There might be a 5,000-mile wide belt of it clogging up the Atlantic Ocean and threatening to wash up on beaches in Florida and Mexico, but seaweed, at least in other coastal regions, could help shore up economic growth. While hoteliers, beach-goers and fishing crews in the Americas fret about the encroaching Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, estimated to be the world’s biggest seaweed bloom, coastal regions in Africa and Asia could capitalise on a wave of demand for “nutrient-rich seaweed products,” according to researchers in the US. Harvested as a food crop for thousands of years in countries as far-flung as Japan, Indonesia and Ireland, seaweed has also been deployed as a fertiliser and more recently has been in demand as an ingredient in cosmetics.
DUBLIN Less well-off countries are facing bigger food bills, according to the United Nations, which on Thursday said the world's food imports are set to increase by 12 per cent this year to 1.72 trillion dollars, equivalent to Russia's gross domestic product. In its biannual report on global food markets, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated consumer prices for proteins and calories to have increased by between 20 and 34 per cent compared to a year ago, risking "deteriorating quantitative and qualitative dietary trends in vulnerable countries" where food can account for up to half of household spending. The FAO last week estimated an overall annual jump in food costs of around 40 per cent, due to "a surge in prices for oils, sugar and cereals."
In what could be a further sign of job losses to come due to the rise in AI-powered robotics, a Dutch-Swiss team has come up with a tomato-picking robot with the help of ChatGPT. Researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and the Lausanne-based technical university EPFL said the artificial intelligence chatbot offered a range of ideas and suggestions during the process, including what kind of robot they should go about putting together. “We wanted ChatGPT to design not just a robot, but one that is actually useful,” said Cosimio Della Santina of TU Delft. The team in the end chose to home in on food supply, saying that “as they chatted with ChatGPT, they came up with the idea of creating a tomato-harvesting robot.”
Instant coffee has become more expensive in Europe, even as consumer food prices have started to slowly fall from the highs seen around the world in 2022. Britain has likely been worst hit, with jars of instant selling for the equivalent of $13. Supermarkets, aiming to deter thieves, have felt obliged to put dummy containers on shelves or attach security tags to the real thing. Prices in shops “rose off the back of the ongoing high global costs for these commodities,” said Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium. The commodity or wholesale price of robusta, the bean type usually used to make instant coffee, hit a 15-year global high in May, despite the wider fall in agricultural commodity prices from the peaks seen after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Cancer research funding involves big money, with over $24 billion spent worldwide between 2016 and 2020. But most of that outlay did not go into primary treatment research in fields such as surgery, which got 1.4%, and radiotherapy, which received almost 3%. According to Queen's University Belfast and the University of Southampton, around 75% of the funding went into pre-clinical or medicinal research that does not involve patients. And although the pre-clinical research "has inherent value in improving the knowledge and understanding of cancer, there are usually lengthy delays translating this to patient benefit, with time lags of up to 17 years cited," the two university teams said. Published in the journal Lancet Oncology in June, "the first comprehensive global analysis of cancer research funding" assessed $24.5 billion of global investment from over 66,000 public and philanthropic awards.