farmers

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 (UPI) — Farmers for Free Trade, a nonprofit group that advocates for lower tariffs and expanded global market access, wrapped up its “Motorcade for Trade” tour Tuesday in Washington to urge policymakers to ease trade tensions and support struggling producers.

Dozens of farmers joined at different points along the route to participate in town halls and farm stops, contributing to discussions on trade priorities, export markets and challenges.

The organization has prioritized five issues, including tariff reductions, exemptions for agricultural necessities, such as fertilizer and equipment, and a timely review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The caravan began Sept. 5 in Dorchester, Neb., with a cooperative event between farmers and Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb. The next three stops included sessions with Reps. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, and Jim Baird, R-Ind.

Although the Farmers for Free Trade team did not live in its RV, the group named it Ruth after driving more than 2,800 miles with it, spending many hours inside planning and being interviewed with their furry companion, a dog named Huckleberry.

“It’s really about getting information from farmers throughout the Midwest to understand what impact the administration’s trade and tariff policies have had on individuals,” said Brent Bible, an Indiana grain farmer. “It’s had an individual impact, not just on producers, but on communities throughout rural America,”

The caravan made 10 stops — in Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington.

“We hosted events throughout the Midwest — everything from meetings with members of Congress to farmer roundtables and tariff town halls,” said Brian Kuehl, the Farmers for Free Trade executive director.

Between the fourth and fifth stop, Kuehl said, it became increasingly difficult to set a schedule.

“Our No. 1 one priority was to meet with members of Congress, and a lot of times you wouldn’t know their schedule until a few days in advance. Then, in the middle of the tour, we had the government shutdown. A bunch of members we had events with canceled because they had to be in D.C.,” Kuehl said.

His team then pivoted to hosting listening sessions and trade talks with farmers, along with visiting the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin and various farms.

Despite some adjustments, Kuehl shared his team’s optimism for the tour.

“One of the things that’s so cool about agriculture is how diverse it is throughout the United States,” he said. “In the Midwest, you’re looking at soybean and corn farms. As we moved east, we saw more dairies and hog farms. We even visited a winery in Pennsylvania. Pretty much the trade disruptions are impacting them all negatively.”

In Indiana, Bible said, “Our input costs have gone up dramatically because of tariffs on imports — fertilizer, equipment, steel, aluminum. If we need a replacement part or a new tractor, all of those things are impacted. We’re getting squeezed at both ends, and when that happens, there’s nothing left in the middle.”

In Ohio, corn, soy and cattle farmer Chris Gibbs said, he’s felt that squeeze firsthand. After more than 40 years in agriculture, he described 2025 as “a cash flow and working capital crisis,” noting that he’s paying well above production costs for major crops.

“We’re about $200 per acre under the cost of production for corn and about $100 under for soybeans,” Gibbs said.

Because of the shutdown — now the longest in history — the U.S. Department of Agriculture “is essentially not functioning,” Gibbs said. “They normally release reporting information that the market relies on, but that hasn’t been occurring. Farmers are having to make major business decisions without the data we depend on.”

Gibbs added: “I’ve been farming almost 50 years, and I’m struggling, If I’m having to move money around just to stay afloat, what happens to the young farmers who don’t have savings yet? They’re hanging on by a thread.”

Farmers strategically planned the finale of their motorcade to be in Washington this week in alignment with the Supreme Court of the United States’ schedule. The high court plans to hear oral arguments Wednesday on whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act authorizes President Donald Trump to impose tariffs to the extent he has.

“We’re in a commodity business,” Bible said. “If we have a truly free, functioning market, we can be competitive. But that hasn’t been the case. Prices have been artificially manipulated by policy decisions and retaliation from other countries.”

Israeli army and settlers have carried out 158 attacks against olive pickers since the start of the current season

Israel has ordered the deportation of 32 foreign activists supporting olive-harvesting Palestinian farmers amid mounting Israeli army and settler attacks in the occupied West Bank two weeks into the harvesting season.

Israeli news outlet Israel Hayom reported that the activists were arrested last week near the town of Burin, in the Nablus Governorate, as they protested an Israeli general order stating that only those working on the harvest are allowed on the land during the harvesting period.

Israeli army and settlers have carried out 158 attacks against olive pickers since the start of the current season, according to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission.

The assaults included a range of violations, including beatings, mass arrests and shootings. At least 74 attacks targeted olive-growing lands, including 29 cases where trees and farmland were cut, bulldozed or uprooted. A total of 765 olive trees were destroyed.

The UN and rights groups have said Palestinian farmers face a heightened risk while gathering olives.

“Settler violence has skyrocketed in scale and frequency,” Ajith Sunghay, the head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Two weeks into the start of the 2025 harvest, we have already seen severe attacks by armed settlers against Palestinian men, women, children and foreign solidarity activists.”

The UN estimates that 80,000 to 100,000 Palestinian families rely on the olive harvest for their livelihoods, Sunghay said.

On Wednesday, a statement by Interior Minister Yariv Levin and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir stated that the activists would be deported over their alleged affiliation with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC).

A 99-year entry ban was imposed on the activists, the statement said, without specifying their identities, nationalities or where they would be deported to.

Settler violence against Palestinians has worsened since the start of the war in Gaza.

More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers since October 7, 2023, in the occupied West Bank, according to the United Nations, and thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced due to Israeli settler attacks, movement restrictions and home demolitions.

The UN says the first half of 2025 has seen 757 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage – a 13 percent increase compared with the same period last year.

On Sunday, a settler attack in the town of Turmus Aya was captured on camera and showed Israeli settlers descending on Palestinian olive harvesters and activists and beating them with clubs. One woman was taken to the hospital with serious injuries.

At least 36 people, including journalists, were injured earlier this month when settlers attacked Palestinian farmers harvesting olives in the Jabal Qamas area of Beita, beating them and setting fire to three vehicles.

More than 700,000 settlers live in 150 settlements and 128 outposts – both illegal under international law – dotting the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settlers are often armed and frequently accompanied or protected by Israeli soldiers.

In addition to destroying Palestinian property, they have carried out arson attacks and killed Palestinian residents.

Iraqi farmer Umm Ali has watched her poultry die as salinity levels in the country’s south have reached record highs, rendering already scarce water unfit for human consumption and killing livestock.

“We used to drink, wash and cook with water from the river, but now it’s hurting us,” said Umm Ali, 40, who lives in the once watery Al-Mashab marshes of southern Iraq’s Basra province.

This season alone, she said, brackish water has killed dozens of her ducks and 15 chickens.

“I cried and grieved, I felt as if all my hard work had been wasted,” said the widowed mother of three.

Iraq, a country heavily affected by climate change, has been ravaged for years by drought and low rainfall.

Declining freshwater flows have increased salt and pollution levels, particularly in the south, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers converge before spilling into the Gulf.

“We haven’t seen such high levels of salinity in 89 years,” Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources spokesman, Khaled Shamal, said.

Last month, salinity levels recorded in the central Basra province soared to almost 29,000 parts per million compared with 2,600ppm last year, according to a Water Ministry report.

Freshwater should contain less than 1,000ppm of dissolved salts, while ocean water salinity levels are about 35,000ppm, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The Tigris and the Euphrates converge at Basra’s Shatt al-Arab waterway “laden with pollutants accumulated along their course”, said Hasan al-Khateeb, an expert from Iraq’s University of Kufa.

In recent weeks, the Euphrates has seen its lowest water levels in decades, and Iraq’s artificial lake reserves are at their lowest in recent history.

Khateeb warned that the Shatt al-Arab’s water levels had plummeted and it was failing to hold back the seawater from the Gulf.

Farmer Zulaykha Hashem, 60, said the water in the area had become very brackish this year, adding that she must wait for the situation to improve to irrigate her crop of pomegranate trees, figs and berries.

According to the United Nations, almost a quarter of women in Basra and nearby provinces work in agriculture.

“We cannot even leave. Where would we go?” Hashem said, in a country where farmers facing drought and rising salinity often find themselves trapped in a cycle of water crisis.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration, which documents climate-induced displacement in Iraq, has warned that increased water salinity is destroying palm groves, citrus trees and other crops.

As of October last year, some 170,000 people had been displaced in central and southern Iraq due to climate-related factors, according to the agency.

Water scarcity pushed Maryam Salman, who is in her 30s, to leave nearby Missan province for Basra several years ago, hoping her buffalo could enjoy the Shatt al-Arab.

Rising salinity is not the only problem now, said Salman, a mother of three children.

“Water is not available … neither summer nor winter,” she said.

The Tigris and the Euphrates originate in Turkiye, and Iraqi authorities have repeatedly blamed dams across the border for significantly reducing their flows.

Iraq, a country with inefficient water management systems after decades of war and neglect, receives less than 35 percent of its allocated share of water from the two rivers, according to authorities.

Khateeb from the University of Kufa said, in addition to claiming its share of the rivers, Iraq must pursue desalination projects in the Shatt al-Arab.

In July, the government announced a desalination project in Basra with a capacity of 1 million cubic metres per day.

Local residents said the brackish water is also impacting fish stocks.

Hamdiyah Mehdi said her husband, who is a fisherman, returns home empty-handed more frequently.

She blamed the Shatt al-Arab’s “murky and salty water” for his short temper after long days without a catch, and for her children’s persistent rash.

“It has been tough,” said Mehdi, 52, noting the emotional toll on the family as well as on their health and livelihood.

“We take our frustrations out on each other.”

Published on
08/10/2025 – 18:10 GMT+2

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It’s a narrow win — but a win nonetheless — for the opponents of the controversial trade agreement reached with the Mercosur countries in December 2024.

A show of hands from European lawmakers on Wednesday saw 269 of them reject a paragraph of a resolution on the EU’s political strategy for Latin America that welcomed the conclusion of the Mercosur agreement — offering a preview of the showdown taking shape in the European Parliament over the controversial trade deal.

The Strasbourg vote was decided by just 10 votes, as 259 other MEPs voted in favour, reflecting a divided hemicycle over this controversial agreement.

“The European Parliament is once again expressing its scepticism about the trade agreement with Mercosur,” French MEP Pascal Canfin (Renew) wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

“The political signal is very clear: there are more MEPs who have profound doubts about the merits of this agreement than MEPs who want it adopted immediately.”

The European Commission, which had been at the helm during more than twenty years of negotiations for this agreement, submitted it for ratification to the Council and for its consent to the European Parliament on 3 September.

However, it remains uncertain whether the final step for the EU to conclude the agreement will proceed smoothly.

The deal, which liberalises trade between Mercosur countries — Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay — and the EU, reduces tariffs on many products, including some agricultural goods, raising concerns among European farmers about facing unfair competition from Latin American producers.

‘We will continue fighting’

In the Parliament, a group of lawmakers is preparing to submit a resolution to their colleagues calling for the EU Court of Justice to be seized to suspend the deal’s approval.

Opponents of the agreement also fear that Mercosur countries will not comply with European phytosanitary and environmental standards.

The agreement “abandons agriculture and livestock, harms the environment, fuels deforestation, rolls out the red carpet for extractive multinationals,” Spanish MEP Irene Montero (The Left), who prompted the vote on Wednesday, told Euronews.

“We will continue fighting to ensure that this agreement is not ratified and to stop the danger it poses to the environment and our primary sector.”

Supporters of the deal argue, on the other hand, that this text — which creates a free trade area of 700 million people — is necessary in the new global trade context to face Chinese competition in Mercosur countries and diversify trading partners, especially as the US is raising tariff barriers around its market.

The part of the resolution that was rejected welcomed the conclusion of the deal’s negotiations, highlighting “the fact that the agreement would be a real game changer for the relationship between the two regions.”

The deal “would be the largest trade agreement ever signed by the EU in terms of population, covering more than 700 million citizens, and the most significant in terms of its economic impact,” the resolution emphasised.

The resolution also stressed the “geopolitical value” of the deal, “as an essential tool for advancing the EU’s strategic interests in the current international context.”

The plenary vote on the Mercosur agreement itself has not yet been scheduled. A source familiar with the matter told Euronews that the European Parliament’s administration hopes it will be on the MEPs’ agenda by the end of the year.

A GHOST bridge that has stood unfinished for more than a decade between China and North Korea could finally be nearing completion.

The over pass stood abandoned for so long that farmers used the road to dry crops.

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The bridge – which was completely funded by China – was completed on the Chinese side in 2014, costing the nation $350 million.

China went all out on the project, developing a new city at its end of the road.

Despite Chinese productivity and complete financial aid on the project, the North Korean end remained untouched until 2019, leaving apartment complexes, stores and more lying vacant on the Chinese side.

The cash-strapped nation only needed to build about two miles of road to complete the inter-country link.

The incomplete over pass opened into a paddy field on North Korea’s side of the river, as neither side lifted a finger to complete the project, rendering the link between nations a bridge to nowhere for five more years.

Meanwhile, in downtown Dandong, on the Chinese side, buses and trucks have been forced to wait for hours to get across the original link between the two nations – the Old Friendship Bridge.

The Old Friendship Bridge was constructed in the late 1930s and was originally named the Sino-Korean Friendship bridge.

The US bombed the Friendship Bridge during the Korean War to stop Chinese forces from interfering and aiding North Korea.

The connecting road was patched up after fighting stopped, and still serves as a link between Beijing and Pyongyang to this day.

The narrow road and rail bridge connecting the downtown areas of Sinuiju and Dandong has been the busiest border port between the two nations over recent years, as bilateral trade has increased.

However, the new signs of construction on the New Yalu River Bridge signal that China and North Korea are preparing to boost trade.

North Korea embodied the full meaning of a hermit when it shut its doors to the outside world during the Covid pandemic.

Since the border closure eased in 2023, both nations have kept up appearances and increased trade and business exchanges.

Despite North Korea previously shutting its borders, the work on the bridge had largely been completed.

Construction on the Kim Jong Un’s side began in February 2020, but was halted the following August, after digging work took place across around 111 acres (45 hectares) of land.

Following the border closure, satellite imagery showed farmers making use of the unfrequented road by drying crops on the tar.

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Since hesitantly opening back up, the nation has also shown signs of strengthening its international relationships.

Despite this, uncertainty still bubbles below the surface, as North Korea has openly prioritised strengthening its relationship with Moscow.

Signalling the shift in international relations, tourism into the notoriously closed-off nation resumed with Russia, where it has not with China.

Fresh construction on the bridge is the latest signal of North Korea realigning to its closest neighbour.

Building has resumed on the North Korean side of the New Yalu River Bridge, marking the first movement on the development in five years.

New images from Planet Labs of the notoriously unopened bridge surfaced, showing evidence of new excavation.

Blue-roofed structures also popped up, believed to be related to long-term construction plans on the site.

NK News reported the size of the development could link it to a plan by Chinese company Five Continents International Development Corporation (FCIDC) to construct an economic park in North Korea’s Sinuiju region.

The exact location of this project, however, has not been confirmed.

The new construction on the bridge could be in preparation to connect to a planned large customs complex to match one built on the Chinese side of the bridge.

In 2018, FCIDC suggested that the Sinuiju “Heyuan” International Logistics and Trade City (SILTC) would be located close to a border connection point.

A spokesperson said the economic park would have: “its own customs and border inspection, where transit goods can directly enter … avoiding the congestion of Dandong-Sinuiju Port … and greatly improving cargo flow.”

Wang Ruoming, one of the lead project coordinators based in China, fuelled the rumours earlier in the year with a social media post hinted at the project’s revival.

He reposted a computer rendering of the economic park on his Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) profile in January, saying: “2025 is destined to be a year of good fortune”.

The New Yalu River Bridge features a four-lane road, while China’s sprawling new customs port appears ready to handle dozens of cargo trucks at a time. 

The border between North Korea and China runs in the direct centre of the river.

Oct. 5 (UPI) — Soybean farmers could be the recipients of between $10 billion and $14 billion in government aid after China’s unofficial embargo tanked sales.

China stopped buying soybeans after President Donald Trump levied tariffs on the country.

Soybean farmers are urging the president to reach a deal with China.

“China is the world’s largest soybean customer and typically our top export market,” said American Soybean Association president Caleb Ragland in a statement on Sept. 24 after China reportedly bought 20 shiploads of soybeans from Argentina when that country said it would waive all taxes on soybean exports.

“The U.S. has made zero sales to China in this new crop marketing year due to 20% retaliatory tariffs imposed by China in response to U.S. tariffs. This has allowed other exporters — Brazil and now Argentina — to capture our market at the direct expense of U.S. farmers. The frustration is overwhelming,” Ragland said.

China was responsible for about $12 billion in soybean sales in 2024, NBC reported.

“The soybean farmers of our country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying. We’ve made so much money on tariffs that we are going to take a small portion of that money and help our farmers,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

MAGNOLIA, Ky. — The leafy soybean plants reach Caleb Ragland’s thighs and are ripe for harvest, but the Kentucky farmer is deeply worried. He doesn’t know where he and others like him will sell their crop because China has stopped buying.

Beijing, which traditionally has snapped up at least a quarter of all soybeans grown in the U.S., is in effect boycotting them in retaliation for the high tariffs President Trump has imposed on Chinese goods and to strengthen its hand in negotiations over a new overall trade deal.

It has left American soybean farmers fretting over not only this year’s crop but the long-term viability of their businesses, built in part on China’s once-insatiable appetite for U.S. beans.

“This is a five-alarm fire for our industry,” said Ragland, who leads the American Soybean Assn. trade group.

The situation might even be enough to test farmers’ loyalty to Trump, although the president still enjoys strong support throughout rural America. If no deal is reached soon, farmers hope the government will come through with aid as it did during Trump’s first term, but they see that as only a temporary solution. Trump said Thursday he was considering an aid package.

U.S. and Chinese officials have held four rounds of trade talks between May and September, with another likely in the coming weeks. No progress on soybeans has been reported.

Getting closer to harvest, “I’m honestly getting worried that the time is running out,” said Jim Sutter, chief executive of the U.S. Soybean Export Council.

Political pressure is growing

After Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese goods, China responded with tariffs of its own, which now total up to 34% on U.S. soybeans. That makes soybeans from other countries cheaper.

China’s retaliatory tariffs also hit U.S. growers of sorghum, corn and cotton; and even geoduck divers have been affected. But soybeans stand out because of the crop’s outsize importance to U.S. agricultural exports. Soybeans are the top U.S. food export, accounting for about 14% of all farm goods sent overseas.

And China has been by far the largest foreign buyer. Last year, the U.S. exported nearly $24.5 billion worth of soybeans, and China accounted for more than $12.5 billion. That compared with $2.45 billion by the European Union, the second-largest buyer. This year, China hasn’t bought beans since May.

With U.S. farmers hurting, the Trump administration is under growing pressure to reach a deal with China. As talks drag on, Trump appears ready to help.

“We’re going to take some of the tariff money — relatively small amount, but a lot for the farmers — and we’re going to help the farmers out a little bit,” Trump said, during what he called a transition period.

The only way most farmers survived Trump’s trade war in his first term was with tens of billions of dollars in government payments. But that’s not what most farmers want.

What farmers expect from Trump

“The American farmer, especially myself included, we don’t want aid payments,” said Brian Warpup, 52, a fourth-generation farmer from Warren, Ind. “We want to work. We work the land, we harvest the land, the crop off the land. And the worst thing that we could ever want is a handout.”

Farmers are looking to Trump for a long-term solution.

“Overwhelmingly, farmers have been in President Trump’s corner,” said Ragland, the president of the soybean association. “And I think the message that our soybean farmers as a whole want to deliver is: ‘President Trump, we’ve had your back. We need you to have ours now.’”

He said farmers appreciate the willingness to provide some short-term relief, but what they ultimately need are strong, reliable markets. “Our priority remains seeing the United States secure lasting trade agreements — particularly with China — that allow farmers to sell their crops and build a sustainable future with long-term customers,” he said.

Ragland, 39, hopes his three sons will become the 10th generation to till his 4,500 acres in Magnolia, Ky. Unless something changes soon, he worries that thousands of farmers may not survive.

Coming into this year, many farmers were just hoping to break even because crop prices were weak while their costs had only increased. Trump’s tariffs, which helped make their crops uncompetitive around the world, drove prices down further. And tariffs on steel and fertilizer sent costs up even more.

Darin Johnson, president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Assn., said he still has faith in the Trump administration to reach a good trade deal with China.

“I think where the patience is probably wearing thin is the time,” said Johnson, a fourth-generation farmer. “I don’t think anybody thought that we were going to take this much time, because we were told 90 deals — 90 deals in 90 days.”

China’s negotiating strategy

The U.S. soybean industry grew in response to Chinese demand starting back in the 1990s, when China began its rapid economic rise and turned to foreign producers to help feed its people. Protein-rich soybeans are an essential part of the diet.

While China relies on domestic crops for steamed beans and tofu, it needs far more soybeans for oil extraction and animal feed. In 2024, China produced 20 million metric tons of soybeans, while importing more than 105 million metric tons.

American farmers have come to count on China as their biggest customer, and this has “given the Chinese a point of leverage,” Sutter said. By holding off on buying U.S. soybeans, China is seen as trying to leverage that purchasing power in the trade talks.

“I think that’s the strategy,” said Sutter of the U.S. Soybean Export Council. “I think that’s why China is targeting soybeans and other agricultural products, because they know that farmers have a strong lobby and farmers are important to the U.S. government.”

Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, didn’t answer specific questions on soybean purchases but urged the U.S. to work with Beijing.

“The essence of China-U.S. economic and trade cooperation is mutual benefit and win-win,” Liu said.

China turned to Brazil when Trump launched his first trade war in 2018. Last year, Brazilian beans accounted for more than 70% of China’s imports, while the U.S. share was down to 21%, World Bank data show. Argentina and other South American countries also are selling more to China, which has diversified to boost food security.

What American farmers are doing in response

U.S. farmers also are broadening their customer base, said Sutter, who recently traveled to Japan and Indonesia in search of new markets. Taiwan pledged to purchase $10 billion worth of soybeans, corn, wheat and beef in the next four years.

“There’s strong diversification efforts underway,” Sutter said. But “China is so big, it’s hard to replace them overnight.”

Farmers are working to boost consumption at home, too. Growth in biodiesel production has taken in some of the soybeans that were once exported. Other beans are crushed to produce soybean oil and soybean meal. The United Soybean Board is investing in research into the benefits of using soybeans to feed dairy cows and hogs.

But Iowa farmer Robb Ewoldt, a director with the Soybean Board, knows that such domestic uses are growing only gradually.

“We cannot replace a China in one shot,” Ewoldt said. “It’s not going to happen. We need to be realistic in that.”

Tang and Funk write for the Associated Press. Tang reported from Washington and Funk from Omaha. AP journalists Dylan Lovan in Magnolia, Obed Lamy in Warren and Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

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.

In Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, travel writer Jan Morris described the city’s many faces and “ambivalence”, maintaining that, unlike most other Italian cities, it has “no unmistakable cuisine”. But I had come to Trieste to experience, if not a cuisine, then a culinary tradition which, to me at least, does seem unmistakable: the osmiza scene of the surrounding countryside.

An osmiza (or osmize in the plural) is a Slovene term for a smallholding that produces wine in the Karst Plateau, a steep rocky ridge scattered with pine and a patchwork of vineyards that overlooks the Adriatic Sea. Visiting osmize is a centuries-old tradition in which these homesteads open their doors to the public for a fleeting period each year. Guests order their food and wine at a till inside – where a simply tiled bar, often set into local stone, might boast family photos, halogen lights and a chalkboard menu – before heading outside to feast at long Oktoberfest-style tables and benches.

“On the Italian side of the border, we just serve cold food,” Jacob Zidarich tells us, as he places down plates of pickled courgette, house-cured salumi, local cow’s milk cheese and a homemade sausage with mustard and grated horseradish. “But in Slovenia, you find cooked food.”

I am sitting with my partner on the hot terrace at Zidarich’s family home, looking out over a glittering Adriatic. To accompany our food, Zidarich pours two glasses of liquid gold vitovska, a white wine indigenous to this corner of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, the north-eastern Italian region that borders Slovenia, and which is home to the port city of Trieste.

To understand the tradition of visiting osmize is to grasp something of Trieste’s complex history and multifaceted cultural identity. The word derives from the Slovenian osem, meaning “eight”, a reference to a decree by 18th-century Holy Roman empress Maria Theresa that farmers in the Karst could sell their wares for eight consecutive days each year.

The result is an enduring tradition in which farmers only open for a short time each season, although almost all of them are now open for more than eight days a year. For this reason, no two osmiza-based itineraries are the same. Turn up at virtually any time of year and there will be osmize open – especially over the warmer months – all offering an affordable flavour of the Friulian countryside.

You’ll pay little more than €2-3 for a quarter-litre carafe of wine and €12-15 for an abundant platter of cold cuts, pickles and pillowy white bread. The tradition is particular to this tiny nook of Friuli, although as Zidarich indicated, it also exists – with differences – over the Slovenian border. Our focus is the Italian side where you can check which osmize are open (on the day of writing, there are 13) and at what time on the website osmize.com.

I base myself at the charming Hotel Albero Nascosto in the centre of Trieste for three nights and, with the intention of visiting as many of the osmize as possible, hire a car. I make it to four osmize, and realise quickly that Zidarich is something of an exception. Although his family had been making simple white and red wines for generations, it was his father, Benjamin, who transformed the farm into one of the most respected wine producers in the region. At other osmize we mostly drink wine from kegs. Some might describe these places as rustic, but even the table wines here have a clear style and moreish complexity to them.

Next up is Verginella Dean, an osmiza bustling with both locals and visitors and known for its peerless view of the Gulf of Trieste. From here the city’s Piazza Unità d’Italia is just visible, as is the brutalist Temple of Monte Grisa (which we visit afterwards). From an outdoor bar with two wine taps, I order a quarter of malvasia for two of us and a mixed platter of pork cuts, triangles of salty cheese and sun-dried tomatoes “for one” (it could feed four).

Osmize aren’t so much a cuisine as a gastronomic tradition, but I might have put to Jan Morris that they are emblematic of a place that, although bureaucratically Italian, has strong Slovenian influences. Zidarich’s vineyards straddle the border with most of the land being in Italy, but Slovenian is the language spoken at home, as with all the farmers I met.

“We don’t feel Italian here, we feel like we’re from Trieste,” says Theresa Sandalj, who owns a green coffee import business based in the city. The daughter of Trieste Slovenians, she tells me she grew up without any Italian traditions – “no lasagne, no ravioli” – and that when she met her Milanese husband she gave him a copy of Morris’s book “to explain what I was”.

Trieste, then, is at a crossroads between three great European cultures: Roman, Slavic and Austrian. But it doesn’t stop there – it’s a multi-faith, “inter-racial jumble”, as Morris had it, home to one of the largest synagogues in Europe alongside Greek and Serbian Orthodox churches. Its significant immigrant communities rub shoulders.

Besides osmize, there are plenty of reasons for hungry travellers to visit Trieste, from its quirky coffee culture complete with its own vocabulary (here an espresso is a nero, which could refer to a glass of red wine elsewhere in the region) to fresh fish and seafood at restaurants such as Trattoria Nerodiseppia and Le Barettine, which are both within spitting distance of the hotel.

We also loved Mimì e Cocotte, a centrally located seasonal restaurant that combines the humility of home-cooked food with a sense of occasion, and specialises in regional natural wines. With these we wash down courgette frittata and two plates of pasta – cacio e pepe, and cavatelli with tomatoes and stracciatella. Just outside Trieste, in the seaside village of Duino, Alla Dama Bianca has the fading charm of a 1970s hotspot. Here we eat razor clams and watch swans glide across the water as the sun sets.

Back in Trieste, on Via Giusto Muratti, we discover Pagna, an artisanal bakery and natural wine bar run by the Serbian pastry chef Pedja Kostic, who was drawn to Trieste from Belgrade via the US, by the wine scene. At Pagna I eat the almond croissant of my life: a perfect crisp pastry with a pillowy interior hugging not-too-much frangipane.

But it was for osmize that I came, where each one reflects the people behind it. At Šuc Erika, an osmiza in the middle of a farmyard, whose walls are adorned with a picture depicting ricotta production and felt-tip drawings by previous child guests, we order from a woman in a Metallica T-shirt. Afterwards, we sit under a pergola of ripening grapes. Rather magically, we are the only ones here, and sip our drinks (which, unusually, include a delicious cloudy beer brewed in-house) to a soundtrack of cattle lowing and stamping their hooves.

Unable to resist just one more before we leave, we head to Osmiza Boris in Medeazza, where Boris’s wife, Patricia, is behind the bar. She tells us about the salumi, wine vinegars, olive oil and honey they make on-site, while two teenage sons pad in and out of a courtyard in flip-flops. Boris was recommended to us by a waiter at La Dama Bianca as one of his favourites to visit before work, which gives you some indication of how widely enjoyed osmize are here – democratic and available to everybody, when they happen to be open.

The trip was provided by Promo Turismo FVG, the tourist board of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia. Doubles at Hotel Albero Nascosto from £120 B&B

Aminu Ishaku now earns a living as a commercial motorcyclist in Abuja.

His family has five hectares of land in Chadari, a farming village in Kano State’s Makoda Local Government Area, North West Nigeria, where they once planted maize, sorghum, and millet, crops that fed and earned them some money.

Until 2021, the land never failed them completely. Some years, it brought 10 bags of sorghum, seven of millet, and nine of maize. 

That year, Aminu borrowed ₦300,000 ($196) and walked into another season with faith. 

“There was rain,” said the 22-year-old. “Everything germinated beautifully. We even added manure to help them grow faster. We were expecting more because of how well they sprouted.”

But the rains stopped. And for two long months, nothing fell from the sky. The young crops dried, devastating the family. No irrigation system, no borehole, no motorised pump. Just the soil and their hopes.

When the rains eventually returned, they planted again. But the second harvest was nothing close to what they needed. 

“That was when I told my father I would go look for work,” Aminu said. 

It was his first time leaving Kano. With only ₦2,000 ($1.31) to cover transport, Aminu, who had just finished secondary school, travelled 12 hours by road to Abuja, arriving on the outskirts of Apo, a district in the Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC), where the city asphalt gives way to dust.

“That is where I settled,” he said.

Each year, he returns briefly during the planting season, hoping things will be different. But it has not been.

“In 2022, there was another drought,” he said. “Then, insects attacked the crops. They grew, but the insects destroyed them. The dry spell made them vulnerable.”

In late 2023, the problem worsened. 

There was flooding, said Aminu. Water swallowed homes and farmlands, and crops that survived the dry spell perished under the flood. 

“That caused food shortages,” he said. “Those whose crops did not drown had to harvest early.”

“We barely had enough to eat, let alone sell,” Aminu added. “That is why I stay in Abuja to work, to support the family.”

Aminu is one of the many young men fleeing the slow violence of environmental breakdown in Northern Nigeria. For some, like 30-year-old Abdulhamid Sulaiman, the journey began earlier. Abdulhamid left Danja, a farming town in Katsina State, in 2014, long before climate change became synonymous with rural poverty.

“Rain would disappear in the middle of the season,” he said. “The crops would grow weak. Then insects would come. Sometimes they ate the maize from inside.”

When he married, his father gave him four hectares of land, where he planted maize and tomatoes.

In good years, he harvested five to 10 bags of maize and earned up to ₦250,000 ($164) from tomatoes. But the rains changed. 

“The harvest could not last us till the following season,” he said. “And I did not have another job.”

Groundwater began to seep from the earth during the rainy season, soaking parts of his farm and stalling growth. 

He did not know why. 

“It just kept coming up, slowly, like it was rising from underneath,” he told me.

So, like Aminu, he left.

Idris Sale’s story is no different. In 2015, he left Kano for Abuja after repeated seasons of dwindling millet and cassava harvests. As food dwindled, he began searching for alternative survival means for his family.

These are not isolated stories. They are early signals of a broader shift.

A 2021 study warned that climate-induced migration could surge in states like Sokoto, Zamfara, and Katsina by 2050 under worsening environmental conditions. Northern Nigeria is already losing up to 350,000 hectares of arable land each year to desertification, a crisis that the United Nations estimates costs the country $5 billion annually in lost livelihoods.

On-the-ground reporting confirms this trend. In July, HumAngle showed how desertification and the shrinking of migration corridors are intensifying farmer-herder conflicts across the region. A 2022 investigation highlighted similar tensions in Yobe, while a 2024 story detailed how desertification continues to consume livelihoods in the Northeast. 

In the same month, Balarabe Abbas Lawal, the Minister of Environment, disclosed that 50 to 75 per cent of the land across Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, Yobe, and Zamfara States was now degraded, some of it permanently.

The ripple effects are devastating. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) ranks Nigeria as the country with the second-highest number of food-insecure people globally. 

In the first six months of 2025, nearly 31 million people faced acute hunger, another WFP report states. The burden falls disproportionately on children. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international non-governmental organisation working in conflict zones, reported that in Katsina alone, 652 children died of severe malnutrition in just six months.

The structural vulnerability is clear. Roughly 80 per cent of northern farmers are smallholders who grow over 90 per cent of the country’s food. Yet, most lack irrigation, climate-resilient seeds, or access to state support. As environmental shocks multiply, subsistence agriculture is collapsing beneath them.

Life on the fringes

Aminu now lives in Apo, Abuja. He came here chasing the stories he had heard from others back in Chadari, that the capital held promise for those willing to work. But like many climate migrants arriving from the north, he quickly realised that without formal education or connections, the only available work was in the city’s informal economy.

“When I first came, I worked at construction sites,” he recalled. 

He moved from one project to another, saving steadily until he could add to the little money he had left behind at home.

Eventually, he bought a motorcycle and started working as a commercial rider (an okada man), shuttling passengers along the busy Galadimawa-Garki-Apo corridor. 

“I was making about ₦15,000 [$9.80] daily,” he said.

Out of that, he regularly sent between ₦10,000 ($6.52) and ₦15,000 home weekly.

The outskirts of Abuja have become a magnet for climate migrating northern youths, who join the 93 per cent of employed Nigerians working in the informal sector.

But the city is not always welcoming.

“My first bike was seized by the VIO [Vehicle Inspection Officers],” Aminu alleged. “I had the papers, but I could not get it back.” 

With no income, he returned to construction work and farming during the rainy season. After a year, he scraped together enough to buy another motorcycle, this time at a discount. That one would be stolen. 

“Now I use a friend’s bike,” he said. “I ride during the day and pay him a return each evening.”

Despite better earnings, the stress wears on Aminu. 

“I am making more money here,” he said, “but I have more peace of mind back home.”

His frustrations echo a broader pattern of tension between informal workers and city authorities. Multiple reports have documented how commercial motorcycle riders in Abuja face routine harassment, extortion, and crackdowns, sometimes sparking violent clashes. In April, the Directorate of Road Traffic Services (DRTS) crushed over 600 impounded motorcycles, enforcing a Federal Capital Territory (FCT) regulation that prohibits their operation in designated areas.

Abdulhamid’s story took a different turn. When he first left Danja in Katsina, he arrived in Zuba, another edge community in the FCT, where a few acquaintances from home had already settled. 

“I spent five days looking for work,” he recalled. “When I couldn’t find anything, I returned home.”

But hardship forced him back. This time, he found work as a manual sand miner. 

“We go from stream to stream, in different communities, digging sand by hand,” he said. 

On a good day, he earns between ₦6,000 ($3.91) and ₦12,000 ($7.83). From that, about ₦2,100 ($1.37) goes into daily transport and meals. 

“I send at least ₦10,000 [$6.52] every two days to my family,” he said.

“The sand is heavy, and the places are hilly. It is dangerous climbing up and down with it,” Abdulhamid added.

Worse, he has no idea the work he does may be worsening the climate crisis he fled. 

Their only point of contact with the authorities is the farmers who own land near the riverbanks. 

“Nobody from the government has ever questioned us,” he said. 

“We just pay them [the farmers] ₦1,000 per truck of sand.”

But unregulated sand mining is accelerating erosion, destabilising riverbanks, and contributing to downstream flooding, especially in flood-prone areas like the FCT. HumAngle has documented how unchecked mining in Kano destroyed farmland and made seasonal floods deadlier. A similar report shows the issue in Ogun State, South West Nigeria. 

Abdulhamid shrugged. “The sand brings fast money, but we don’t know it’s part of why floods are worse.”

A 2022 UNEP study estimates that 50 billion tonnes of sand are extracted globally each year. In Nigeria, much of this is done illegally and manually, depleting aquifers, degrading river ecosystems, and displacing communities. Ironically, the work Abdulhamid now relies on contributes to the flooding and food shortages that pushed him out of Danja.

Idris Sale’s path was steadier. Since arriving in Abuja from Kano in 2015, he has moved between carpentry and construction labour. 

“On a good day, I make ₦10,000 [$6.52],” he said. 

He saves about ₦7,000 ($4.57) and sends up to ₦20,000 ($13.6) home weekly. 

“There are more job opportunities here,” he said. “I do not get that kind of money in Makoda.”

His main challenge is not the police or permits, but broken promises. 

“Sometimes, they don’t pay me at all,” he said. “Or they give less than we agreed. They just keep postponing it.”

Still, Idris believes the move has been worthwhile. 

“My life has changed,” he said. “Back home, farming was failing. There was no other way to earn.” 

Despite the setbacks, he sees his situation improving. But his shelter is now under threat. Since late 2023, Abuja’s city administration, under FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, has launched a sweeping demolition campaign, targeting informal settlements in what it calls a clean-up and security initiative. Dozens of communities have been levelled.

These demolished neighbourhoods used to shelter many climate immigrants.

According to UN-Habitat, a significant portion of Abuja’s population lives in informal settlements. They are not criminals or squatters, but part of the shadow workforce that keeps the city running. They dig its foundations, ferry its passengers, and haul its waste.

What policies ignore

Aminu has lived through the shifting seasons. He has felt the searing heat, watched the rains falter, and struggled through the floods. But he cannot explain them. 

“Maybe it is the cultivation that drives the rain,” he said. “Before you plant, there will be rain. But after you plant, it will seize.”

Abdulhamid, too, notices the changes. The dry spells have become harsher. But when asked what causes them, he admits, “I have no idea.” 

His family, like others in his community, now relies on a hand-dug well to water crops during dry periods. “An exhausting process with limited results,” he said.

Neither has access to irrigation tools or drought-resistant seeds. Climate change may not be in their vocabulary, but erratic rainfall, failed harvests, livelihood losses, and migration define their lives.

While Aminu and Abdulhamid have quietly adapted by digging wells or leaving home, Nigeria’s climate strategies have not. The country’s policy documents, from the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the National Adaptation Plan, emphasise mitigation: solar energy, reforestation, and emission cuts. But they say little about rural youths like Aminu and Abdulhamid, those forced to migrate not by armed conflict, but by empty fields and dead crops.

The National Adaptation Plan warns of climate risks to agriculture. But it says little about the migration of young people, or the pressure that climate displacement places on informal urban economies.

Meanwhile, data paints a clearer picture. Climate-related displacements across Africa have surged sixfold since 2009, reaching 6.3 million people in 2023. While floods remain the main driver, drought-related migration is accelerating. Nigeria alone recorded over 6 million people displaced by climate events between 2008 and 2021. Yet adaptation funds rarely follow them to the cities where they resettle.

In Abuja, planning documents acknowledge flood threats, but not the steady influx of rural migrants building lives on the fringes. There is no policy for them. No targeted relief. No plan to absorb or empower.

“We are mostly farmers in Chidari,” Aminu said. “And it is rainfed farming. We cannot afford to dig boreholes in our farms, and our politicians did not construct any for us.” 

He is not bitter, just resigned. “During the dry season, we are jobless. Some youths join politics as thugs. Others, like me, leave for the city.”

Aminu says he would return to farming in Chidari if he had access to irrigation tools, fertilisers, and pesticides. Otherwise, he sees himself remaining in Abuja’s informal economy or joining the military. “I have applied several times,” he said, “but ha’ve never been selected.”

Abdulhamid, too, says he would stay in his village if empowered with climate-smart farming tools. 

“I love my village,” he said. “But the hardship and responsibilities were what made me leave.” 

He wishes those in government would come and see what their policies overlook. 

“If I could talk to them, I would ask them to visit the villages during the rainy season. Let them see what we go through,” he said.

The federal government has paid California dairy farms more than $230 million to subsidize losses in milk production resulting from bird flu, records show, an amount that the dairy industry expects to climb higher as more claims for damages are processed.

The H5N1 bird flu has swept through more than 75% of California’s 1,000 dairy farms since August 2024, sickening cattle and leading to steep dropoffs in milk production.

Farmers were able to get relief under a U.S. Department of Agriculture program known as the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish Program, or ELAP. The program usually provides assistance for farmers impacted by wildfires, drought and flooding but was opened up for dairy farmers last year as bird flu began ravaging their cows.

U.S. Department of Agriculture records show that 644 payments were made to 359 California dairy farms between November 2024 and June 2025 totaling $231 million. The average per farm payment was about $645,000, and ranged from $2,058 to the Pereira Dairy Farm, in Visalia, to $4.4 million to Channel Islands Dairy Farm, in Corcoran.

Those payments are expected to go much higher, however, as more claims are submitted and processed. Many of the payments issued in May and June were for outbreaks in 2024, suggesting there are more to come.

The relief payments were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Farm Forward, a nonprofit group that advocates against factory farming. The group asserts that the subsidies help prop up industrial-scale dairy operations that perpetuate the spread of bird flu.

“These are mega industrial operations that are fueling an outbreak,” said Andrew deCoriolis, Farm Forward’s executive director. “Bird flu spreads in exactly the kinds of environments that we’re paying to preserve.”

Anja Raudabaugh, the chief executive of the industry’s largest state trade group, Western United Dairies, said the payments have “ensured our dairy communities and their workers stay employed and healthy. Until we get approval of a dairy cow vaccine, weathering this storm has only been possible with the assistance of the milk loss payments.”

Jonathan Cockroft, managing partner of Channel Islands Dairy Farms, said while the payments helped with the roughly 30% drop in milk production his farm experienced, his losses exceed the $4 million he received.

He said the virus caused cows to abort their pregnancies, and often prevented them from getting pregnant again. A dairy cow that doesn’t give birth doesn’t produce milk. In other cases, he said the udders were so scarred by the disease that the cows were unable to produce milk at levels prior to infection.

“There’s a whole other version I’m not sure the public understands, which is the huge impact on reproduction,” he said.

He also noted many animals died — especially when the outbreak first hit last fall, and the newness of it combined with the blazing heat of the Central Valley felled 10% to 15% of many California herds.

Joey Airoso, a dairy farmer in Tipton, received a $1.45-million subsidy for an outbreak at his farm last October.

He said the outbreak has cost him more than $2 million “just on milk income and that does not include the over $250,000 of extra care costs” required to treat cows with medicines, extra staffing and veterinary consultations.

And it doesn’t cover the cost of the cows that died — which can’t produce milk or be sold for meat. The average dairy cow costs about $3,500, Cockroft said.

Jay Van Rein, a spokesperson for California’s Department of Food and Agriculture, said the loss payments are “the most realistic way for producers to recover and to avoid huge disruptions in the food supply of these products.”

USDA officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but a former top USDA official who left the agency in January said it was important to provide dairy farmers relief once the agency identified H5N1 bird flu in a handful of Texas herds in March 2024. By then the disease had been spreading for weeks, if not months, making containment to one state impossible.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and we knew that we were going to need to support producers, and we knew that the quicker we could get some assistance out to them to help them test, the better off we were going to be, and the faster we’d be able to bring the infection under control,” he said.

Farm Forward’s DeCoriolis and others, however, say these programs perpetuate an agricultural industry designed around containing hundreds, if not thousands, of genetically similar animals into confined lots — veritable playgrounds for a novel virus. He also noted the federal relief programs don’t come with any strings attached, such as incentives for disease mitigation and/or biosecurity.

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Canada, said handing out subsidies to farms without trying to understand or investigate the practices they are using to quash the disease is a mistake.

“What are they doing on the farms to prevent reinfection?” she said.

The USDA payments were based on a per cow milk production losses over a four-week period. According to Farm Forward’s data, several farms received more than one subsidy. While roughly half received just one payment, 100 farms received two payments, 58 received three, 19 received four and two received six separate payments.

At one farm in Tulare County, four USDA payments were submitted once a month between November 2024 and February 2025. At another, payments stretched from December 2024 to May 2025.

Rasmussen said the multiple payments most likely stemmed depending on specific circumstances at the dairies involved.

Cockroft of the Channel Islands Dairy said he and other farmers have seen waves of reinfection and milk tests that remain positive for months on end. He said he knew of a farm that was in quarantine for nine months.

When herds are quarantined, animals are not allowed to be transferred on or off site. In California, a farm is under quarantine for 60 days after initial virus detection. It can’t move out of quarantine until tests show its milk is virus-free — for three weeks in a row.

Van Rein, the state agriculture spokesperson, said the average time under quarantine is 103 days. He said that of the 1,000 herds in California, 940 are not under quarantine; 715 of those had previously been infected and released from quarantine.

A quarantined farm can still sell milk, however, even if the milk tests positive. Pasteurization has been shown to kill the virus.

The relief payments are another sign of how the U.S. government supports the agricultural industry, which is considered by some to be vital to the national interest.

“We’ve decided politically that this is an industry that we want to support, that was hit by something that obviously wasn’t their fault, and we’re going to help them, because it was a disastrous thing that hit the industry,” said Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. “If we thought about these payments as we’re using our tax money to help somebody who’s in need, because their family is poor, that’s not the case.”

Late one fateful evening, Malam Muhammadu Sodangi of Tuwon Tsoro watched helplessly as armed raiders made off with the cattle, sheep, and goats belonging to his family. The livestock, including prized ploughing bulls and small ruminants raised by his wives, were their sole means of livelihood. Without the bulls, Malam Sodangi cannot farm, and his wives cannot trade.

“They came in the late evening. My livestock and those of Malam Hamidu and Abubakar Garba were gone, making life very difficult for us,” said the 62-year-old.

In northwestern Nigeria, a surge in livestock raids has been linked to terror groups, with the Lakurawa group, an affiliate of the Islamic State in the Sahel (IS-Sahel), being among the most notorious. 

Operating with stealth, Lakurawa conduct their attacks through door-to-door, farm-to-farm, and pen-to-pen raids, often under the pretext of collecting zakat (an Islamic form of almsgiving). This strategy has wreaked havoc on rural communities across Sokoto and Kebbi States, leaving farmers and pastoralists reeling from the loss of their herds and livelihoods. 

Farmers and herders have been brutalised and the local economy crippled, leaving residents in a desperate struggle for survival. Lakurawa’s use of Niger Republic as a fallback position after each raid has made the group both elusive and resilient.

Muhammadu and his neighbour, Malam Hamidu, told HumAngle that since November 8, 2024, rural communities across Augie and Arewa Local Government Areas (LGA) in Kebbi State have come under increasing threat from armed groups.

Augie shares borders with Silame and Gudu in Sokoto State, two LGAs known to harbour Lakurawa hideouts. To the east lies Arewa LGA, considered the group’s most active stronghold in Kebbi, and Niger Republic, whose porous frontier serves as a strategic entry and escape route for the militants.

“The porous border has left Augie’s rural communities dangerously exposed to repeated attacks. Residents are routinely subjected to livestock raids carried out by the Lakurawa militants,” said Hamidu.

Operating from entrenched strongholds in Tangaza, Silame, Gudu, and Arewa in Sokoto and Kebbi states, as well as the forested regions of neighbouring Niger Republic, the assailants launch sporadic incursions.

Rustled Herds, Havoc Funds

In northwestern states like Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, and Sokoto, armed groups engage in cattle rustling as a means to finance their operations. Multiple reports have confirmed this. 

While an analysis by ENACT–an organisation promoting knowledge on response to organised crime in Africa–indicates that non-state armed groups have long relied on cattle rustling as a primary revenue stream, an estimate by the local newspaper Vanguard places total annual criminal earnings from livestock theft, kidnapping for ransom, illegal gold mining, and extortion between ₦200 billion and ₦500 billion.

Livestock remains a key early driver of this illicit economy, and this has long been the case, not only in Nigeria’s North West, but also in Chad and Cameroon. A study conducted by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Chad and Cameroon revealed that “stolen cattle are sold to fund weapons and fighters.”

Academic research (via Tandfonline) has also stated that “cattle rustling offers a crucial channel for financing, especially for the procurement of arms and sustaining the loyalty of gang members, and this makes it indispensable to terrorism financing in the North West.”

Malam Hamidu of Tuwon Tsoro told HumAngle that Lakurawa’s activities in and around Augie, Arewa, Silame, Gudu, and Tangaza are reportedly funded by huge revenues generated through the sales of stolen herds in local markets.

Proceeds from these illicit transactions are believed to fund essential operational demands, including the procurement of firearms, compensation for local recruits, and the upkeep of remote hideouts scattered across forested areas in the North West and along the porous border regions of neighbouring Niger Republic.

A victim of livestock theft in Mera community, Augie, speaking on condition of anonymity, said:

“We learnt that whenever they steal our cows and sheep, they transport them to rural markets in Arewa and Bunza LGAs, where they’ve effectively taken control of local trade. The money from those sales is used to buy weapons, fuel, and food, and even to recruit more locals into their ranks.”

Communities shattered

While the cattle rustling crisis first emerged in Augie in 2021 with sporadic kidnappings and seizures of ploughing bulls by armed groups crossing over from Tangaza, Silame, and Gudu in Sokoto State, the situation has worsened significantly over the past eight months. 

Since November 8, 2024, attacks have intensified from the Lakurawa group through door-to-door raids. Entire communities have been devastated, and at least 27 communities have had their herds raided. 

The victims are mostly farmers and pastoralists, including women for whom livestock formed the household and economic backbone.

According to Babangida Augie and Lauwali Aliyu Sattazai, who have tracked the violence since a deadly raid on November 8, the losses are staggering.

“Apart from the Mera incident, which saw over 100 cows stolen, we estimate that about 2,000 cows and more than 1,500 other ruminants have been rustled in just eight months,” said Babangida Augie, with Aliyu Sattazai corroborating it. 

Herders from different ethnicities are affected. Abubakar Lamido, Secretary of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) in Kebbi State, said the Lakurawa indiscriminately target both Hausa and Fulani herders.

“They steal from both Hausa and Fulani communities. As at [sic] the time of the Mera incident alone, Lakurawa have seized 120 cows, 51 goats and numerous sheep from Fulani pastoralists in Augie, under the guise of collecting zakat,” Lamido stated.

“They arrived at my home around 6:30 p.m. with guns and took away 32 cows, 27 sheep and several goats, including those belonging to my wives. We were left with nothing, not even a horn,” said Sodangi.

Malam Hamidu and Abubakar Garba were pulling ploughs on their farms when the attackers struck.

“They met us in the field with guns. They took away my work bulls, which we rely on for ploughing. From my farm, they moved to Abubakar Garba’s farm, also stealing work bulls and several sheep. Without those animals, we cannot survive,” he said.

Beyond material losses 

For some, the consequence runs deeper than material losses. In Mera, where the November attack not only saw herds of cows carted away but also left 18 people dead, residents now live in constant fear.

Alhaji Bawa Mera was among those affected by the attack. He spoke of losing not only his 24 cattle and his son, Garba, who was tragically killed while pursuing the Lakurawa in a bid to recover the stolen herds, but also his peace of mind, shattered in the wake of the violence.

“Since that day, we have not known peace of mind,” he said. “Some of us no longer dare to farm our distant fields. We fear we might not return alive.”

Sodangi of Tuwon Tsoro told HumAngle that he had also been having sleepless nights for more than two weeks. “Since the day they took our herds, I’ve not trusted any unfamiliar face. I’ve been having sleepless nights, and this place no longer feels like home. I’m considering relocating to a safer community.”

Crippling rural economies

Academic studies show that livestock rustling dramatically undermined the socioeconomic well-being of agro-pastoral communities across the North West. Herders and farmers lost their means of livelihood. In many rural communities, such as in Katsina, Sokoto, and Zamfara, rustling led to a significant reduction in household income, deepening poverty.

In Kebbi, it appears to be part of a deliberate strategy to destabilise livelihoods. Victims and community members believe the sustained raids by armed groups are intended to cripple the rural economy and instil fear across farming and herding communities. 

With each attack, farmers and pastoralists are forced to abandon their traditional ways of life. Many have fled their villages and farmlands out of fear, seeking safety in communities across Nigeria and the Niger Republic. Some herders, seeing their livestock as a magnet for attacks, have sold them off, surrendering their livelihoods so they can live.

“Keeping animals now is like inviting death,” one herder, who requested anonymity, revealed. “It is not worth the risk.”

“It is a calculated plan to destroy our economy,” said Abubakar. 

The increasing collapse in livestock ownership is fuelling a growing crisis: unemployment among rural youth, many of whom are now vulnerable to recruitment by the very armed groups tormenting their communities.

The economic toll has been heavy on both men and women.

“My wives have lost their only source of income,” said Sodangi. “Their sheep and goats were stolen. They can no longer trade or support the family.”

Communities respond

Many of these affected areas have developed some defence strategies. In Zamfara and Katsina states, there are community volunteer security groups called Yan-Sakai, composed of local hunters, ex-servicemen, and herders. The groups patrol forests, roads, and grazing corridors where rustlers often strike.

In the face of incursions and raids by Lakurawa, the people of Augie are refusing to fold their arms. 

With little more than grit, local knowledge, and a commitment to protecting their way of life, communities are stepping up where institutions fall short. 

The heart of this resistance lies in grassroots security efforts. Youth vigilantes, mostly volunteers, have taken up the task of guarding their villages, often confronting well-armed raiders with sticks, locally made weapons, and sheer courage.

“When our cattle were taken in Mera, Yan-Sakai mobilised immediately,” said a member of Yan-Sakai who asked not to be named for safety reasons. “We went after them, not because we had better weapons, but because we had no choice,” he added.

Fear and uncertainty

While pastoralists are offloading their herds, farmers face a difficult decision: whether to keep their work bulls or sell them to purchase ploughing machines, known as power tillers, in the hope that machines may be spared where animals are not.

Tensions escalated when reports emerged from some communities in Sokoto and Garu village, near the Augie border with Niger Republic, that certain directives were being given by the terror groups to farmers.

“Farmers are being threatened for attempting to replace their work bulls with ploughing machines,” said Abubakar. “The implication is clear: retain livestock that can easily be stolen or risk losing the right to farm entirely.”

Sodangi expressed growing concern: “We’ve heard that the Lakurawa have warned people [in other areas] not to switch from work bulls to power tillers. They don’t want machines in the fields, they want bulls, so they can come and take them. That’s why panic is spreading, and many of us are now considering relocation to safer communities. I am considering moving to Tibiri, in the Niger Republic, to stay with my relatives.” 

While the local response has been swift and defiant, official responses are not as efficient.

“They only come after the attacks,” said Babangida Augie. “We have noticed a pattern of Lakurawa scouting for villages first, then returning a few days later to strike. This happened in Tungar Tudu, Sattazai, Bagurar More, and now, they have visited Illelar and Zagi once. We fear they will be next,” Babangida added.

Call for proactive security

The stolen herds are not just livestock, but a symbol of broken security, broken lives, and broken rural economies in the North West. The trend reflects the growing humanitarian fallout of insecurity in Nigeria’s northwestern frontier.

“We are not just losing cows,” said Sodangi. “We are losing our futures, our means of survival, our confidence in government, our belief that tomorrow will be better.”

There is a growing call for the Nigerian state to ensure the presence of security personnel in rural areas of the North West, fully equipped with modern tools, training, and welfare support needed to confront the Lakurawa threat effectively. 

Without such measures, human lives in the rural communities in the zone and beyond may continue to buckle under the weight of a crisis that shows no signs of abating.

There were so many mines on Larisa Sysenko’s small farm in Kamyanka in eastern Ukraine after the Russians withdrew that she and her husband Viktor began demining it themselves — with rakes.

Along the front line at Korobchyne near Kharkiv, Mykola Pereverzev started clearing fields with his farm machinery.

“My tractor was blown up three times. We had to get a new one. It was completely unrepairable. But we ended up clearing 200 hectares of minefields in two months,” he said.

“Absolutely everyone demines by themselves,” declared Igor Kniazev, who farms half an hour from Larisa’s.

Ukraine is one of the world’s renowned breadbaskets, its black earth so rich and fertile you want to scoop it up and inhale its aroma.

But that dark soil is now almost certainly the most heavily mined on the planet, experts told the AFP news agency.

More than three years of relentless artillery barrages —  the most intense since World War II — have scattered it with millions of tonnes of ordnance, much still unexploded.

Experts estimate one in 10 shells fail to detonate, with up to a third of North Korean munitions fired by Russia remaining intact, their high explosives deteriorating where they fall.

Yet the drones revolutionising warfare in Ukraine may also transform the demining process.

Ukraine and many of the 80-plus nongovernmental organisations and commercial groups operating there already employ drones to accelerate the enormous task of land clearance, supported by substantial international funding.

Despite the dangers and official warnings, farmers themselves often take the initiative, like the Sysenkos.

They were among the first to return to devastated Kamyanka, which Russian forces occupied from March to September 2022.

Two weeks after Ukrainian soldiers recaptured the village, Larisa and Viktor returned to find their house uninhabitable, without utilities.

After waiting out the winter, they returned in March 2023 to take stock and begin cleanup, first removing the gallows Russian soldiers had erected in their yard.

Then they started demining, with rakes. “There were many mines, and our guys in the Ukrainian army couldn’t prioritise us. So we slowly demined ourselves with rakes,” Larisa said cheerfully.

Boxes of Russian artillery shells — 152mm howitzer shells specifically, Viktor noted with a mischievous smile — still sit stacked before their house.

“I served in Soviet artillery, so I know something about them,” the 56-year-old added.

That summer, Swiss FSD Foundation deminers discovered 54 mines in the Sysenkos’ field.

The deminers instructed the Sysenkos “to evacuate the house”.

“Their protocols prohibited us from staying. So we complied. The demining machine traversed the area repeatedly, triggering numerous explosions.”

While Kamyanka remains largely a ghost village with gutted homes, about 40 people have returned — far below its pre-war population of 1,200.

Many fear the mines, and several residents have stepped on them.

Yet farmers cannot afford to wait and have resumed working the vast fields of Ukraine’s renowned “chernozem” soil, famous for its intense blackness and fertility.

“Looking at surrounding villages, farmers have modified tractors themselves for clearance and are already planting wheat and sunflowers,” Viktor added.

MADISON, Wis. — A Wisconsin dairy farmer alleged in a federal lawsuit filed Monday that the Trump administration is illegally denying financial assistance to white farmers by continuing programs that favor minorities.

The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed the lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in federal court in Wisconsin on behalf of a white dairy farmer, Adam Faust.

Faust was among several farmers who successfully sued the Biden administration in 2021 for race discrimination in the USDA’s Farmer Loan Forgiveness Plan.

The new lawsuit alleges the government has continued to implement diversity, equity and inclusion programs that were instituted under former President Biden. The Wisconsin Institute wrote to the USDA in April warning of legal action, and six Republican Wisconsin congressmen called on the USDA to investigate and end the programs.

“The USDA should honor the President’s promise to the American people to end racial discrimination in the federal government,” Faust said in a written statement. “After being ignored by a federal agency that’s meant to support agriculture, I hope my lawsuit brings answers, accountability, and results from USDA.”

Trump administration spokesperson Anna Kelly did not immediately respond to an email Monday seeking comment.

The lawsuit contends that Faust is one of 2 million white male American farmers who are subject to discriminatory race-based policies at the USDA.

The lawsuit names three USDA programs and policies it says put white men at a disadvantage and violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment by discriminating based on race and sex.

Faust participates in one program designed to offset the gap between milk prices and the cost of feed, but the lawsuit alleges he is charged a $100 administrative fee that minority and female farmers do not have to pay.

Faust also participates in a USDA program that guarantees 90% of the value of loans to white farmers, but 95% to women and racial minorities. That puts Faust at a disadvantage, the lawsuit alleges.

Faust has also begun work on a new manure storage system that could qualify for reimbursement under a USDA environmental conservation program, but 75% of his costs are eligible while 90% of the costs of minority farmers qualify, the lawsuit contends.

A federal court judge ruled in a similar 2021 case that granting loan forgiveness only to “socially disadvantaged farmers” amounts to unconstitutional race discrimination. The Biden administration suspended the program and Congress repealed it in 2022.

The Wisconsin Institute has filed dozens of such lawsuits in 25 states attacking DEI programs in government. In its April letter to the USDA, the law firm that has a long history of representing Republicans said it didn’t want to sue “but there is no excuse for this continued discrimination.”

Trump has been aggressive in trying to end the government’s DEI efforts to fulfill a campaign promise and bring about a profound cultural shift across the U.S. from promoting diversity to an exclusive focus on merit.

Bauer writes for the Associated Press.

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.

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.

WASHINGTON — President Trump used a White House meeting to forcefully confront South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, accusing the country of failing to address Trump’s baseless claim of the systematic killing of white farmers.

Trump even dimmed the lights of the Oval Office to play a video of a far-left politician chanting a song that includes the lyrics “kill the farmer.” He also leafed through news articles to underscore his point, saying the country’s white farmers have faced “death, death, death, horrible death.”

Trump had already cut all U.S. assistance to South Africa and welcomed several dozen white South African farmers to the U.S. as refugees as he pressed the case that a “genocide” is underway in the country.

The U.S. president has launched a series of accusations at South Africa’s Black-led government, claiming it is seizing land from white farmers, enforcing anti-white policies and pursuing an anti-American foreign policy.

Experts in South Africa say there is no evidence of white people being targeted for their race, although farmers of all races are victims of violent home invasions in a country that suffers from a very high crime rate.

“People are fleeing South Africa for their own safety,” Trump said. “Their land is being confiscated and in many cases they’re being killed.”

Ramaphosa pushed back against Trump’s accusation. The South African leader had sought to use the meeting to set the record straight and salvage his country’s relationship with the United States. The bilateral relationship is at its lowest point since South Africa enforced its apartheid system of racial segregation, which ended in 1994.

“We are completely opposed to that,” Ramaphosa said of the behavior alleged by Trump in their exchange. He added, “that is not government policy” and “our government policy is completely, completely against what he was saying.”

Trump was unmoved.

“When they take the land, they kill the white farmer,” he said.

At the start of the Oval Office meeting, Trump described the South African president as a “truly respected man in many, many circles.” He added: “And in some circles he’s considered a little controversial.”

Ramaphosa chimed in, playfully jabbing back at a U.S. president who is no stranger to controversy. “We’re all like that,” Ramaphosa said.

Trump issued an executive order in February cutting all funding to South Africa over some of its domestic and foreign policies. The order criticized the South African government on multiple fronts, saying it is pursuing anti-white policies at home and supporting “bad actors” in the world like the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran.

Trump has falsely accused the South African government of a rights violation against white Afrikaner farmers by seizing their land through a new expropriation law. No land has been seized, and the South African government has pushed back, saying U.S. criticism is driven by misinformation.

The Trump administration’s references to the Afrikaner people — who are descendants of Dutch and other European settlers — have also elevated previous claims made by Trump’s South African-born advisor Elon Musk and some conservative U.S. commentators that the South African government is allowing attacks on white farmers in what amounts to a genocide.

That has been disputed by experts in South Africa, who say there is no evidence of white people being targeted, although farmers of all races are victims of violent home invasions in a country that suffers from a very high crime rate.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday said Trump remains ready to “reset” relations with South Africa, but noted that the administration’s concerns about South African policies cut even deeper then the concerns about white farmers.

South Africa has also angered the Trump White House over its move to bring charges at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Ramaphosa has also faced scrutiny in Washington for his past connections to MTN Group, Iran’s second-largest telecom provider. It owns nearly half of Irancell, a joint venture linked with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Ramaphosa served as board chair of MTN from 2002 to 2013.

“When one country is consistently unaligned with the United States on issue after issue after issue after issue, now you become — you have to make conclusions about it,” Rubio told Senate Foreign Relation Committee members at a Tuesday hearing.

With the deep differences, Ramaphosa tried mightily to avoid the sort of contentious engagement that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky experienced during his late February Oval Office visit, when the Ukrainian leader found himself being berated by Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That disastrous meeting ended with White House officials asking Zelensky and his delegation to leave the White House grounds.

The South African president’s delegation included golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen in his delegation, a gesture to the golf-obsessed U.S. president. Ramaphosa brought Trump a massive book about South Africa’s golf courses. He even told Trump that he’s been working on his golf game, seeming to angle for an invitation to the links with the president.

Luxury goods tycoon and Afrikaner Johann Rupert was also in the delegation to help ease Trump’s concerns that land was being seized from white farmers.

Ramaphosa turned to the golfers, Rupert and others to try to push back gently on Trump and make the case that the issue of crime in South Africa is multidimensional problem.

At one point, Ramaphosa called on Zingiswa Losi, the president of a group of South African trade unions, who told Trump it is true that South Africa is a “violent nation for a number of reasons.” But she told him it was important to understand that Black men and women in rural areas were also being targeted in heinous crimes.

“The problem in South Africa, it is not necessarily about race, but it’s about crime,” Losi said. “We are here to say how do we, both nations, work together to reset, to really talk about investment but also help … to really address the levels of crime we have in our country.”

Musk also attended Wednesday’s talks. He has been at the forefront of the criticism of his homeland, casting its affirmative action laws as racist against white people.

Musk has said on social media that his Starlink satellite internet service isn’t able to get a license to operate in South Africa because he is not Black.

South African authorities say Starlink hasn’t formally applied. It can, but it would be bound by affirmative action laws in the communications sector that require foreign companies to allow 30% of their South African subsidiaries to be owned by shareholders who are Black or from other racial groups disadvantaged under apartheid.

The South African government says its long-standing affirmative action laws are a cornerstone of its efforts to right the injustices of the white minority rule of apartheid, which denied opportunities to Black people and other racial groups.

Imray and Madhani write for the Associated Press. Imray reported from Johannesburg. AP writers Seung Min Kim, Chris Megerian and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.