economy

Tanzania’s economic growth has been stable with inflation staying below the Central Bank’s 5 percent target in recent years, according to the World Bank.

Unlike its neighbour, Kenya, the lower-middle-income country has avoided debt distress, with GDP boosted by high demand for its gold, tourism and agricultural commodities like cashew nuts, coffee and cotton. However, the World Bank noted that 49 percent of the population lives below the international poverty line.

While growth has attracted foreign investment, government policies have negatively impacted the business landscape: In July, Hassan’s government introduced new restrictions banning foreigners from owning and operating businesses in 15 sectors, including mobile money transfers, tour guiding, small-scale mining and on-farm crop buying.

Officials argued that too many foreigners were engaging in informal businesses that ought to benefit Tanzanians. The move played to recent protests against the rising influx of Chinese products and businesses in Tanzanian markets, analysts say. Foreigners are also banned from owning beauty salons, souvenir shops and radio and TV stations.

The move proved controversial in the regional East African Community bloc, particularly in neighbouring Kenya, whose citizens make up a significant population of business owners in the country, having taken advantage of the free-movement policy within the bloc.

Conservation challenges

While abundant wildlife and natural resources have boosted the economy via tourism, Tanzania faces major challenges in managing human-wildlife conflict.

Clashes between humans, particularly in rural areas, and wild animals are becoming more common due to population growth and climate change, which is pushing animals closer to human settlements in search of food and water.

Human-elephant flare-ups are most common. Between 2012 and 2019, more than 1,000 human-wildlife mortality cases were reported nationwide, according to data from Queen’s University, Canada.

While the government provides financial and material compensation to the families of those affected by human-wildlife conflict incidents, families often complain of receiving funds late.

Meanwhile, there is tension between the government and indigenous groups such as the Maasai, who are resisting being evicted to make more room for conservation space to be used for tourism.

Last year, crackdowns on Maasai protesters and resulting outrage from groups led to the World Bank suspending a $150m conservation grant, and the European Union cancelling Tanzania’s eligibility for a separate $20m grant.

Returning home

About 70 percent of the Nukak population remains displaced from their ancestral lands, according to the FCDS.

Most families have been pushed into sedentary lifestyles, settling in makeshift camps on the edge of towns, where addiction and child sexual exploitation became widespread.

Others have settled on small plots in rural areas, where tensions with settlers flared over land disputes.

“The settlers took over the land as if it were vacant. They say there were no Nukak, but what happened was that the Nukak got sick and left,” said Njibe.

In the most remote reaches of the Amazon, where the Nukak reservation is located, the Colombian government has little presence.

The Nukak, therefore, have few legal protections from settler violence when they try to reclaim their lands.

But in recent years, Nukak members like Njibe, tired of waiting for government action, resolved to return on their own.

The idea gained traction in 2020, when several clans retreated into the jungle for fear of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But after returning to their relative isolation, the clans considered staying for good. They called on nongovernmental organisations like FCDS for support.

At that time, Njibe was living on a small farm inside the limits of the Nukak Maku reservation.

Even within the reservation, decades of colonisation had razed large swaths of the forest. Grassy pastures dotted with cows had replaced the Amazon’s towering palm trees.

Deforestation had increased in the wake of a 2016 peace deal between the government and the FARC. The rebel group previously limited deforestation in the Amazon in order to use its dense canopies as cover against air surveillance.

But, as part of the deal, FARC — the largest armed rebel group at the time — agreed to demobilise. A power vacuum emerged in its place.

According to FCDS, powerful landowners quickly moved into areas formerly controlled by the FARC, converting the land into cattle pastures.

Armed dissident groups who rejected the peace deal also remained active in the area, charging extortion fees per cow.

“The colonisation process has caused many [Nukak] sites to be either destroyed or absorbed by settler farms,” said a FCDS expert who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

Still, in 2022, the FCDS forged ahead with a pilot programme to support seven Nukak communities as they settled deeper into the reservation, where the lush forest still remained. There, the Nukak hoped they could revive a more traditional, if not completely nomadic, way of life.

But many of the expeditions to identify permanent relocation sites failed.

Initially, Njibe hoped to move to a sacred lake inside the reservation that he recalled from his childhood, but once he arrived at the site, he found that it was now part of a ranch.

When he asked the settler who ran the ranch for permission to stay there, the rancher rejected his request, and Njibe was forced to choose another place to live.

He considered returning to a forested area — about 24 hectares (59 acres) wide, roughly the size of 33 football fields — that he considered his childhood home.

But that too lay within a ranch. This time, however, the settler in question, who Njibe said was more sympathetic to his land claims, allowed him to stay.

After taking multiple economic hits in his household, Gurvinder Singh, a 47-year-old farmer in Gurdaspur, in India’s Punjab state, took a million-rupee loan ($11,000) from a private lender to marry off his eldest daughter. He saved a portion of that and used it to sow 3 acres (1.2 hectares) of paddy.

He placed his bet on the high-yielding pearl variety of aromatic Basmati rice. A good sale would have given him an earning of nearly 1 million rupees per acre ($11,400 per 0.4 hectares).

But now, Singh’s pearl paddy grains lie submerged in floodwater, buried under layers of soil and sediment.

“I cannot afford this shocking flood at this time in my life. We are ruined,” Singh told Al Jazeera. “This year’s harvest was supposed to cover our debts. But this field is a lake now, and I don’t know how I will start again.”

Singh also had to temporarily leave his home, along with his wife and two children, after the devastating floods hit their village earlier this month. “What will I go back to?” he wondered.

‘A lasting repercussion’

Northern Indian states have been reeling under the impact of heavy monsoon rains, flash floods and swelling rivers that have submerged entire villages and thousands of hectares of farmland.

In Punjab, where more than 35 percent of the population relies on agriculture, the situation is particularly grim. Here, farmers are facing the worst floods in the last four decades, with large tracts of paddy fields inundated just weeks before harvest. The state cultivates rice in nearly two-thirds of its total geographical area.

Gurdaspur, where Singh lives with his family, has been among the worst flood-hit districts in a region that borders three overflowing rivers – Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej – following heavy rainfall in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh state.

At least 51 people have died due to floods in Punjab, and 400,000 more people have been displaced.

Singh’s field of paddy contributes to India’s $6bn worth of Basmati exports. Punjab alone accounts for 40 percent of the total production. Across the border, Pakistan’s Punjab province, also submerged in floods, accounts for 90 percent of the country’s Basmati output, generating nearly $900m.

Initial official estimates put the complete loss of crops in more than 450,000 acres (182,100 hectares) — almost the area of Mauritius — of farmland in India’s Punjab. Independent agricultural economists told Al Jazeera that the final impact of floods could be five times higher than the official estimate.

“The crop is completely spoiled, their machinery is submerged, and the farmers’ houses have washed away,” said Lakhwinder Singh, director of the Patiala-based Punjabi University’s Centre for Development Economics and Innovations Studies.

“Punjab’s farmers have to restart from scratch. They would require a lot of support and investment from the government,” Singh told Al Jazeera.

So far, the Punjab government – governed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is nationally in opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party – has announced a 20,000 Indian rupees ($230) allowance for farmers who lost their crops to flood. But that may be too little to deal with the monumental challenges that lie ahead for farmers, said Singh.

Nearly 6 percent of that basmati rice is shipped to the United States, which has slapped a 50 percent tariff on New Delhi. India has traditionally been protectionist towards its agricultural sector, which employs half of India’s population (the world’s largest) – a sticking point in trade negotiations with the administration of US President Donald Trump .

Singh warned the government of India against using the impact of the floods as leverage to liberalise policy to import food grains. “The government must not push the farmers under the bus to reduce the tariffs and get a deal with Trump,” he said. “These Punjab floods could have a lasting repercussion on the future of the agricultural economy.”

‘All we have is water’

The immediate and daunting challenge for Punjab’s farmers will be to get rid of the soil and sediment that have settled over their farmlands, agriculture experts have said.

Indra Shekhar Singh, an independent agricultural policy analyst, said that the extent of the damage could only be determined after the water receded from the fields. “There is excessive sedimentation and mud on farmers’ fields,” he told Al Jazeera. “Another problem is levelling the field, which is another cost, and readying it for the next season.”

In India, the monsoon or “kharif” crop makes up about 80 percent of the total rice production, which is harvested in late September to October. Now, experts say, Punjab’s farmers are racing against time to ready their fields for the next season’s crop, winter’s wheat, which must start by early November to avoid yield losses.

“Paddy fields are taking the worst hit in the floods,” said Shekhar Singh. “Unless there is a miracle, even the conservative numbers suggest heavy losses to farmers.

Other than the new diseases from floodwaters that may affect the standing crops, Shekhar Singh said that the farmers are also staring at a critical nutritional crisis for the Rabi season.

India’s farmers rely on urea, containing about 46 percent nitrogen, as their main fertiliser; the country is also the world’s largest importer of urea. But stocks have been dwindling: Urea stocks dropped from 8.64 million tonnes in August 2024 to 3.71 million tonnes in August this year.

This monsoon also saw panic buying of urea by farmers across several Indian states. Now, the floods have struck amid an underlying fear that fertilisers may fall short for the upcoming Rabi sowing. There has been a global surge as well in urea prices, rising from $400 per tonne in May 2025 to $530 per tonne in September.

“This would lead to black marketing for fertilisers in impacted states like Punjab, and adds to an existing problem of fake pesticides circulation,” added Shekhar Singh.

Punjabi University’s Singh said that farmers face a “prolonged economic crisis for them that will continue in the coming months”.

Meanwhile, Singh, the farmer from Punjab’s Gurdaspur, is pondering what the future holds for his family.

He had married off his daughter earlier this year to another farmer in Amritsar, one of Punjab’s biggest cities that borders Pakistan. Their farmland is submerged, too.

“I cannot travel to visit them even when we are suffering from the same disease,” he said, before reflecting on the tragedies confronting a region where two sides of a tense border are grappling with the same crisis.

“We were ready to fight a war for these rivers,” Singh said, referring to the hostilities between India and Pakistan earlier this year after an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir killed 26 civilians. India had suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, which distributes the six rivers between the nuclear-armed neighbours, in response – a move that Pakistan described as an “act of war”.

“All we have now is water,” Singh said.

Malawians are voting to elect their next president amid a deepening economic crisis in one of Africa’s poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries.

The small Southeast African nation has been hit with double-digit inflation that has caused food prices to skyrocket for several months now. It came after intense drought events last year. Earlier, in 2023, Cyclone Freddy, which struck the region, hit Malawi the hardest, killing more than 1,000 people and devastating livelihoods.

In Tuesday’s election, voters are also choosing parliamentarians and local councillors across 35 local governments.

Malawi is most known for its tourist hotspots, such as Lake Malawi, Africa’s third-largest freshwater lake, as well as nature and wildlife parks.

The country has a population of 21.6 million. Lilongwe is the capital city, and Blantyre is the commercial nerve centre.

Here’s what to know about the elections:

How does voting happen?

The elections began in the morning on Tuesday and will end by evening.

Some 7.2 million people are registered to vote across 35 local government authorities, according to the electoral commission.

To emerge as president, a candidate must gain more than 50 percent of the vote. If not, then a run-off must be held. Presidential results will be published by September 24.

A total of 299 constituency parliament members and 509 councillors will be elected. Parliamentary results will be published by September 30.

Who are the key contenders?

Seventeen presidential candidates are running for the post. However, the race is largely considered a two-horse race between incumbent President Lazarus Chakwera and former leader Peter Mutharika.

Lazarus Chakwera: The 70-year-old president and leader of the ruling Malawi Congress Party (MCP) is hoping to secure his second and — per the constitution —  final term.

The former preacher’s win in 2020 was historic, after a court ruled that there were irregularities in the 2019 election, and ordered a re-run. Chakwera’s win in that second vote marked the first time in African history that an opposition candidate won a re-run election.

However, Chakwera’s tenure has been marked by high levels of inflation and, more recently, fuel shortages. There have also been numerous allegations of corruption, particularly nepotism, against him. In 2021, the president made headlines when he appointed his daughter, Violet Chakwera Mwasinga, as a diplomat to Brussels.

In his campaigns, Chakwera has asked for more time to work on easing the country’s current economic stagnation. He and officials in his government have also blamed some of the hardships on last year’s drought, a cholera outbreak between 2022 and 2024, and the devastation of Cyclone Freddy in February 2023.

Supporters point out that Chakwera has already overseen major road construction work across Malawi and restarted train services after more than 30 years.

He previously ran in 2014, but was unsuccessful.

Peter Mutharika: The 85-year-old leader of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is looking to make a comeback after his earlier second-term bid was defeated by Chakwera in 2020.

A former law professor, Mutharika has campaigned on the economic gains he said Malawi witnessed under him, arguing that things were better during his tenure than under the present leadership. He led Malawi from 2014 to 2020.

While he is credited with lowering inflation and kickstarting major infrastructure projects, Mutharika also faced corruption scandals in his time. In 2018, Malawians took to the streets to protest his alleged involvement in a bribery scandal that had seen a businessman pay a 200,000 kickback to his party. Mutharika was later cleared of wrongdoing.

Critics have speculated about Mutharika’s age, noting that he has not been particularly active during the campaign. Mutharika is the brother of former President Bingu wa Mutharika, who died in office in 2012.

Other notable presidential contenders include:

• Joyce Banda – Malawi’s only female president from 2012 to 2014, from the People’s Party. She was formerly vice president under Bingu wa Mutharika.
• Michael Usi – the former vice president who is from the Odya Zake Alibe Mlandu party.

What’s at stake in this election?

Struggling economy

Although Malawi exports tobacco, tea, and other agricultural products, the country is largely aid-dependent. It is also under pressure from accumulated external debt.

For Malawian voters, rising prices of food and everyday items are the most pressing issue on the ballot. Food costs have gone up by about 30 percent in the past year, but salaries have largely stayed the same. Meanwhile, the costs of fertiliser for the 80 percent of Malawians who survive on subsistence farming have risen.

Economists chalk up the stagnation crisis to a lack of foreign currency, which has limited crucial imports, including fertilisers and fuel.

Presently, the country is facing severe fuel shortages, with hundreds queuing up at fuel stations daily. Chakwera has blamed corrupt officials, who he says are deliberately sabotaging the fuel markets, for the problem.

In May, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) terminated a $175 million loan programme after it failed to give early results. Only $35 million had been disbursed. There will likely be negotiations for a new IMF programme after the elections, officials have said.

Earlier, in February, disgruntled citizens took to the streets Lilongwe and Blantyre in protest against the rising cost of living. Some voters, particularly the young people, feel that not much will change whether they vote or not.

While Mutharika has campaigned on his economic record while in office, Chakwera has pledged a cash transfer programme of 500,000 Malawi kwacha ($290) for newborns, which they can access at the age of 18.

Corruption

Corruption crises have riddled both Mutharika and Chakwera’s governments, something many Malawians say they are tired of.

While Chakwera has talked tough on fighting graft since becoming head of state in 2020, he has faced criticism for nepotism scandals and for handling corruption cases selectively.

Meanwhile, candidate Joyce Banda has also promised to fight corruption if elected. As president, Banda fired her entire cabinet in 2013, following news that some government officials were caught with large amounts of cash in their homes.

Drought and extreme weather

Malawi is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries, although it does not contribute significantly to emissions. With the majority of people relying on subsistence farming for food, extreme weather events often hit Malawi especially hard.

Climate activist Chikondi Chabvuta told Al Jazeera that governments in the past have not invested enough in building systems, such as food systems, that can absorb climate shocks. Women and girls, in particular she said, are often most affected by the double whammy of weather disasters and inflation that often follows.

“Creating a buffer for the people impacted should be a priority because science is telling us these events are going to get worse,” Chabvuta said. “Life for Malawians has to get better by policies that show seriousness,” in tackling environmental challenges, she added.

Millions of people were impacted for several months in 2024, after a severe regional drought destroyed harvests, driven by El Nino weather patterns.

According to the World Food Program, hundreds of thousands across the country were forced to rely on food assistance for survival as Malawi declared an emergency.

In February 2023, Cyclone Freddy, which was one of the deadliest storms to hit Africa in the last two decades, caused 1,216 fatalities. It also wiped out crops and caused similar food shortages.

Maputo, Mozambique – Down the main aisle of a bustling conference pavilion in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, Lucia Matimele stands surrounded by lush green leaves, peppers on the stalk, and bunches of ripe bananas.

“We have land, we have water, we have farmers!” she enthuses. “What we need is investment.”

Matimele is the director of industry and commerce for Gaza province, a region about 200km (125 miles) away that is one of the country’s main breadbaskets. She and her team packed up some of their most promising crops and joined thousands of others – from within and outside Mozambique – to exhibit their wares and make industry connections as the government works to promote economic growth and development in what has been a politically challenging year.

More than 3,000 exhibitors from nearly 30 countries are in Mozambique this week for the 60th annual Maputo International Trade Fair (FACIM) – the largest of its kind in the country. Tens of thousands are expected to attend the seven-day event, the government said.

Crowds of exhibitors and eager attendees gathered at the sprawling conference site on the outskirts of Maputo for day one of the event on Monday. A dozen pavilions are hosting local businesses, provincial industry leaders, such as Matimele, and regional and international companies looking to trade in or with Mozambique.

Standing before delegates and businesspeople at the opening ceremony, Mozambican President Daniel Chapo focused on the need to ensure a good environment for foreign investors, while also building an inclusive and sustainable local economy.

“Mozambique has a geostrategic location, with ports, development corridors and various other potentialities; vast resources, mineral, natural, agricultural, tourist, and above all a humble, hard-working, friendly and welcoming people,” Chapo said in Portuguese, highlighting the country’s “unique opportunities” for international partners.

But at home, he affirmed, “economic independence starts with agriculture workers, farmers, the youth, women – all of us together”.

With that in mind, the government, with financing from the World Bank, has instituted a new $40m Mutual Guarantee Fund to help finance small and medium enterprises in the country. It will provide credit guarantees to at least 15,000 businesses and aims to assist mainly women and young people, the president said.

“One of the concerns we hear repeatedly at all the annual private sector conferences is the difficulty in accessing financing,” Chapo said while launching the fund at FACIM on Monday.

“We know that high interest rates have been almost insurmountable barriers for small- and medium-sized businesses, which represent the heart of the national business fabric, hence the creation of this fund, specifically dedicated to this group of companies, because they are responsible for 90 percent of the dynamism of our economy, generating income mainly for young people.”

He added: “This instrument is not just a financial mechanism, it is a bridge to the recovery of the Mozambican economy.”

‘We can feed our people best’

Mozambique has “ample resources”, the World Bank says, including arable land, abundant water sources, energy, mineral resources and natural gas deposits.

However, its gross domestic product (GDP) growth for 2025 is projected to be just 3 percent (it was 1.8 percent in 2024 and 5.4 percent in 2023).

Experts point to a raft of challenges facing the Southern African nation: for years it was besieged by a $2bn “hidden debt” corruption scandal that implicated senior government officials; it is still recovering from post-2024 election protests that affected tourism; and it faces an ongoing rebellion by armed fighters in the northern Cabo Delgado province, home to offshore liquefied natural gas (LNG) reserves.

The armed rebellion has halted TotalEnergies’ $20bn LNG project, and, with it, put added strain on the region’s finances and near-future economic prospects, noted Borges Nhamirre, a Mozambican researcher on security and governance with the Institute for Security Studies.

“The economy of Mozambique was prepared for the next 20, 30 years to rely on natural resources … But now the most recent problem is the insurgency in the northern part of the country. So that affects the economy of Mozambique deeply,” Nhamirre said.

“And unfortunately, Mozambique did not diversify the source of revenues, did not invest in other sectors like agriculture, industry, manufacturing – relying mostly on natural gas,” he added.

“Mozambique needs to bet on producing its own food,” the researcher said, noting that it is not affordable to keep importing when the country has the potential to feed itself. “The land for agriculture is there, water is there. So, the problem is just mentality and a bit of capital.”

At her booth in one of the pavilions at FACIM, Matimele has similar thoughts. “We can feed our people best,” she said, surrounded by fresh produce from small farms in Gaza province. Across the aisle from her, another booth boasts supplies from the province of Tete: grains, seafood, vegetables, livestock; while throughout FACIM, businesses are selling locally sourced items, including coffee and honey.

In Gaza, Matimele says, people farm rice, bananas, cashews and macadamias, much of which they send abroad to countries such as South Africa and Vietnam – and she would like to increase exports and reach new places.

The challenge for them is not production, but processing and distribution, she says.

“We need big industry getting into this business,” Matimele said, adding that small farmers need guarantees that what they produce will be sold and not go to waste.

“FACIM helps us by giving us a secure market,” she explained.

Without funding, ‘you will get stuck’

For other observers, FACIM’s focus this year on investment and the Mutual Guarantee Fund are a step in the right direction, especially for small business owners in the agricultural sector.

“Agriculture is our main resource. It employs millions of people and feeds millions more,” said Rafael Shikhani, a Mozambican historian and researcher. Yet, there remains a longstanding “problem” with the sector, he noted from Maputo.

“[Historically], we have had so many breakups in that [agriculture] cycle,” he said, highlighting the 1977-92 civil war, and in the midst of that, a severe drought that hit the country from 1982 to 1984. “It was a sort of disruption to production,” he said, one that has had ripple effects.

Current challenges facing Mozambican agriculture, the researcher said, include a lack of capital for farming, as well as some people preferring to take an easier route by importing food from neighbouring South Africa to sell locally instead of growing it from scratch.

“In many areas, the funding is a key motivation,” Shikhani said. “If you don’t have funds, you can [still] start a very nice business, but there will be a certain way you will get stuck – you’ll need equipment, you’ll need to pay people, you’ll need a truck, you’ll need to put up a fence; for whatever, you will need money.”

That is where the Mutual Guarantee Fund could come in handy.

“More investment in agriculture is good,” Shikhani said. It will also help the sector evolve from individuals farming small plots of land to small and medium-sized farming businesses that make more informed choices about “the type of land, where you farm, and how you exploit your land”.

For analyst Nhamirre, the way the Chapo government goes about tackling the country’s most pressing economic issues will go a long way in determining the outcome.

But he remarks that external factors, such as the armed rebellion in the north and internal governance issues, will also play a part.

“There are internal things that the government needs to do well … The people are still very frustrated,” he said, pointing to the past year’s post-election violence, saying there is a chance protests may flare up again.

Meanwhile, Shikhani looks at the issue through a historian’s lens. “There is a cycle of crisis: if there is an economic crisis, it leads to a political crisis, and it leads to social unrest. If you deal with economics and you feed people, there will be no more social unrest, and there will be no political crisis. So, you start with economics,” he said.

“Give people food, give people jobs, give people hope – they will work and make money.”

At her booth in FACIM, Matimele and her team stand ready in matching red shirts emblazoned with the words: “Gaza, the route of progress” in Portuguese. Ahead of them is a week of networking that they hope will lead to more – more food, more jobs, more hope.

“Investment is the right way to follow,” said the provincial industry chief. “If we have investment, we can solve all the issues.”

Israeli destruction in al-Mughayyir near Ramallah is part of push to forcibly displace Palestinians, researcher says.

The Israeli military has destroyed about 3,000 olive trees in a village near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, the head of the local council says, as Palestinians face a continued wave of violence across the territory in the shadow of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Israeli military issued an order on Saturday to uproot olive trees in a 0.27sq-km (0.1sq-mile) area in al-Mughayyir, a village of about 4,000 residents northeast of Ramallah.

The army justified the measure by saying the trees posed a “security threat” to a main Israeli settlement road that runs through the village’s lands.

The destruction was carried out as al-Mughayyir has been under lockdown since Thursday after an Israeli settler said he was shot at in the area.

The deputy head of the village council, Marzouq Abu Naim, told Palestinian news agency Wafa that Israeli soldiers had stormed more than 30 homes since dawn on Saturday, destroying residents’ property and vehicles.

For decades, the Israeli military has uprooted olive trees – an important Palestinian cultural symbol – across the occupied Palestinian territory as part of the country’s efforts to seize Palestinian land and forcibly displace residents.

The West Bank also has seen a surge in Israeli military and settler violence since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023, and tens of thousands of Palestinians have been forced out of their homes.

More than 2,370 Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians have been reported across the area from January 2024 to the end of July this year, according to the latest figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

The highest number of attacks – 585 – was recorded in the Ramallah area, followed by 479 in the Nablus region in the northern West Bank.

At least 671 Palestinians, including 129 children, also have been killed by Israeli forces and Israeli settlers across the West Bank in that same time period, OCHA said.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on Saturday on the uprooting of the olive trees in al-Mughayyir.

Hamza Zubeidat, a Palestinian researcher, said the destruction is part of Israel’s “continuous” effort to force Palestinians off their lands.

“We have to be clear that since 1967, Israel is still implementing the same plan of evicting the Palestinian population from the countryside and the cities of the West Bank. What’s going on right now is just a continuous process of this eviction of Palestinians. It’s not a new Israeli process,” Zubeidat told Al Jazeera.

He noted that al-Mughayyir has a long agricultural history and, like other villages in the West Bank, relies almost entirely on agriculture and livestock as its main source of income.

“This area where more than 3,000 olive trees [were] uprooted is one of the most fertile areas in this part of the Ramallah area,” Zubeidat explained.

“Uprooting trees, confiscated water springs, blocking and preventing Palestinians from accessing their farms and water sources means more food and water insecurity.”

In Porciuncula, Brazil, small-scale coffee farmer Jose Natal da Silva is losing sleep – not just to protect his arabica crops from pests, but over fears raised by a new 50% United States tariff on Brazilian goods announced by President Donald Trump.

The tariff, widely seen as a political move in defence of far-right Trump ally ex-President Jair Bolsonaro, who faces trial for an alleged coup plot, could slash demand and prices for Brazilian coffee in its top export market.

Brazil is the world’s largest coffee exporter, sending 85 percent of its output abroad. The US buys 16 percent of that, making it Brazil’s biggest coffee customer. Experts warn the tariff will hurt competitiveness, especially for family farmers who produce two-thirds of Brazil’s coffee and have fewer resources to weather downturns or shift to new markets.

Last year’s climate change-driven drought already devastated crops. Now, falling arabica prices, down 33 percent since February, are compounding losses. “We struggle for years, and suddenly we might lose everything,” said da Silva, who grows 40,000 trees and other crops to survive.

Nearby in Varre-Sai, Paulo Menezes Freitas, another smallholder with 35,000 trees, fears he may be forced to abandon coffee farming. He says the tariff also affects essential imports like machinery and aluminium. “It feels like the ground is crumbling under us,” he said.

Despite the blow, Brazil’s coffee exporters remain cautiously optimistic. The Council of Coffee Exporters of Brazil (Cecafe)’s Marcio Ferreira believes US buyers can’t afford to stop importing Brazilian beans. But on the ground, small farmers fervently hope for a rollback before livelihoods vanish.

Canberra says restrictions will be lifted following a ‘rigorous science and risk-based assessment’.

Australia has announced that it will lift tough restrictions on beef imports from the United States, removing measures singled out for criticism by US President Donald Trump.

Agriculture Minister Julie Collins said the government would remove the biosecurity restrictions after a “rigorous science and risk-based assessment” found the risks were being managed on the US side.

“Australia stands for open and fair trade – our cattle industry has significantly benefitted from this,” Collins said in a statement.

Australia, which has some of the world’s toughest biosecurity measures, has until now not accepted beef from cattle raised in Canada and Mexico but slaughtered in the US.

Canberra lifted a ban on beef from cows raised and slaughtered in the US, introduced in response to an outbreak of mad cow disease, in 2019.

The move comes after Trump called out Australia’s restrictions on US beef in his April 2 “Liberation Day” announcement of sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries.

“Australia bans – and they’re wonderful people and wonderful everything – but they ban American beef,” Trump said.

“They won’t take any of our beef,” Trump added.

“They don’t want it because they don’t want it to affect their farmers and you know, I don’t blame them but we’re doing the same thing right now starting at midnight tonight, I would say.”

Australia, which exports about 70 percent of its beef, is among the main suppliers of red meat to the US, but consumes little US beef.

Australia exported about 26,000 tonnes of beef and veal to the US in the first three weeks of July, according to government statistics.

Meat & Livestock Australia, a producer-owned company that supports the local beef industry, said the changes would have a minimal effect on the market.

“The potential for US beef to be imported into Australia in large volumes is minimal, given the high demand for beef in the US, the low US cattle herd, the strength of the Australian dollar, our competitive domestic supply, and most importantly Australians’ strong preference for high-quality, tasty and nutritious Australian beef,” the company said.

“In fact, demand for Australian beef in the US continues to grow. In June 2025, exports to the US rose 24 percent year-on-year, despite a 10 percent tariff introduced in April.”

Nearly half the global population has also been exposed to dust levels exceeding WHO safety thresholds.

A new report by the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has found that sand and dust storms are leading to “premature deaths” due to climate change, with more than 330 million people in 150 countries affected.

On Saturday, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) marked the International Day of Combating Sand and Dust Storms and its designation of 2025 – 2034 as the UN Decade on Combating Sand and Dust Storms.

The storms “are fast becoming one of the most overlooked yet far-reaching global challenges of our time”, said Assembly President Philemon Yang. “They are driven by climate change, land degradation and unsustainable practices.”

The secretary-general of WMO, Celeste Saulo, said on Thursday that sand and dust storms do not just mean “dirty windows and hazy skies. They harm the health and quality of life of millions of people and cost many millions of dollars through disruption to air and ground transport, on agriculture and on solar energy production.”

Airborne particles from these storms contribute to 7 million premature deaths annually, said Yang, adding that they trigger respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and reduce crop yields by up to 25%, causing hunger and migration.

“About 2 billion tonnes of dust are emitted yearly, equivalent to 300 Great Pyramids of Giza” in Egypt, Laura Paterson, the WMO’s UN representative, told the UNGA.

More than 80% of the world’s dust comes from the deserts in North Africa and the Middle East, added Paterson, but it has a global effect because the particles can travel hundreds and even thousands of kilometres across continents and oceans.

Undersecretary-General Rola Dashti, head of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, told the assembly the storms’ economic costs are “staggering”.

In the Middle East and North Africa, it costs $150bn, roughly 2.5% of gross domestic product (GDP), annually to deal with dust and sand storms, she said.

“This spring alone, the Arab region experienced acute disruption,” Dashti said, citing severe storms in Iraq that overwhelmed hospitals with respiratory cases and storms in Kuwait and Iran that forced school and office closures.

Dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa has travelled as far as the Caribbean and Florida, she said. For the United States, dust and wind erosion caused $154bn in damage in 2017, a quadrupling of the amount since 1995, according to a study in the scientific journal Nature.

The WMO and World Health Organization also warned that the health burden is rising sharply, with 3.8 billion people – nearly half the global population – exposed to dust levels exceeding WHO safety thresholds between 2018 and 2022, up from 2.9 billion people affected between 2003 and 2007.

The US has closed its ports of entry to Mexican cattle for fear of the parasitic, flesh-eating worm spreading north.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has denounced a decision by the United States to once again suspend imports of her country’s cattle over a flesh-eating parasite called the screwworm.

On Thursday, Sheinbaum used her morning news conference to call fears of the worm overblown. She pointed out that a single case in the eastern state of Veracruz had prompted the import pause.

“From our point of view, it is a totally exaggerated decision to close the border again,” Sheinbaum said.

At the centre of the cross-border debate is the New World screwworm, a species endemic to the Caribbean and parts of South America. It had previously been eradicated from the northernmost part of its range, in Central and North America.

The US, for instance, declared it eliminated from the country in 1966.

But the parasite may be making a comeback, leaving the US government alarmed about its potential impact on its cattle and beef sector, a $515bn industry.

The New World screwworms appear when a variety of parasitic flies, Cochliomyia hominivorax, lay their eggs near wounds or sores on warm-blooded animals. Most commonly, its hosts are livestock like horses or cattle, but even household pets or humans can be infested.

Each female fly is capable of laying hundreds of eggs. When the eggs hatch, they release larvae that tunnel into the flesh of their hosts, often causing incredible pain.

Unlike maggots from other species, they do not feed on dead flesh, only living tissue. If left untreated, infestations can sometimes be deadly.

The fear of New World screwworms expanding northwards has caused the US to halt shipments of Mexican cattle several times over the past year.

In late November, it put in place a ban that lasted until February. Then, on May 11, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the US would once again bar entry to Mexican cattle after the “unacceptable northward advancement” of the bug.

A port of entry in Arizona was slated to reopen to Mexican cattle starting on Monday. But that plan was suspended under a new announcement on Wednesday, which implemented the cattle ban once more, effective immediately.

“The United States has promised to be vigilant — and after detecting this new NWS [New World screwworm] case, we are pausing the planned port reopening’s to further quarantine and target this deadly pest in Mexico,” Rollins said in a statement.

The statement explained that the US hopes to eradicate the parasite, pushing its encroachment no further than the Darien Gap, the land bridge in Panama that connects South and Central America.

It also asserted that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) was “holding Mexico accountable by ensuring proactive measures are being taken”.

Part of its strategy will be to release male flies — lab-raised and sterilised through radiation — from airplanes in Mexico and the southern US. Female flies can mate only once, so if they pair with a sterile fly, they will be unable to reproduce.

The same strategy has been deployed in the past to control the New World screwworm, as an alternative to more hazardous methods like pesticides that could affect other animals.

In a social media post on June 30, Rollins touted gains in recent weeks, including “over 100 million sterile flies dispersed weekly” and “no notable increase” in screwworm cases in eight weeks.

She thanked her Mexican counterpart, Julio Berdegue, for his help.

“He and his team have worked hand in hand with our @USDA team since May 11 to get these ports reopened. We are grateful,” she wrote.

United States President Donald Trump has threatened Brazil with a 50 percent tariff, citing the criminal charges against its former president and his political ally Jair Bolsonaro, who is accused of plotting a coup.

In a letter to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s current president, Trump said on Wednesday that the treatment of Bolsonaro, who refused to publicly concede the presidential election that he lost to Lula in 2022, “is an international disgrace”.

The letter was one of 22 tariff notices Trump sent this week to various countries. On Monday, the president extended a pause on his sweeping global tariffs from Wednesday to August 1.

For the most part, Trump says he is trying to rebalance large trading deficits, whereby the US imports more from a country than it exports there.

But the US has a trade surplus with Brazil, and the tariff threatened against South America’s largest economy was higher than those received by other countries, which have mostly fallen in the range of 25 to 40 percent.

The escalation in tensions between the US and Brazil came as Lula hosted representatives from China, Russia, Iran and other nations for a BRICS summit of emerging economies in Rio de Janeiro this week.

Leaders attending the summit criticised Trump’s tariffs and the recent US and Israeli bombing of Iran, drawing threats from Trump of a 10 percent additional tariff for “anti-American” BRICS-aligned countries.

What has Trump announced in relation to Brazil?

Trump has continued to publish letters informing US trading partners of tariffs planned to begin on August 1 if they can’t reach trade deals with his government before that. So far, he has sent 22 letters to heads of state. More could still come.

While the letters have mostly denounced trade between those countries and the US as “far from reciprocal”, Trump’s letter to Lula was stronger.

He wrote that “due in part to Brazil’s insidious attacks on Free Elections, and the fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans”, he planned to levy a 50 percent tax on Brazilian goods exported to the US.

“Please understand that the 50 percent number is far less than what is needed to have the Level Playing Field we must have with your Country,” Trump added. “And it is necessary to have this to rectify the grave injustices of the current regime.”

He said: “The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace.”

How has Brazil responded?

Lula promised to hit back with tariffs of his own if Trump follows through with his threat.

“Brazil is a sovereign nation with independent institutions and will not accept any form of tutelage,” Lula said in a post on X.

He added that the criminal case against Bolsonaro, who challenged the outcome of Brazil’s 2022 election, is a matter solely for the justice system and “not subject to interference or threat”.

Why is Trump targeting Brazil when the US has a trade surplus?

According to the Office of the US Trade Representative, the US imported $42.3bn of goods from Brazil in 2024 and exported $49.7bn.

In short, Brazil’s purchases from the US amounted to roughly $7.4bn more than US purchases from Brazil.

Ever since the announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs, on April 2, Trump has consistently stated his desire to reduce America’s trade deficits with its trading partners.

In Trump’s view, deficit countries, such as the US, import goods that could have been produced at home, harming domestic employment and economic growth in the process.

However, “Brazil has historically run a small trade deficit with the US”, said Elizabeth Johnson, an economic analyst at TS Lombard, a strategy and political research firm. “It is very much political. … It is part of the Bolsonaro family’s effort to get Trump to weigh in on the ongoing trial of Jair Bolsonaro.”

Indeed, this is not the first time Trump has used the threat of tariffs to try to alter other countries’ domestic policy decisions.

Since returning to office in January, he has threatened a 25 percent tariff on Colombian goods and said he would double that if the country refused to accept deportees from the US. Colombia ultimately accepted his terms.

What trade does the US do with Brazil?

In 2023, the balance of trade (imports plus exports) between the US and Brazil amounted to $104bn, making Brazil the US’s 15th largest trading partner.

Top US exports to Brazil last year included aircraft and spacecraft (amounting to about $7bn), fossil fuels ($9bn) and industrial machinery such as nuclear reactors and electrical equipment (roughly $10bn), according to US Census Bureau data.

Brazil’s exports to the US in 2023 were led by crude oil and fossil fuels (about $8.8bn), iron and steel products ($5bn) and soya beans ($3.3bn).

What impact could a 50 percent tariff have on Brazil’s economy?

It could severely hurt companies highly exposed to the US market. In particular, firms in the base metals and agricultural sectors could be badly hit.

According to Johnson, Trump’s tariff threat could be a drag on economic growth because the US is Brazil’s second largest export market after China.

Indeed, Goldman Sachs has calculated that Brazil’s exports to the US represent 2 percent of its gross domestic product and Trump’s tariffs could cut its economic growth by 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points.

What impact could this have on the US economy?

If the tariffs are implemented, US firms that buy Brazilian goods would most likely have to find alternative sources for those products, and this could take time.

In the meantime, “the semifinished steel products from Brazil used in American manufacturing mean [that higher tariffs would be] a negative,” Johnson told Al Jazeera.

In addition, “beef, orange juice, coffee” and other farm products travelling from Brazil into the US would become much more expensive, she said.

On the other hand, Johnson suggested, “There’s room for Trump to score a win with Brazil by allowing more ethanol exports into the US, which would help [American] farmers.”

What charges is Bolsonaro facing in Brazil?

Bolsonaro, who was president of Brazil from 2019 to 2023, refused to concede his presidential election loss to his left-wing rival in 2022.

Bolsonaro raised questions about the accuracy of the election result, claiming that some electronic voting machines had been faulty.

Shortly after Lula took office in January 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters angered over the election result stormed the presidential palace, Congress and the Supreme Court in the capital, Brasilia.

Now, Bolsonaro is facing criminal charges for allegedly plotting a coup and for alleged actions he took to overturn the 2022 election result.

Bolsonaro and 33 other people were charged this year, and the ex-president’s case is being heard by the Supreme Court. He could face 40 years in prison if found guilty.

Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing and has framed the trial as a politically motivated attack.

Trump, who also falsely claimed he had beaten Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, had faced criminal charges related to seeking to overturn that election. His supporters also stormed the US Capitol before Biden took office, seeking to stop the certification of the election results.

Trump has highlighted what he regards as parallels between himself and Bolsonaro. On Monday, he wrote on social media that he empathised with what was happening to Bolsonaro: “It happened to me, times 10.”

Which other countries were notified of new tariffs?

Other than Brazil, recipients of tariff letters on Wednesday included the Philippines, Moldova, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Libya, Algeria and Iraq. They were notified of tariffs as high as 30 percent.

The rates Trump said would be imposed on Sri Lanka, Moldova, Iraq and Libya were lower than those he initially announced in early April.

Tariffs on goods from the Philippines and Brunei were higher. The rate for goods from Algeria remained the same.

Trump has said companies that move production to the US will be exempt from tariffs. But he also warned that if countries retaliate, they could face even higher US duties.

The US and its largest trading partners have been negotiating trade deals since Trump announced the tariffs. But so far, only Vietnam and the United Kingdom have reached new deals while a partial agreement has been reached with China.

More recently, Trump administration officials have indicated that deals with India and the European Union may be imminent.

John C. Harris, California horse-racing mogul, had a particular love for the thoroughbred breeding and racing sector of his company, Harris Farms.

Multiple horses that were raised and trained at Coalinga-based Harris Farms went on to become national champions, including Tiznow, the 2000 Horse of the Year, and California Chrome, a national Hall of Fame racehorse. A close friend recounted Harris’ reaction to the latter thoroughbred winning the 2014 Kentucky Derby.

The moment California Chrome sprinted over the finish line, tears streamed down Harris’ face.

“It was just knowing that his farm had such a major role,” said his good friend Doug Burge. “It was probably the most fun we ever had.”

Harris, who owned the multimillion-dollar agribusiness Harris Farms, has died. He was 81.

Those who knew Harris described him as an acclaimed rancher, farmer and horse-racing enthusiast who devoted himself to his passions to the end. Harris Farms confirmed his death in a statement shared on July 3. No details, including cause of death, were provided.

Harris was born on July 14, 1943, and resided in Fresno County all of his life. He earned a degree in agricultural production at UC Davis before serving in the U.S. Army for two years.

Harris took ownership of Harris Farms following his father’s death in 1981. He oversaw all operations of the ranch, which encompasses a thriving farm that produces more than 30 types of crops including garlic, pistachios and wine grapes, as well as the horse-breeding operation, according to its website. Harris Farms was known for the beef it produced, but the cattle-raising portion of the business was sold in 2019.

Harris nurtured a steadfast passion for horse racing and the thoroughbred breeding industry in Northern California, according to friends and family. He was a former president and board member of the California Thoroughbred Breeders Assn. and served on the board of the Thoroughbred Owners of California and the National Jockey Club. According to those who worked with him, he shaped the horse-racing industry into what it is today.

“He had a love for the land, everything from farming to raising horses,” said Burge, the current president of the CTBA, who knew Harris as a mentor and friend for more than 30 years.

Harris was a longtime, dedicated advocate for the agricultural industry, according to Oscar Gonzalez, the vice chairman of the California Horse Racing Board who previously served as assistant secretary of Agriculture during the Biden administration.

“Mr. Harris was just a phone call away,” he said. “When I was in Washington, D.C. … and I needed a point of reference or background information on an issue involving agriculture, or water or immigration, he was always somebody that had context in that background.”

One of Harris’ last advocacy efforts was just a couple of weeks ago, when he fought to reinstate live horse racing at the Big Fresno Fair, a proposal that was ultimately unsuccessful.

“We will never give up continuing this storied tradition of Fresno racing. Today’s story is not the end — we will come back again next year,” Harris said, according to the Business Journal.

Justin Oldfield, a thoroughbred breeder and a chairman of the CTBA, said that Harris wanted everyone in the industry to be successful, always offering mentorship and help to those who needed it.

“For as successful as a businessman as he was, you would have never have known it from the way he treated you,” Oldfield said. “John was an extremely humble, down-to-earth individual that treated everyone with respect, treated everyone like they had value.”

He said that he once went to a horse racing industry event honoring Harris with more than 3,000 attendees.

“I can’t even imagine how many people are gonna be at his funeral,” Oldfield said.

Harris is survived by his wife, Cookie, and others “whose lives were enriched by his strength of character and enduring compassion,” the statement from Harris Farms said.

Trade Minister Piyush Goyal’s remarks come before the deadline set by the White House for July 9 for nations to make their individual deals with the US.

India is ready to make trade deals in the national interest, but not just to meet deadlines, Piyush Goyal, minister of trade and industry, has said.

When asked if a deal could be reached by the July 9 deadline set by United States President Donald Trump for all countries to negotiate trade agreements, Goyal said on Friday that “National interest will always be supreme. Keeping that in mind, if a good deal can be made, then India is always ready to make a deal with developed countries.”

“India never does any trade deal on the basis of deadline or timeframe … we will accept it only when it is completely finalised and in the national interest,” Goyal told reporters.

On April 2, Trump threatened a range of tariffs for all US imports. For India, that was set at 26 percent. On April 9, he paused those tariffs for 90 days and set in place a rate of 10 percent in the interim while countries worked out their respective trade deals with Washington, DC. That deadline is set to expire July 9.

“Free trade agreements are possible only when there is two-way benefit; it should be a win-win agreement,” Goyal said.

Indian officials returned from Washington this week after an extended visit to iron out lingering concerns on both sides. Trade talks between India and the US have hit roadblocks over disagreements on import duties for car components, steel, and farm goods.

India is resisting opening up its agriculture and dairy sectors while asking for a favourable tariff for its goods entering the US compared with the ones available for countries like Vietnam and China.

Separately, India has proposed retaliatory duties against the US at the World Trade Organization, saying Washington’s 25 percent tariff on automobiles and some car parts would affect $2.89bn of India’s exports, according to an official notification.

At a minimalist matcha bar in Los Angeles, United States, powdered Japanese tea is prepared with precision, despite a global shortage driven by the bright green drink’s social media stardom.

Of the 25 types of matcha on the menu at Kettl Tea, which opened on Hollywood Boulevard this year, all but four were out of stock, according to the shop’s founder, Zach Mangan.

“One of the things we struggle with is telling customers that, unfortunately, we don’t have” what they want, he said.

With its deep grassy aroma, intense colour and pick-me-up effects, the popularity of matcha “has grown just exponentially over the last decade, but much more so in the last two to three years”, the 40-year-old explained.

It is now “a cultural touchpoint in the Western world” – found everywhere from ice-cream flavour boards to Starbucks.

This has caused matcha’s market to nearly double over a year, Mangan said.

“No matter what we try, there’s just not more to buy.”

In the Japanese city of Sayama, northwest of Tokyo, Masahiro Okutomi – the 15th generation to run his family’s tea production business – is overwhelmed by demand.

“I had to put on our website that we are not accepting any more matcha orders,” he said.

Producing the powder is an intensive process: the leaves, called “tencha”, are shaded for several weeks before harvest, to concentrate the taste and nutrients.

They are then carefully deveined by hand, dried and finely ground in a machine.

“It takes years of training” to make matcha properly, Okutomi said. “It’s a long-term endeavour requiring equipment, labour and investment.”

“I’m glad the world is taking an interest in our matcha … but in the short term, it’s almost a threat – we just can’t keep up,” he said.

The matcha boom has been propelled by online influencers like Andie Ella, who has more than 600,000 subscribers on YouTube and started her own brand of matcha products.

At the pastel-pink pop-up shop she opened in Tokyo’s hip Harajuku district, dozens of fans were excitedly waiting to take a photo with the 23-year-old Frenchwoman or buy her cans of strawberry or white chocolate-flavoured matcha.

“Matcha is visually very appealing,” said Ella.

To date, her matcha brand, produced in Japan’s rural Mie region, has sold 133,000 cans. Launched in November 2023, it now has eight employees.

“Demand has not stopped growing,” she said.

Last year, matcha accounted for more than half of the 8,798 tonnes of green tea exported from Japan, according to Japan’s Agriculture Ministry data – twice as much as 10 years ago.

Tokyo tea shop Jugetsudo, in the touristy former fish market area of Tsukiji, is trying to control its stock levels given the escalating demand.

“We don’t strictly impose purchase limits, but we sometimes refuse to sell large quantities to customers suspected of reselling,” said store manager Shigehito Nishikida.

“In the past two or three years, the craze has intensified. Customers now want to make matcha themselves, like they see on social media,” he added.

The global matcha market is estimated to be worth billions of dollars, but it could be hit by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Japanese products – currently 10 percent, with a rise to 24 percent in the cards.

Shortages and tariffs mean “we do have to raise prices. We don’t take it lightly”, said Mangan at Kettl Tea, though it has not dampened demand so far.

“Customers are saying, ‘I want matcha before it runs out’.”

Japan’s government is encouraging tea producers to farm on a larger scale to reduce costs.

But that risks sacrificing quality, and “in small rural areas, it’s almost impossible”, grower Okutomi said.

The number of tea plantations in Japan has fallen to a quarter of what it was 20 years ago, as farmers age and find it difficult to secure successors, he added.

“Training a new generation takes time… It can’t be improvised.”

Meerut, India – The last of the paint had begun to peel off Mohammad Mohsin’s house two years ago. The faded green, white and yellow paints on the walls still bore stains from last year’s monsoons.

A narrow, 3-foot-tall (0.9 metres) passage only possible to enter by crouching, led from the kitchen into a courtyard lined with buffalo dung, a rusting scooter, and a creaking cot in northern India’s Meerut district, about 100km (62 miles) from New Delhi.

“We will get the house painted when it’s finally wedding time,” Mohsin had said, leaning on an iron shovel, when Al Jazeera visited him in February earlier this year, referring to his sister Aman’s wedding plans.

But the date for the wedding came and went – without it being solemnised.

In 2023, Mohsin had borrowed roughly $1,440 under the Indian government’s Kisan Credit Card (KCC) scheme. “Kisan” means “farmer” in Hindi.

Launched in 1998, the KCC initiative is intended to modernise rural credit by providing accessible, short-term, low-interest credit to farmers for agricultural expenses, thereby replacing exploitative private moneylenders.

Issued against land holdings, the KCC operates like a revolving credit line, allowing farmers to borrow at the start of a crop cycle and repay after the harvest. With a modest interest rate of 4 percent annually, the scheme is among the most accessible financial instruments for millions of farmers.

But for years now, the KCC scheme has deviated from its original purpose. Farmers in rural India, where agriculture barely sustains families and where dowry in marriages is the norm, have used KCC loans as a convenient but dangerous alternative to family income.

The KCC money Mohsin borrowed in 2023 from a state-run bank’s local branch was not meant to sow sugarcane or buy fertiliser. He always meant to use it for his sister’s dowry: Aman’s prospective in-laws had demanded a Maruti Wagon-R car, a larger Mahindra Scorpio SUV, and hundreds of thousands of rupees in cash, when the marriage was planned.

KCC looks and can be used like a regular credit card, including for cash withdrawals. Clutching the family’s KCC card issued in his father Mohammad Kamil’s name, Mohsin withdrew the money from an ATM and went straight to a car dealer in Meerut to make the down payment for a Wagon R car.

In February 2025, Aman’s proposed marriage collapsed under a new set of dowry demands. By now, Mohsin was already in significant debt and had no money to sow crops, or invest in seeds or farm machinery.

He was also saddled with the car he had bought for the groom. He missed paying the monthly instalments a few times. When farmers fail to repay during a crop cycle, the interest rate jumps from 4 percent to 7 percent, which is what happened with Mohsin.

He now repays the loan in small instalments, but knows that he will be playing catchup for years. And the longer he delays his payments, the higher the risk that the loan could be classified as a non-performing asset (NPA), damaging his credit rating and future borrowing capacity.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Aman finished Fazilat, a seven-year course in Islamic theology offered by Darul Uloom, a prominent Muslim seminary in Deoband, about 80km (50 miles) from Meerut. The course is considered the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree from a regular college.

Aman’s family has also resumed its search for another groom. “I will get married when the right family agrees,” Aman told Al Jazeera.

But families do not just agree. They negotiate – and dowry is the currency. Tens of thousands of Indian women have been killed by their in-laws over dowry demands. In 2024 alone, India saw a dowry-related death every 30 hours, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau.

“In our part of the world, no dowry means no groom,” Aman’s 60-year-old mother, Amina Begum, told Al Jazeera, sitting in one of the corners of their sparse home.

Once a groom is finalised and the new dowry demands are negotiated, Mohsin will need cash again. And he may have to rely on the KCC scheme, again.

But a new KCC loan cannot be sanctioned until the previous one is fully repaid. The only way around this involves local middlemen who help farmers repay the interest on existing KCC loans, and get the principal renewed in the bank as a fresh loan. In exchange, these middlemen charge an interest rate as high as between 2 and 5 percent per day.

The result: If Mohsin gets another KCC loan sanctioned, he will need to use that to also repay the middlemen who helped him get it – perpetuating the cycle of indebtedness he is trapped in.

‘System breaks your dignity’

India’s farmers receive limited state support for unexpected or heavy personal expenses, such as hospital bills, children’s education, social obligations, or even weddings – often forcing them to rely on informal credit or agricultural loans meant for farming needs.

For instance, India’s public healthcare spending is among the lowest globally, consistently under 2.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). The limited resources put a significant strain on poor families in cases of medical emergencies.

As a result, across India’s agrarian belt, mainly in the north, the KCC scheme is being drained to plug life’s emergencies, exposing a deep rural distress.

A farmers’ union leader and a politburo member of the Communist Party of India, Vijoo Krishnan, says that in addition to weddings, farmers are increasingly using KCC loans for healthcare and education. This diversion of money leads to what Krishnan calls a “development debt trap”, where farmers are forced to take on loans just to meet basic survival needs, rather than to invest in productivity or growth.

A 2024 study published in The Pharma Innovation Journal, an Indian interdisciplinary publication that also features research in agriculture and rural development, found that only a fraction of KCC loans go towards agriculture. About 28 percent of the KCC-holding farmers who were respondents in the study said they used the fund for household needs, 22 percent for medical expenses, 14 percent for children’s education, and nearly 10 percent for marriage-related expenses.

“Farming barely pays enough to sustain a family,” said Mohammad Mehraj, the former head of Mohsin’s Muslim-majority village of Kaili Kapsadh. “If there’s a medical emergency or a wedding, the pressure is too much.”

The fear of repayment haunts farmers, rooted in the deep shame that failure brings. Everyone has heard the stories. “In a nearby village, a man in his forties was declared a defaulter. His name was read out in the village square. The shame was so unbearable that his wife moved back to her parents’ home,” Mohsin recalled. The man in question, he says, has not been seen since. No one knows if he fled, or if he is even alive.

Mohsin lives with the same fear. “The system doesn’t break down your door, it breaks your dignity,” he said. In small villages with close-knit communities, a bank official’s visit to the house to seek repayment of loans is seen as an embarrassment to be avoided at all costs.

“I’d rather starve than have a bank man knock on our door,” said Mohsin’s father, Kamil, who is in his 70s, his voice barely above a whisper. Around him, others nodded in agreement.

To escape shame, farmers like Mohsin rely on the middlemen who charge a steep interest rate to help them renew KCC loans without settling the principal.

Thomas Franco, a former general secretary of the All India Bank Officers’ Federation, said that while schemes like KCC have expanded credit access for farmers, they have also created a debt trap.

“At the harvest time, many farmers, already burdened with earlier debts, are forced to take additional loans. Loans intended for productivity often get diverted to meet immediate social obligations,” he told Al Jazeera.

By 2024, the Indian government’s official data shows that the KCC scheme had disbursed more than $120bn to farmers, a sharp rise from $51bn in 2014.

But those numbers mask a more complex reality in which banks become a part of the serial indebtedness crisis, while showcasing high numbers of loan disbursals, Franco said.

“The loans get renewed every year without actual repayment, and in the bank’s books, it shows as a fresh disbursal, even though the farmer does not get the actual funds. This exaggerates the success numbers,” he said.

Meanwhile, as India’s farmers find themselves buried in mountains of debt, many are taking their own lives.

In 2023, Maharashtra, India’s richest state, contributing about 13 percent to the country’s GDP, reported the highest number of farmer suicides – at 2,851. This year, Maharashtra’s Marathwada region is one of the worst hit. In the first three months of 2025 alone, the region recorded 269 suicides, marking a 32 percent increase from the same period in 2024.

In neighbouring Karnataka, between April 2023 and July 2024, 1,182 farmers died by suicide, primarily due to severe drought, crop loss and overwhelming debt. In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, farmer suicides rose by 42 percent in 2022, compared with the previous year. Similarly, Haryana, also in the north, reported 266 farm suicides in 2022, up 18 percent from 225 in 2021.

Critics argue that without deep structural reforms aimed at providing better public welfare systems for farmers and their families, such as affordable healthcare, quality education, and reforms to make farming profitable, schemes like the KCC will remain short-term solutions.

Jayati Ghosh, a leading development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that India’s agricultural credit system is fundamentally out of sync with how farming works.

“Crop loans are typically structured for a single season, but farmers often need to borrow well before sowing, and can only repay after harvesting and selling. Forcing repayment within that narrow window is unrealistic and harmful, especially when farmers lack the support to store crops and wait for better prices,” she said.

Ghosh, who co-authored a 2021 policy report for the Andhra Pradesh government and has studied agrarian distress for more than three decades, told Al Jazeera that key Indian financial institutions – the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the central bank and NABARD, the apex rural development bank – were to blame for treating agriculture like any other commercial enterprise.

“The failure lies with NABARD, the RBI and successive governments. Agricultural lending needs to be subsidised, decentralised and designed around real conditions in the field,” she said.

Schemes like the KCC, she said, are built on the flawed belief that cash alone can solve rural distress.

“We’ve built a credit system assuming farmers just need money. But without investment in irrigation, land security, local crop research, storage and market access, loans won’t solve the crisis,” she said.

‘I wonder if farming even has a future’

The KCC scheme has also been riddled with controversies, with multiple loan scams surfacing across India in recent years.

In Kaithal, a town in northern Haryana state, six farmers used forged documents to secure nearly $88,000 in loans, which ballooned to $110,000 before detection, due to accrued interest over time after the farmers failed to repay them.

In the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, agricultural dealer Mohammad Furkan, in collusion with a bank manager, created fake bills and ghost loans worth $1.2m in 2014, earning him a three-year sentence in March 2023.

In Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state where Meerut is located, three State Bank of India managers sanctioned about $792,000 in fraudulent KCC loans between 2014 and 2017, using forged land records and fake documents. The federal Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) booked them in January 2020 after an internal bank inquiry. The matter is still being probed.

Yet, bank officials say that despite years of scams and red flags, the KCC scheme continues to suffer from weak oversight.

“There’s no systemic check in place,” said a loan disbursal agent affiliated with the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), who has been processing KCC applications in rural Uttar Pradesh for more than a decade. He spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, as he is not authorised to speak to the media.

But even if the KCC was cleaned up and all scammers punished, it would not solve the problem, say some farmer leaders.

“This is not about debt. It’s about dignity,” said Dharmendra Malik, the national spokesperson of the Indian Farmers’ Union, a prominent group. “You can’t solve agrarian distress with easy loans. You need investment in irrigation, storage, education and guaranteed prices for the crops.”

Back in Kaili Kapsadh, Mohsin’s buffalo stood tethered in the courtyard, swatting flies with its tail. It is worth $960 and, in this village, that is a status symbol, akin to owning a vintage car in a wealthy urban suburb.

But prestige does not pay back loans. Mohsin has not been able to renew his family’s KCC loan, worth about $1,500, for more than two years. He is still repaying the last one.

Each harvest yields the same bitter crop for him: more bills and losses. Looking at his sugarcane fields, already browning under a harsh sun, he said: “Sometimes I wonder if farming even has a future.”

If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, these organisations may be able to help.

Staying cool just got a little more expensive this summer. The price of coconut oil, a key ingredient in ice cream, has soared in 2025. Looking ahead, further price gains are likely as demand continues to outpace supply.

At the end of May, the wholesale price for Philippine coconut oil delivered in Rotterdam, an industry benchmark, reached $2,800 a tonne, roughly twice as much as the year before.

Adverse weather in Indonesia and the Philippines, which together account for three-quarters of global coconut oil supplies, has negatively affected production. Ice cream prices, in turn, have risen.

According to an analysis by RIFT, a British business consultancy, United Kingdom supermarket ice lollies and cones shot up by 7.6 percent in May.

Due to its high melting point, coconut oil keeps industrially made ice cream solid for longer at room temperature. Crucially for food companies, it does so without affecting ice cream’s flavour and texture.

The global ice cream industry, worth $81bn in 2024, is now paying close attention to the market dynamics affecting coconut prices.

What role has the weather played?

Coconuts are found in the tropics, where they benefit from lots of rain and sunshine. But the El Nino weather pattern, which produces warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures across the Pacific, led to drier weather across Southeast Asia, particularly from June last year to October.

During that period, coconut farms suffered from extreme heat and droughts. Because coconuts take a year to grow, last year’s weather pattern has meant that palm trees have yielded less fruit than normal in 2025, reducing supply.

The United States Department of Agriculture expects that unfavourable weather conditions will see global coconut oil production fall to 3.6 million tonnes in 2024-2025, down 5 to 10 percent from the previous season.

Output is also likely to stay low in the 2025-2026 season, according to analysts.

Are biofuels to blame too?

In October, the Philippine government mandated blending larger amounts of coco methyl ester, a fatty derivative of coconut oil, with diesel to produce biodiesel.

Until recently, the impact of the coconut-for-diesel policy was limited. A blending target of 1 percent was introduced in 2007 and then 2 percent from 2009. But that changed last year, when Manila hiked the target to 3 percent.

The government announced a further jump to 4 percent by late 2025 and 5 percent by the end of 2026. A 1-percentage-point increase requires an extra 900 million coconuts for the biofuels market, raising demand and prices.

Last year, Philippine Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said: “Implementing the higher biofuels blend is a win-win solution as we promote economic growth, uphold environmental stewardship and strive for cleaner energy utilisation.”

If the Philippine government carries out its plan, it will use 4.5 billion coconuts to generate the 500 million litres of coco methyl ester necessary to meet the biodiesel target by 2026. That would amount to nearly one-third of the country’s annual crop of 15 billion coconuts.

For context, the US diverts about 40 percent of its annual corn crop into its bioethanol, a fuel made primarily from fermented cornstarch designed to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Are chocolates eating into coconut too?

In an effort to maintain profit margins and contain costs, increasing numbers of chocolate makers have started reformulating products with cocoa substitutes. One of those is coconut oil.

In December, the US ICE cocoa futures contract surged to a record $12,931 per tonne, up a staggering 177 percent from the same period the year before. Since then, prices have come down but continue to remain elevated.

The high price of cocoa – currently trending about $10,000 per tonne – continues to be supported by crop shortages and resilient consumer demand for cocoa-based products, especially chocolate.

Coconut oil is an established alternative for cocoa butter, particularly in vegan or dairy-free chocolate recipes. And even at its elevated price, coconut oil is still cheaper than cocoa.

“I expect many confectionery and chocolate makers to substitute cocoa for coconut oil in the near term,” Felipe Pohlmann Gonzaga, a Switzerland-based commodity trader, told Al Jazeera.

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have become another source of demand. In recent years, coconuts have been extolled by celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Kourtney Kardashian for their nutritional benefits.

Wellness Mama, a popular healthcare website, lists 101 uses for coconuts, including as a treatment for insomnia, heartburn, cuts, acne, haemorrhoids, mosquito bites and sunburn.

In the makeup and beauty market, coconut oil is seen as a natural and environmentally friendly alternative to palm oil. Here too, industrial consumption is rising.

While the health benefits of coconut oil continue to be questioned, this niche source of demand is rising. And although they wouldn’t have a big impact on their own, health-conscious buyers are entering an already tight market, lifting prices.

Can coconut production rise to meet the demand?

Despite coconut oil’s growing popularity, expanding production is a difficult task.

“Unlike with other crops, coconut farmers can’t simply add acres in response to higher prices,” Pohlmann Gonzaga says.

“It takes at least a year for the trees to reach maturity and production. Deforestation concerns and environmental laws also make expansion difficult,” he added.

Like palm fruit, coconuts grow on trees in tropical areas where forests would have to be removed to plant more trees.

“The European Union deforestation regulation, for instance, inhibits the destruction of biodiverse forests in order to import monoculture crops,” Pohlmann Gonzaga said.

He also pointed out that “we’re moving from El Nino to La Nina, which tends to bring more flooding in Southeast Asia. So planting, harvests and logistics will be impacted.”

With demand for coconuts likely to remain firm and supplies constrained, he added that he does not expect the prices to come down anytime soon.

“We can expect ice cream prices to be high this summer and stay high next year,” he said.

“For ice cream lovers out there, it may be time to start looking at fruit-based sorbet substitutes.”

People asked to avoid swarms of stinging insects after truck hauling 250 million bees rolls over near the Canadian border.

A truck carrying millions of honeybees has overturned in the northwestern United States, prompting emergency warnings from local authorities.

The truck, carrying approximately 31,751kg (70,000 pounds) of active beehives, overturned on Friday in Washington state’s Whatcom County – a rural area near the Canadian border, about 48km (30 miles) south of Vancouver.

“250 million bees are now loose,” the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) announced on its official social media page. “Avoid the area due to the potential of bee escaping and swarming.”

Authorities sealed off parts of the area and urged the public to keep a safe distance of at least 200 yards (182 metres) as officials and bee experts helped recover, restore and reset the hives, according to the sheriff’s office.

The goal, officials said, is to safely re-hive the bees and help them locate their queens, a process that could take up to 48 hours.

While some beekeepers focus solely on honey production, many others lease their hives to farmers who rely on bees to pollinate their crops. The loss of millions of bees, even temporarily, could threaten the productivity of nearby farms during the growing season.

“While there is no general health risk to the public, anyone who is allergic to bee stings or has concerns should check the State Department of Health webpage on bees and wasps,” WCSO said.

Honeybees are crucial to the food supply, pollinating more than 100 crops including nuts, vegetables, berries, citrus and melons. Bees and other pollinators have been declining for years, and experts blame insecticides, parasites, disease, climate change and lack of a diverse food supply.

In 2018, the United Nations General Assembly sponsored the first “World Bee Day” on May 20 to bring attention to the bees’ plight.

Beekeepers often transport millions of bees from one location to another because leaving them in one location for too long can deplete resources for other pollinators, The Seattle Times newspaper reported.

In 2015, 14 million bees escaped a truck north of Seattle on Interstate 5 and started stinging people, the newspaper reported at the time.

Dimapur, Mokokchung, Wokha, Chumoukedima and Kohima, India — With its high ceilings, soft lighting and brown and turquoise blue cushioned chairs, Juro Coffee House has the appearance of a chic European cafe.

Sitting right off India’s National Highway-2, which connects the northeastern states of Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, the cafe hosts a live roastery unit that was set up in January by the Nagaland state government.  Here, green coffee beans from 12 districts in Nagaland are roasted live, ground and served, from farm to cup.

On a typical day, the cafe gets about a hundred customers, sipping on coffee, with smoke breaks in between.

Those numbers aren’t big – but they’re a start.

For decades, an armed rebellion seeking the secession of Nagaland from India dominated the state’s political and economic landscape. Thousands have been killed in clashes between security forces and armed rebels in Nagaland since India’s independence, soon after which Naga separatists held a plebiscite in which nearly all votes were cast in favour of separating from the Indian union. India has never accepted that vote.

The state’s economy has depended on agriculture, with paddy, fruits like bananas and oranges and green leafy vegetables like mustard leaves, the main crops grown traditionally.

Now, a growing band of cafes, roasteries and farms across the state are looking to give Nagaland a new identity by promoting locally grown Arabica and Robusta coffee. Juro Coffee House is among them.

While coffee was first introduced to the state in 1981 by the Coffee Board of India, a body set up by the Indian government to promote coffee production, it only began to take off after 2014.

Helped by government policy changes and pushed by a set of young entrepreneurs, Nagaland today has almost 250 coffee farms spread across 10,700 hectares (26,400 acres) of land in 11 districts. About 9,500 farmers are engaged in coffee cultivation, according to the state government. The small state bordering Myanmar today boasts of eight roastery units, besides homegrown cafes mushrooming in major cities like Dimapur and Kohima, and interior districts like Mokokchung and Mon.

For Searon Yanthan, the founder of Juro Coffee House, the journey began with COVID-19, when the pandemic forced Naga youth studying or working in other parts of India or abroad to return home. But this became a blessing in disguise since they brought back value to the state, says Yanthan. “My father used to say, those were the days when we used to export people,” he told Al Jazeera. “Now it’s time to export our products and ideas, not the people.”

‘Back to the farm’

Like many kids his age, Yanthan left Nagaland for higher studies in 2010, first landing up in the southern city of Chennai for high school and then the northern state of Punjab for his undergraduate studies, before dropping out to study in Bangalore. “I studied commerce but the only subject I was good in was entrepreneurship,” said the 30-year-old founder, dressed in a pair of smart formal cotton pants and a baby pink polo neck shirt.

The pandemic hit just as he was about to graduate, and Yanthan left with no degree in hand. One day, he sneaked into a government vehicle from Dimapur during the COVID-19 lockdown – when only essential services like medical and government workers were allowed to move around – to return to his family farm estate, 112km (70 miles) from state capital Kohima, where his dad first started growing coffee in 2015.

He ended up spending seven months at the farm during lockdown and realised that coffee farmers didn’t know much about the quality of beans, which wasn’t surprising considering coffee is not a household beverage among Nagas and other ethnic communities in India’s northeast.

Yanthan, who launched Lithanro Coffee, the parent company behind Juro, in 2021, started visiting other farms, working with farmers on improving coffee quality and maintaining plantations. Once his own processing unit was set up, he began hosting other coffee farmers, offering them a manually brewed cup of their own produce.

Gradually, he built a relationship with 200 farmers from whom he sources beans today, besides the coffee grown on his farm.

Yanthan sees coffee as an opportunity for Nagaland’s youth to dream of economic prospects beyond jobs in the government — the only aspiration for millions of Naga families in a state where private-sector employment has historically been uncertain. “Every village you go to, parents are working day and night in the farms to make his son or daughter get a government job,” Yanthan told Al Jazeera.

Coffee, to him, could also serve as a vehicle to bring people together. “In this industry, it’s not only one person who can do this work, it has to be a community,” he said.

Brewing success

So what changed in 2015? Coffee buyers and roasters are unanimous in crediting the state government’s decision to hand over charge of coffee development to Nagaland’s Land Resources Department (LRD) that year. The state department implements schemes sponsored by the federal government and the state government, including those promoting coffee.

Unlike in the past, when Nagaland – part of a region that has historically had poor physical connectivity with the rest of India – also had no internet, coffee roasters, buyers and farmers could now build online links with the outside world. “[The] market was not like what it is today,” said Albert Ngullie, the director of the LRD.

The LRD builds nurseries and provides free saplings to farmers, besides supporting farm maintenance. Unlike before, the government is also investing in the post-harvest process by supplying coffee pulpers to farmers, setting up washing stations and curing units in a few districts and recently, supporting entrepreneurs with roastery units.

Among those to benefit is Lichan Humtsoe. He set up his company Ete (which means “ours” in the Lotha Naga dialect) in 2016 after quitting his pen-pushing job in the LRD and was the first in the state to source, serve and supply Naga specialty coffee. Today, Ete runs its own cafes, roasteries and a coffee laboratory, researching the chemical properties of indigenous fruits as flavour notes. Ete also has a coffee school in Nagaland (and a campus in the neighbouring state of Manipur) with a dedicated curriculum and training facilities to foster the next generation of coffee professionals.

Humtsoe said the past decade has shown that the private sector and government in Nagaland have complemented each other in promoting coffee.

Nagaland’s growing coffee story also coincides with an overall increase in India’s exports of coffee beans.

In 2024, India’s coffee exports surpassed $1bn for the first time, with production doubling compared with 2020-21. While more than 70 percent of India’s coffee comes from the southern state of Karnataka, the Coffee Board has been trying to expand cultivation in the Northeast.

Building a coffee culture in Nagaland is no easy feat, given that decades of unrest left the state in want of infrastructure and almost completely reliant on federal funding. Growing up in the 1990s, when military operations against alleged armed groups were frequent and security forces would often barge into homes, day or night, Humtsoe wanted nothing to do with India.

At one point, he stopped speaking Nagamese – a bridge dialect among the state’s 16 tribes and a creole version of the Indian language, Assamese. But he grew disillusioned with the political solution rooted in separatism that armed groups were seeking. And the irony of the state’s dependence on funds from New Delhi hit the now 39-year-old.

Coffee became his own path to self-determination.

“From 2016 onwards, I was more of, ‘How can I inspire India?’”

The quality challenge

Ngullie of the LRD insists that the coffee revolution brewing in Nagaland is also helping the state preserve its forests.

“We don’t do land clearing,” he said, in essence suggesting that coffee was helping the state’s agriculture transition from the traditional slash-and-burn techniques to agroforestry.

The LRD buys seed varieties from the Coffee Board for farmers, and growers make more money than before.

Limakumzak Walling, a 40-year-old farmer, recalled how his late father was one of the first to grow Arabica coffee in 1981 on a two-acre farm on their ancestral land in Mokokchung district’s Khar village. “During my father’s time, they used to cultivate it, but people didn’t find the market,” he said. “It was more of a burden than a bonus.”

Before the Nagaland government took charge of coffee development, the Coffee Board would buy produce from farmers and sell it to buyers or auction it in their headquarters in Bengaluru, Karnataka. But the payments, said Walling, would be made in instalments over a year, sometimes two. Since he took over the farm, and the state department became the nodal agency, payments are not only higher but paid upfront with buyers directly procuring from the farmers.

Still, profits aren’t huge. Walling makes less than 200,000 rupees per annum (roughly $2,300) and like most farmers, is still engaged in jhum cultivation, the traditional slash-and-burn method of farming practised by Indigenous tribes in northeastern hills. With erratic weather patterns and decreasing soil fertility in recent decades, intensified land use in jhum cultivation has been known to lead to further environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions, exacerbating climate change.

“Trees are drying up and so is the mountain spring water,” Walling told Al Jazeera, pointing at the evergreen woods where spring leaves were already wilting in March, well before the formal arrival of summer. “Infestation is also a major issue and we don’t use even organic fertilisers because we are scared of spoiling our land,” he added.

And though the state government has set up some washing stations and curing units, many more are needed for these facilities to be accessible to all farmers, said Walling, for them to sustain coffee as a viable crop and secure better prices. “Right now we don’t know the quality. We just harvest it,” he said.

Dipanjali Kemprai, a liaison officer who leads the Coffee Board of India operations in Nagaland, told Al Jazeera that the agency encourages farmers to grow coffee alongside horticultural crops like black pepper to supplement their income. “But intercropping still hasn’t fully taken off,” said Kemprai.

Meanwhile, despite the state’s efforts to promote sustainable agriculture, recent satellite data suggests that shifting cultivation, or jhum, may be rising again.

The future of Naga coffee

Though it is the seventh-largest producer of coffee, India is far behind export-heavy countries like Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Italy.

And while the Nagaland government maintains that exports have been steadily growing, entrepreneurs tell a different story. Vivito Yeptho, who co-owns Nagaland Coffee and became the state’s first certified barista in 2018, said that their last export of 15 metric tonnes (MT) was in 2019, to South Africa.

Still, there are other wins to boast of.

In 2024, the state registered its highest-ever production at 48 MT, per state department officials. Yeptho said Nagaland Coffee alone supplies 40 cafes across India, of which 12 are in the Northeast region. And Naga coffee is already making waves internationally, winning silver at the Aurora International Taste Challenge in South Africa in 2022 and then gold in 2023.

“To aim for export, we need to be at least producing 80-100 MT every year,” Yeptho told Al Jazeera.

But before aiming for mass production, entrepreneurs said they still have a long way to go in improving the quality of beans and their post-harvest processing.

With a washing mill and a curing unit in his farm, where he grows both Arabica and Robusta varieties, Yanthan’s Lithanro brand is the only farm-to-cup institution in the state. He believes farmers need to focus on better maintenance of their plantations, to begin with.

“Even today, the attitude is that the plants don’t need to be tended to during the summers and monsoon season before harvest (which starts by November),” Yanthan told Al Jazeera. “But the trees need to be constantly pruned to keep them within a certain height, weeding has to be done and the stems need to be maintained as well.”

Even as these challenges ground Naga farmers and entrepreneurs in reality, their dreams are soaring.

Humtsoe hopes for speciality coffee from Nagaland to soon be GI tagged, like varieties from Coorg, Chikmagalur, Araku Valley and Wayanad in southern India.

He wants good coffee from India to be associated with Nagas, not just Nagaland, he said.

“People of the land must become the brand”.

Farmers demonstrate against changes to legislation that would ease restrictions on pesticide and water use in farming.

French farmers have disrupted highway traffic around Paris and rallied in front of parliament to protest against amendments filed by opposition lawmakers to a bill that would loosen environmental regulations on farming.

Members of France’s leading farming union, the FNSEA, parked about 10 tractors outside the National Assembly on Monday to put pressure on MPs, who began debating the legislation in the afternoon.

The legislation, tabled by far-right MP Laurent Duplomb, proposes simplifying approvals for breeding facilities, loosening restrictions around water use to promote irrigation reservoirs and reauthorising a banned neonicotinoid pesticide used in sugar beet cultivation that environmentalists say is harmful to bees.

The proposed law is part of a wider trend in numerous European Union states to unwind environmental legislation as farmers grapple with rising costs and households struggle with the cost-of-living crisis.

More than 150 farmers from the Ile-de-France, Grand Est and Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur regions gathered peacefully in front of the National Assembly, drinking coffee and eating croissants, after blocking the main roads around the capital.

“This bill to lift the constraints on the farming profession is very important to us,” FNSEA Secretary-General Herve Lapie told the AFP news agency.

“What we are asking for is simply to be able to work in a European environment: a single market, a single set of rules. We’ve been fighting for this for 20 years. For once, there’s a bill along these lines. … We don’t have the patience to wait any longer.”

The FNSEA and its allies say the neonicotinoid pesticide acetamiprid, which has been prohibited in France since 2018 due to environmental and health concerns, should be authorised in France like it is across the EU because it is less toxic to wildlife than other neonicotinoids and stops crops from being ravaged by pests.

Environmental campaigners and some unions representing small-scale and organic farmers say the bill benefits the large-scale agriculture industry at the expense of independent operators.

President Emmanuel Macron’s opponents on the political left have proposed multiple amendments that the protesting farmers said threatened the bill.

“We’re asking the lawmakers, our lawmakers, to be serious and vote for it as it stands,” Julien Thierry, a grain farmer from the Yvelines department outside Paris, told The Associated Press news agency, criticising politicians from the Greens and left-wing France Unbowed (LFI).

Ecologists party MP Delphine Batho said the text of the bill is “Trump-inspired” while LFI MP Aurelie Trouve wrote in an article for the French daily Le Monde that it signified “a political capitulation, one that marks an ecological junction”.

FNSEA chief Arnaud Rousseau said protests would continue until Wednesday with farmers from the Centre-Val de Loire and Hauts-de-France regions expected to join their colleagues.

Protests are also expected in Brussels next week, targeting the EU’s environmental regulations and green policies.

Farmers across France and Europe won concessions last year after railing against cheap foreign competition and what they say are unnecessary regulations.