Agriculture

Image: A village hosting internally displaced people in Mora, Cameroon, where Boko Haram fighters have conducted raids on livestock. The hunt for food appears to be pushing the militants deeper into Cameroon. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

nytimes.com - March 4th 2016 - Dionne Searcey

At first, the attack had all the hallmarks of a typical Boko Haram assault. Armed fighters stormed a town on the border with Nigeria, shooting every man they saw.

But this time, instead of burning homes and abducting hostages, the fighters gathered cows, goats and any kind of food they could round up, then fled with it all.

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Image: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was opened on Feb. 26, 2008. Carved into the Arctic permafrost and filled with samples of the world's most important seeds, it's a Noah's Ark of food crops to be used in the event of a global catastrophe. AFP/Getty Images

npr.org - September 23rd, 2015

A tall rectangular building juts out of a mountainside on a Norwegian island just 800 miles from the North Pole. Narrow and sharply edged, the facility cuts an intimidating figure against the barren Arctic background. But the gray building holds the key to the earth's biodiversity.

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The deadly virus overwhelmed Sierra Leone's key agricultural district, leaving thousands of farms, and their farmers, abandoned. The impact of that lost harvest has shaken the economy — and its food supply.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR  by Ryan Lenora Brown                    Aug. 16, 2015

Kailahun, Sierra Leone —...Today, the Ebola virus appears to be in retreat. Massive tented treatment centers built by international donors stand vacant and ghostly across the countryside, unnecessary to cope with the single-digit numbers of new cases recorded in recent weeks. Schools, closed for nearly nine months, have reopened. On weekend mornings, Freetown’s Atlantic Ocean beaches are once again thronged with joggers, pick-up soccer games, and informal aerobics classes, as fears fade of passing Ebola through physical contact.

Lahai Momoh, a buying agent for cacao in the eastern Sierra Leonean town of Kenema, seen here talking on his cellphone in August 2015, says 2014 was the worst year of his career due to the country's Ebola outbreak.