Red rice sounds like a New Orleans dish or a San Francisco treat. But it's a weed, the biggest nuisance to American rice growers, who are the fourth largest exporters of rice in the world. And rice farmers hate the pest, which, if harvested along with domesticated rice, reduces marketability and contaminates seed stocks.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has suspended Australia's monopoly wheat exporter and the leading Internet auction site, eBay, has found a local partner for its China operations after struggling to penetrate the market. Claudia Blume at VOA's Asia News Center has more on these and other business stories from the region.

At this critical time in the Iraq war, a new effort to stabilize the country is being sought through agriculture. Texas Cooperative Extension, an agency of the Texas A&M University System, will lead a team of five land-grant universities to do just that.

Genetic research, based on information from the recently released honey bee genome, has toppled some long-held beliefs about the honey bee that colonized Europe and the U.S.

The Netherlands Government is launching a project to promote peace and environmental stability by improving soil health, intensifying farm production, and increasing trade in one of the world's poorest areas: the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa.

NEW research offers an explanation for why numbers of many countryside bird species continue to decline, despite Government financial support for farmers to improve their habitat through agri-environment schemes.

"The challenge for China lies in replicating the growth seen in its coastal towns in the country's rural areas," according to David Dollar, the Beijing-based Country Director and chief of mission for the World Bank in China.

Imagine a poor farmer cutting down a hectare of rainforest, rich in biodiversity, to create a pasture worth US$300. The trees, cleared and burned, release 500 tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.