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Fair Trade pays $1.55 per lb. for Antonio's organic coffee, almost 10% more than the market price. But Antonio is left with only 50¢ per lb. after paying Fair Trade cooperative fees, government taxes and farming expenses. By year's end, he says, from the few thousand pounds he grows, he'll pocket about $1,000 - around half the meager minimum wage in Guatemala - or $2.75 a day, not enough for Starbucks' cheapest latte. The same holds true for other Guatemalan growers, like Mateo Reynoso, also from Quetzaltenango. Without Fair Trade, he says, "we wouldn't be growing coffee...
...storing a wad in one cheek as it slowly breaks down and enters the bloodstream. Astonishingly, most of the country's arable land is devoted to the plant, which accounts for approximately a third of the country's water usage. And Yemen has very little water to begin with; almost all of it comes from underground aquifers filled thousands of years ago and replenished only very slowly. Experts predict that Sana'a, a city of almost 2 million, could run dry in as few as 10 years. The social upheaval from such an environmental catastrophe and the refugees it could...
...plant in the global craze for alternative energy sources, hundreds of farmers turned over acres of their small farms to jatropha. But it didn't take them long to realize what scientists have come to realize in recent months: what was once touted as a miracle plant that needed almost no water has turned out to be anything but that. (See pictures of a global food crisis...
...Farmers in Kibwezi quickly realized that they would have to throw out the rulebook to make their crops grow. Boniface Muoki's jatropha plants look like they're doing well - they're covered with thick green leaves and fruit. But Muoki says he did almost nothing the government experts told him to Do - instead, he planted the seedlings in meter-deep holes so that they would collect more rainwater and he tends the plants fastidiously. "It's the farmer who knows best," Muoki says. "At this point, I know more about jatropha than most anyone because...
...networking sites with all the enthusiasm and grace of dads getting down on the dance floor. Their aim: to capture the elusive - and largely uninterested - youth vote when the country goes to the polls sometime before June 2010. With 79 of Britain's 645 MPs currently using Twitter alongside almost 200 prospective parliamentary candidates and a raft of Westminster journalists and bloggers, digital politics has become as crowded and combustible as the analogue version. The latest conflagration - a battle between Conservative blogger Donal Blaney and a Twitter imposter tweeting as @blaneysblarney, the name of Blaney's blog (http://donalblaney.blogspot.com...