A recent shortage of rice on supermarket shelves in Japan has been pinned on the large number of tourists visiting the country as well as hot weather exacerbated by climate change. But farmers and agricultural analysts say there’s something else at play — a decades-old government program that pays farmers not to plant rice.
In Paraguay, the Indigenous Guaraní language is spoken as an official language alongside Spanish. Most Paraguayans speak Guaraní or a mixture of Spanish and Guaraní as their first language, whether they are of Indigenous descent or not.
Itaipu is one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the world. It provides electricity to 80 million people in Brazil and Paraguay. Not only is it huge, but it represents a unique model of cross-border energy cooperation.
The tiny landlocked South American country of Paraguay is one of the top soy producers on the planet. Soy is the country’s top export and it accounts for a major chunk of the country’s gross domestic product. But the soy explosion has wreaked havoc on Paraguay’s ecosystem and been a disaster for many small farmers whose farms have been inundated with pesticides from neighboring soy plantations.
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