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The Blind Spot in the EU’s New Deforestation Regulations: Laws and Satellites Don’t Save Forests — People Do
The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) represents an ambitious legislative effort to protect our planet’s remaining forests. But Priscillia Moulin at MosaiX highlights a potential flaw in the regulations: To meet the EUDR's data requirements and prove that their supply chains are deforestation-free, major commodity buyers are turning to remote sensing and satellite AI — and if these technologies detect any tree-cover loss, the path of least resistance is often to permanently exclude that supplier. She argues that this creates the illusion of compliance while pushing vulnerable small farmers into the grey market, as satellite algorithms can identify changes in forest cover but cannot determine intent or causality, or assess other complex realities on the ground. She proposes three ways companies can comply with the EUDR without freezing smallholders out of the EU's premium, regulated markets.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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Analysis: When “Sustainable” Quietly Means “Without the Farmer”
We are watching the early industrialisation of food categories that have, for centuries, been grown by smallholders in the Global South. The sustainability story we tell about it is real. It is also incomplete in a way that matters.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Global
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Kenya’s Terrafy Launched to Build Parcel-Level Land Intelligence for Africa’s Rural Finance Markets
The platform combines field data, geospatial intelligence, verification workflows, and monitoring systems to create institution-ready land records, turning informal land into bankable, monitorable, monetisable assets.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Coast 4C Secures Funding to Scale Smallholder Seaweed Farming in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia produces the majority of the world’s carrageenan, a seaweed-derived ingredient used across food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, but supply remains fragmented across informal networks, limiting quality, consistency, and farmer income.
- Categories
- Environment, Investing
- Region
- South Asia
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2026 Coffee Barometer: Sustainability Cannot be Built on Permanently Cheap Coffee
The newly released 2026 Coffee Barometer exposes systemic flaws in the global coffee industry over the past 20 years.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Global
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Uganda: African Development Bank Group Approves $140 Million Programme to Expand Irrigation, Agro-Industrialisation, Jobs and Rural Incomes
The Uganda Multipurpose Water for Climate Resilient Irrigation Development and Agro-Industrialization Programme aims to overcome constraints to agricultural production and food insecurity across rural communities which depend heavily on rain fed agriculture.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Financing the Future: How Off-Balance-Sheet Special Purpose Vehicles Could Fund Africa’s Cleantech Transition
Across Africa, founders are tackling some of the world’s most difficult development challenges with cleantech solutions that require significant capital expenditure. But according to Julia Lawson-Johns, and Amar Inamdar at KawiSafi Ventures, beneath this wave of innovation lies a capital architecture that is still too shallow to enable the scale these firms now require. They argue that off-balance-sheet financing via special-purpose vehicles could provide cleantech enterprises with an alternative means of securing upfront liquidity to finance growth, and explore how these vehicles could power Africa’s cleantech transition.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Finance, Investing, Transportation
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Analysis: AI Offers Promise for Agriculture, but Smallholder Farmers Risk Being Left Behind
Precision tools lift yields in rich countries, but without finance, training and data rights, small farmers in poorer regions may miss out.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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