The scrubby desert outside Port Augusta, three hours from Adelaide, is not the kind of countryside you see in Australian tourist brochures. The backdrop to an area of coal-fired power stations, lead smelting and mining, the coastal landscape is spiked with saltbush that can live on a trickle of brackish seawater seeping up through the arid soil. Poisonous king brown snakes, redback spiders, the odd kangaroo and emu are seen occasionally, flies constantly. When the local landowners who graze a few sheep here get a chance to sell some of this crummy real estate they jump at it, even for bottom dollar, because the only real natural resource in these parts is sunshine.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that a group of young brains from Europe, Asia and north America, led by a 33-year-old German former Goldman Sachs banker but inspired by a London theatre lighting engineer of 62, have bought a sizeable lump of this unpromising outback territory and built on it an experimental greenhouse which holds the seemingly realistic promise of solving the world's food problems.

As US cornfields withered in drought conditions last summer, Brazil's once empty Cerrado region produced a bumper crop of the grain, helping feed livestock on US farms and ease a drought-related spike in prices.

US imports of Brazilian corn were small by world standards. But they are rising fast, and they mark just one element of the increasingly complex and sometimes contentious relations between the world's agricultural superpower and its fast-growing competitor amid shifts in the global economy.

Starting at zero in 2010, Brazilian corn exports to the US are on pace to exceed $10m this year and are bound to rise as farmers expand planting and more corn is funnelled to nonfood uses, such as ethanol production. Brazil is expected next year to dethrone the US as the world's largest producer of soybeans. With so much land available for cultivation, that status will probably become permanent.

Canada's multimillion dollar proposal to cull grey seals will not bring back the ravaged stocks of Atlantic cod it is intended to help, scientists have said.

In October, the Canadian Senate approved a controversial plan to kill 70,000 grey seals in the Gulf of St Lawrence under a bounty system next year, ostensibly to revive the cod stocks that the seals were eating.

But a group of marine scientists at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have said in a recent open letter: "There is no credible scientific evidence to suggest a cull of grey seals in Atlantic Canada would help depleted fish stocks recover.

The laughter coming from diners in a corner of Kenji Suzuki's restaurant is flowing as effortlessly as the beer. The chatter cuts through the steam drifting from a nabe, or hotpot, in the centre of the table. There is talk of work, and praise for the chicken, vegetables and tofu being transferred to bowls from the bubbling stock.

Their exuberance is unusual, not just because the working week is only a day old, but because every dish is made with produce many Japanese have spent the past 20 months doing everything possible to avoid.

In an age when serious diners insist on knowing the provenance of their food, the example set by Suzuki's restaurant is hard to beat. About 80% of his menu – from perilla-infused pork to daikon pickles and saké - is from Fukushima.

As his helicopter descends through the smoke towards an Amazonian inferno, Evandro Carlos Selva checks the co-ordinates via a global positioning satellite and radios back to base a witness testimony to deforestation.

Flames lick up from below the canopy, smoke billows across the horizon, and down below, the carbon that has been stored in the forest for hundreds of years is released into the atmosphere.

Skeletal trees are charred grey, others burnt black. Nearby, what was once forest is reduced to an expanse of ash, dust and embers. Trudging through the debris, Carlos Selva points to a soya farm: "They've been paid to do this. Forty per cent of next year's harvest on this land has already been bought."

The floods that have devastated Italy over the past week could become even more severe in the future, threatening food production and destroying the country's natural beauty, experts warn.

Storms have battered ancient towns and left large swaths of farmland in Tuscany under water, prompting a warning from the region's governor, Enrico Rossi, that "climate change is making us get used to ever more violent flooding".

Three people were found dead on Tuesday after their car fell from a collapsed bridge near Grosseto, while the town of Albinia was under two metres of water. As army units were called in to help locals evacuate, towns in neighbouring Umbria were also put on alert and sections of the main road linking north and south Italy were blocked by water. On Monday a 73-year-old man was drowned in his car by rising floodwaters near the walled town of Capalbio, with residents evacuated near Cortona, the setting for the novel Under the Tuscan Sun. Much of the rich farmland of the Maremma had become a lake of mud.

Rising temperatures due to climate change could mean wild arabica coffee is extinct in 70 years, posing a risk to the genetic sustainability of one of the world's basic commodities, scientists said on Wednesday.

Although commercial coffee growers would still be able to cultivate crops in plantations designed with the right conditions, experts say the loss of wild arabica, which has greater genetic diversity, would make it harder for plantations to survive long-term and beat threats like pests and disease.

Monsanto and other agribusiness and food companies have spent more than $45m (£28m) to defeat a California ballot measure that would require labelling of some GM foods. The measure, proposition 37, is one of the most contentious initiatives on California's election ballot on Tuesday.

If it passes, it would require labels on GM food sold in supermarkets, but would not cover restaurants. It also has a number of gaping loopholes. For example, the law would not require labels on meat from animals that were fed GM corn.

Retail bodies and charities have criticised the government for setting "weak" targets on the use of sustainable palm oil.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) yesterday asked retailers, manufacturers and charities to sign up to "work towards" ensuring that, by 2015, all palm oil used in food and other products is responsibly produced and does not contribute to deforestation.

But the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said that while the government deserved praise for putting the palm oil issue on the agenda, many of its members had already made more ambitious commitments. The BRC wants other sectors to commit to nothing less than the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) standards for sustainable palm oil.

Rain and cold weather this summer saw honey yields from hives fall by almost three-quarters, the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) said today. The average crop per hive was down 72% compared to 2011, with just 3.6kg (8lb) of honey produced compared to an annual average of 30lb (13.6kg), the annual honey survey by the BBKA revealed.

The survey of 2,712 beekeepers in England, Northern Ireland and Wales found that 88% said this summer's bad weather caused the fall in honey yields.

I believe we might have made a mistake: a mistake whose consequences, if I am right, would be hard to overstate. I think the forecasts for world food production could be entirely wrong. Food prices are rising again, partly because of the damage done to crops in the northern hemisphere by ferocious weather. In the US, Russia and Ukraine, grain crops were clobbered by remarkable droughts. In parts of northern Europe, such as the UK, they were pummelled by endless rain.

Even so, this is not, as a report in the Guardian claimed last week, "one of the worst global harvests in years". It's one of the best. World grain production last year was the highest on record; this year's crop is just 2.6% smaller. The problem is that, thanks to the combination of a rising population and the immoral diversion of so much grain into animal feed and biofuels, a new record must be set every year. Though 2012's is the third biggest global harvest in history (after 2011 and 2008), this is also a year of food deficit, in which we will consume 28m tonnes more grain than farmers produced. If 2013's harvest does not establish a new world record, the poor are in serious trouble.

A community scheme producing vegetables in the heart of the city, a restaurant providing training for the long-term unemployed and a campaigning nine-year-old blogger are among the food heroes celebrated in this year's Observer Food Monthly awards, which were announced in London on Thursday night.

Voted for by over 16,000 Observer readers alongside an expert panel, this year's crop very much recognises the age of economic austerity and the need to take food back to the grass roots. "With a higher number of voters than ever before, with expert judges from most parts of the UK, the OFM awards have never felt so representative or relevant," says OFM editor Allan Jenkins.

Among the pioneers voted for by the readers of OFM is Growing Communities, a vegetable box scheme based in Hackney and run by volunteers producing most of its food locally, which was named retailer of the year. Create, a restaurant in Leeds providing training and work placements in the catering industry for the unemployed, won best ethical restaurant, while the Parlour, a pub in Chorlton on the outskirts of Manchester, beat tough competition from glossy celebrity-chef-run ventures to be named the best place for Sunday lunch.

Severn Trent Costain (STC) has announced that major UK dairy, First Milk, is to become the first business customer to switch water supplier since the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) altered the regulations to allow more businesses to be able to choose their water supplier. Until recently only businesses that used more than fifty megalitres of water a year, equal to 20 Olympic sized swimming pools, could switch from their existing water supplier to a new one. The threshold has now been reduced to just five megalitres of water, equivalent to two Olympic sized swimming pools, which has substantially increased the number of businesses that are able to choose their water supplier from just 2,200 to 26,000 businesses.

Severn Trent Costain a joint venture that combines the skills and experience of Severn Trent Services, one of the world’s leading suppliers of water and wastewater solutions, and Costain the UK’s leading engineering solutions provider, has signed up First Milk, in a deal that will see STC supply, manage and monitor their water across six major sites in England, Wales and Scotland involving over 600 million litres of water per year. The new arrangement builds on an ongoing successful relationship with First Milk. The two organisations have already been working together to improve asset performance, deriving ongoing savings from day-to-day operational efficiencies and delivering plant optimisation.

A community scheme producing vegetables in the heart of the city, a restaurant providing training for the long-term unemployed and a campaigning nine-year-old blogger are among the food heroes celebrated in this year's Observer Food Monthly awards, which were announced in London on Thursday night.

Voted for by over 16,000 Observer readers alongside an expert panel, this year's crop very much recognises the age of economic austerity and the need to take food back to the grass roots. "With a higher number of voters than ever before, with expert judges from most parts of the UK, the OFM awards have never felt so representative or relevant," says OFM editor Allan Jenkins.

British fishermen have been attacked by French boats in the Channel, raising fears of battles among rival boats over resources as quota limits bite and declining stocks make fishing ever more difficult.

The British fishermen were dredging for scallops in an area west of Le Havre, a lucrative fishing ground, when they were attacked with rocks thrown by nearby French boats, which attempted to block their path.

They called for help from the UK coastguard and Royal Navy, but were told that a French naval vessel would be sent. When it arrived, according to the men, the French authorities refused to intervene, angering the British fishermen and raising fears that a similar confrontation could happen again.

NAIROBI, Oct. 16 — Investments being made in enabling the world to achieve food security are being done at the expense of the environment, threatening the very foundation that will deliver more food to the world, a new report by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) said on Tuesday.

The report launched in Nairobi urges the world to shift its focus also to environment to ensure that food production is sustainable and assured.

Farming groups give big welcome to new protection on prices

Farmers and food processors will have more power when it comes to dealing with supermarkets under new legislation laid out in the Queen's speech yesterday.

The Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill contains a new watchdog which will be set up to ensure that supermarkets deal fairly and lawfully with suppliers.

PAC-Solution Ltd. has launched an environmentally-friendly disinfectant treatment system that enables wastewater to be reused for agricultural irrigation. The system offers effective purification without any harmful by-products often associated with traditional cleaning methods.

The development of this chemical-based treatment technology comes at a time when many countries are faced with challenges in their water supply. The ability to use purified wastewater in irrigation and other agricultural applications reduces the demand on exploitable raw water resources and supports the farming industry. Sustainable wastewater purification system is energy-efficient and does not create harmful by-products at any stage of the process.

The budget "represented a missed opportunity for the Treasury to introduce measures that might have helped farmers capitalise on the growing confidence that is currently evident in the industry," the NFU said today.

NFU President Peter Kendall said: ’Chancellor George Osborne was right to focus on growth and I was pleased to see measures that could create a more competitive business environment in the UK.

In particular, the Chancellor’s ambition to increase UK exports over the next decade to ’1 trillion should benefit farmers who are the backbone of a food and drink industry which constitutes our biggest manufacturing sector.

Badger cull pilots aimed at reducing cattle tuberculosis can take place in west Gloucestershire and west Somerset this year, the government has said.

The exact areas are not being revealed for security reasons.

But the majority of the Gloucestershire area lies near Tewkesbury and the Forest of Dean, while the Somerset area includes part of Taunton Deane.