Amanda Little

Putin’s Ukraine War Has Three Lessons for Global Food Supplies

When 26,500 tons of corn sailed out of the port of Odesa this week — the first agricultural export from Ukraine since Russia’s invasion — many food security experts breathed a sigh of relief. The news, combined with the falling cost of wheat after global prices had nearly doubled, has investors and…

Hunger Is Getting Worse Since the Pandemic

Covid-19 made hunger a critical concern as millions of Americans lost their jobs, families were homebound and supply chains were disrupted. Now inflation and war are making it worse. Ensuring that people had enough food to feed their families wasn't a partisan issue during the pandemic, when…

Climate Change Is Already Shocking Our Food Chain

Stuart Woolf, a large almond and tomato producer, recently bulldozed 400 acres of almond orchards in central California — about 50,000 trees that under normal conditions would have produced $2.5 million of nuts every year for another decade. It’s a fraction of the 25,000 acres his family farms, but…

Sustainable Agriculture is Having Its Political Moment

The Biden administration deserves credit for being the first to recognize that food system reforms can go a long way toward solving the climate crisis. Yet for all its big-picture vision, some critical details are getting overlooked. A big one is a loophole within the USDA’s National Organic…

New Water Wars Are Coming to the American West

Water has been generating conflicts and controversies in the US for centuries, but the American West could be heading toward the most severe water shortages and skirmishes in the nation’s history. The latest clash broke out this month along California's border with Oregon in the Klamath River…

The World's Food Supply Has Never Been More Vulnerable

After a cyberattack crippled the world’s largest meat producer last week, JBS SA meat plants have begun to reopen across the globe. But the meat industry shouldn't be returning to business as usual — and for the security of our food supply, the Biden administration needs to make sure that it doesn…

The Future of Water Is Recycled Sewage

More than a few dystopian fantasies depict a future in which humanity’s water supply derives from recycled human waste. As Frank Herbert imagined it in his 1965 novel "Dune" — now a much-anticipated fall 2021 blockbuster — the humans inhabiting a dessicated, rainless planet must wear “stillsuits”—…