Rebecca Droke/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/AP

President Trump greets the crowd as he leaves the stage after a rally Tuesday at the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio.

The Trump presidency has, at times, adopted the style and tone of “The Apprentice,” the reality television show that made Donald Trump a household name.

But this latest incarnation – which sees the president publicly mulling whether to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of his earliest and most ardent supporters – seems to have brought the varying, and conflicting, priorities of the Trump administration and the Republican Party to a head.

The Sessions imbroglio suggests to political observers that Mr. Trump has fealty to his and his own first, a stance that could jeopardize his own policy agenda and spark more serious conflicts – with Republican allies in Congress, and perhaps even with his own voters. For lawmakers, who have rushed to defend Mr. Sessions, there's an additional concern: a desire to protect rule of law and the independence of the US Justice Department.

Trump began openly criticizing Sessions last week when he told The New York Times that if he’d known Sessions would recuse himself from the Justice Department investigations into Russian government involvement in the 2016 election, he wouldn’t have appointed him. (That recusal ultimately led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to head an independent investigation, after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.) This week the attacks have intensified, with Trump criticizing Sessions on an almost daily basis on Twitter. When asked yesterday whether Sessions will stay in his cabinet, Trump responded that “time will tell.”

Sessions, for his part, seems to have barely broken stride at the Justice Department, absorbing Trump’s attacks while simultaneously making Trump’s campaign promises of tougher drug and immigration enforcement a reality.

On Tuesday, after the president tweeted about his “beleaguered” attorney general, the former United States senator from Alabama announced that federal funding to sanctuary cities will be contingent on those cities cooperating more with federal immigration authorities. Today, Fox News reported that Sessions plans to soon announce several investigations into the internal leaks Trump has frequently bemoaned.

Sessions as standard-bearer

As the first Republican senator to endorse Trump, and on a cabinet stacked with Wall Street types, he’s seen as the standard-bearer of the kind of conservative nationalism that carried the billionaire to the White House. Since becoming attorney general, Sessions has undone or reversed many Obama-era initiatives, including restoring mandatory minimum sentences, backing off investigations into police departments, and expanding the use of civil asset forfeiture.

Indeed, Sessions arguably pushed the Trumpist agenda before Trump did. Sessions’ long-held desires for more nationalist, tough-on-crime policies saw Steve Bannon try to talk the then-senator into a 2012 White House run. Mr. Bannon found Trump soon after, and is now the president’s chief strategist.

“Sessions probably did as much as anybody to define what Trumpism means when it comes to policy – on immigration, justice, on a variety of issues,” says John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California.

“But Trump doesn’t care about Trumpism.... And if he sees his narrow self-interest conflicting with the ideological agenda, then the ideological agenda falls by the wayside,” adds Professor Pitney, author of “The Art of Political Warfare.”

The prospect of Trump sacrificing policy goals to try to protect himself and his family from the Mueller investigation, or for any other reason, may even begin to alienate his own supporters, some experts believe.

“If [Sessions] gets thrown under the bus, a lot of conservatives in the South will have their suspicions confirmed that [Trump] is the guy who says, ‘You’re fired’ on TV, not the guy who can be a real effective president,” says Dave Woodard, a Clemson University political science professor in South Carolina.

“The South has a little under a third of the population of the country,” he adds. “That’s a solid base and you don’t want to alienate it. It seems to me like this could.”

An undercurrent of dissatisfaction may already exist within Trump’s base. Matt Drudge, founder of the right-leaning Drudge Report, is “growing impatient” with the administration, CNN reported today, because he believes Trump is “not following through on his campaign promises – the ideals that helped him win and also brought Drudge’s backing.”

However, there is always a sense that “you can’t count Trump out,” says Nadine Hubbs, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of “Rednecks, Queers and Country Music.”

“He always has a narrative, he always has a story,” she adds. “And for a lot of people [the story they’re sticking to is that] Trump means we’re getting a badly needed reset from eight years of Obama.”

Republicans in Congress, though, have rushed to defend their former colleague this week. Rep. Steve King (R) of Iowa, for one, said that Sessions’ dismissal “would be an amputation of [Trump’s] own immigration and rule-of-law agenda that would be a massive disappointment to the conservatives of America.”

Protecting an independent investigation

Most Republicans have focused their public comments this week on the damage firing Sessions would have on Trump’s policy agenda, but another, potentially more momentous, consequence looms.

The Sessions issue “shows the White House veering down a dark alley that Republicans don’t want to go down – firing Sessions and then firing Mueller,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant in Austin, Texas. “That’s absolutely a breaking point.”

The Republican-controlled Senate would have no interest in confirming an attorney general replacement who would fire the special counsel, adds Mr. Mackowiak. And Republican congressmen have been trying to carefully warn Trump off that course.

Firing Mr. Mueller “would be a huge mistake,” Rep. Tom Cole (R) of Oklahoma told The Washington Post.

“If you think you’re going to avoid [the investigations], you’re making a mistake, in my view,” he added. “You would be creating a new issue, and you would be confirming the worst suspicions of your enemies and raise doubts among your friends.”

It took a long time for candidate Trump to earn the support of establishment Republicans. With Trump now attacking one his earliest and strongest establishment supporters – and potentially alienating his base in the process – political observers believe that fragile support could be in danger of breaking.

Republicans “don’t want Trump to do something that disrupts their electoral prospects going forward,” like firing Sessions and then forcing out Mueller, says Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. However, “they don’t want to undercut the president so thoroughly that his presidency is rendered moot.”

“If Republicans turn on Trump ... he is alone, and the Republican Party’s agenda is without a leader,” he adds.

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed to this report from Washington.

Andrew Harnik/AP

Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona arrives on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, July 25, 2017, as the Senate was to vote on a rejoinder to the Affordable Care Act. After casting a vote crucial to GOP efforts to move ahead on health care, Senator McCain gave an impassioned speech from the Senate floor.

Too much focus on winning. Not enough attention on bipartisan problem-solving. That’s what ails the US Senate today, said Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona in an impassioned speech that amounted to a dressing-down of his colleagues before a full Senate on Tuesday.

“We’ve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle,” said the politician respected and beloved by colleagues, after Republicans agreed in a tight party-line vote to debate a rejoinder to the Affordable Care Act.

He admitted that sometimes he, too, has “wanted to win, more for the sake of winning.”

It’s not the first time a senator has denounced one-sided lawmaking, and health care is not the first issue to illustrate this. Like Wall Street’s focus on quarterly profits, lawmakers from both sides look to the next election and satisfying their base, and this can be to the detriment of solving America’s biggest problems.

But a GOP that’s desperately trying to fulfill a campaign promise with variations on a Republican House bill that is broadly unpopular with the American public points to an acute case of winning-itis, as McCain’s speech implies.

Why health care is so partisan

Multiple factors account for this, says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant in Austin, Texas: A campaign promise repeated for seven years which racked up impressive Republican electoral wins; GOP control of Washington that should allow Republicans to deliver on their promise; and the party-line Democratic vote that brought the nation Obamacare in the first place.

Then there’s the difficulty of taking away a benefit once it’s been dispensed and the very real philosophical divide over health care between the parties, with Democrats viewing it as a right to be guaranteed by the government while Republicans see it as a choice to be met by the private sector.

Republicans are trying to “save” the private health-care system and forestall a move to a “single payer,” government-run system advocated by Democrats, explains Mr. Mackowiak.

But in his view, “The die was cast on Republicans approaching this in a partisan manner once Democrats passed this in a partisan manner themselves.”

Senator McCain made this very point in his speech, calling out Democrats for their partisan passage of the Affordable Care Act, a point that Senate minority leader Sen. Charles Schumer (D) of New York readily admits.

“He’s right that both bills were partisan, and I wish that didn’t happen. But we tried,” Senator Schumer told reporters Tuesday. Democrats worked for months with Republicans to try to fashion a bipartisan bill, held public hearings on their legislation, and allowed for amendments on their bill, before they ultimately passed their bill without a single Republican.

In this case, no public hearings accompanied the GOP bill that passed the House in early May. Democrats did not participate in negotiations. And a Senate version to “repeal and replace” was hammered out behind closed doors by majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky.

But Senator McConnell was unable to bring enough Republicans behind a bill that would leave 22 million Americans without insurance and cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, according to the independent Congressional Budget Office. Another idea, the reprisal of a “repeal only” bill, passed in 2015 but vetoed by President Obama, also could not get enough support.

And so Republicans have embarked on a path to the unknown, debating the House version as a vehicle for amendments that will produce a bill whose final shape is still to be determined. On Tuesday night, nine of the Senate’s 52 Republicans voted against an amendment to “repeal and replace,” and on Wednesday seven voted against an amendment for “repeal” only, and neither garnered a single vote from Democrats. Both amendments failed.

What happens next

The going theory is that after a massive amendment process known as “vote-a-rama,” the amendments that survive will amount to a “skinny” repeal – simply repealing the individual and employer insurance mandates and a tax or two – with a final vote on Friday. The GOP leadership wants to pass something – anything – so they can keep the process alive. (Republicans in both chambers would then have to confer on a bill that could pass both houses.)

Which brings up McCain’s point about winning being everything.

He urged his colleagues to return to “regular order” and tackle legislation through committees involving both parties. Senators on both sides of the aisle listened intently as he made his first appearance at the Capitol since he was diagnosed with cancer. It was a rare moment when a senator had the entire body as his audience – usually they are alone on the floor speaking to the C-SPAN television cameras.

A man of stature

In the history of the Senate, forceful speeches have at times changed people’s minds and determined policy, and leaders have successfully argued that certain issues are bigger than parties, says former Senate historian Don Ritchie. He cites Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky (revered by McConnell) and the Compromise of 1850 over slave and free states, and also Sen. Arthur Vandenberg from Michigan, who helped turn Republicans from an isolationist to an internationalist view after World War II.

McCain certainly has stature. He is admired for his courage when he was tortured as a prisoner during the Vietnam War. And he is known as a senator who works across the aisle. He’s also known for his unvarnished speech. When he ran for president in 2008 and 2000, he named his campaign bus the Straight Talk Express. 

But it’s unlikely that he’ll sway his colleagues to work together on this particular issue. The more realistic incentive will be if the GOP effort to change Obamacare fails.

“If this fails, McConnell is going to move to a bipartisan path,” Mackowiak says. Indeed, the majority leader has said there would be no other alternative but to work with Democrats if Republicans pass a health-care bill.

That negotiation, however, may well be just as difficult as the Republican process has been. As McConnell noted on Tuesday, “Some issues are just more partisan than others. I think we can all stipulate that health care has not been a subject of bipartisanship.”

McCain also urged Republicans and Democrats to start over on health care if the GOP effort fails, which he thought would be the likely outcome.

“Let’s see if we can pass something that will be imperfect, full of compromises, and not very pleasing to implacable partisans on either side, but that might provide workable solutions to problems Americans are struggling with today.”

President Trump's reported suspension of a covert CIA program to fund, arm, and train Syrian rebels is seen as signaling the end of US efforts to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on the battlefield.

But the cutting of US ties – and likely those of US allies who also provided the rebels material support – also calls into question the fate of thousands of armed fighters who have grown reliant on US support and direction.

The move, which some commentators have characterized as appeasing Russia, Mr. Assad’s most powerful backer, has left thousands of mainstream rebels struggling to navigate a battlefield suddenly tipped against them, without a patron, without guidance – and for some – without a cause.

Among the options for the rebels, looking to evolve to survive: join the US-led battle against the so-called Islamic State, or, for the fervently anti-Assad fighters, even join the ranks of jihadist and Islamist groups, which have retained their shadowy funding and supply lines.

Abu Mohammed al Darrawi, the nom de guerre of a Free Syrian Army (FSA) intelligence official who has spent the past four years shuttling between southern Syria and Jordan to negotiate for arms and support, says many “emotional” fighters and commanders will begin considering outreach by Al Qaeda and other well-funded Islamist militias.

“We lost our brothers, our sisters, our children; we went through hell just to end this regime and see an end to Assad,” Darrawi said.

“If Al Qaeda, if Ahrar al Sham, if the devil himself is fighting Assad and will help us in this fight, we will side with them.”

Timber Sycamore

When the CIA launched the covert training and arming program, known as Timber Sycamore, in early 2013, it was designed to pressure Assad on the battlefield while regulating the flow of arms and cash that had already been pouring in from Gulf countries and from Turkey.

The CIA, along with the US allies, vetted and trained thousands of rebels from the FSA and affiliated militias at bases within Turkey to the north and Jordan to the south.

Every operation, every battlefield movement, was micromanaged from Military Operations Centers (MOCs), in Jordan and Turkey that featured US, French, British, Saudi, and Emirati intelligence and military officials.

The US and its allies provided the rebels with light arms, including heavy machine guns, mortars, sniper rifles, and vehicles. But, due to Washington’s concerns, they did not provide them with the anti-aircraft weapons they needed to counter regime airstrikes and turn the tide on the battlefield.

The Trump administration’s suspension of Timber Sycamore followed months of scaling down the program and was seen by many as an inevitable divorce. Mr. Trump referred this week on Twitter to his “ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments” to the rebels.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE, staunch supporters of the rebels, will be unable or unwilling to go against their ally Washington and continue arming or financing the fighters, say Arab security sources close to the MOC in Amman.

Jordan will no longer offer a land corridor to provide weapons to the south, Turkey is pressuring moderate rebels in the north to fight a proxy war with Kurdish groups, while Qatar, a major backer of Islamist rebels, will also be unwilling to throw its support behind the FSA.

The mood in the northern Jordanian town of Irbid, 12 miles from the Syrian border, where commanders of the FSA’s Southern Front have lived and operated, is one of weariness as they consider their options.

“We have 54 factions in the south alone without support, without arms, and without salaries,” says Abdul Hadi Sari, a former Syrian air force general who has been an adviser to FSA’s Southern Front and a military analyst based in Jordan.

“When the US says stop, they all stop.”

Fighting against, with jihadists

According to rebel commanders close to the MOC in Amman, rebels have been negotiating with Saudi Arabia and the UAE to continue salaries to fighters in order to prevent them from breaking ranks and joining jihadist groups. There have been 50 reported defections already this month.

The end of the CIA program meanwhile may also boost efforts to build a fighting force to oust ISIS from Syria, analysts and rebels say, the only way mainstream rebels can secure US support or that of its allies.

According to Syrian rebel commanders close to operations, the US has been redirecting vetted rebels to bases established near Tanf in the triangle between south-eastern Syria, western Iraq, and northern Jordan to train and take up the fight against ISIS in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zour.

“The CIA program was aimed at Assad, while the Department of Defense’s program was aimed at ISIS,” Faysal Itani, a Syria expert and senior fellow at the Rafiq Hairiri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council, says via email.

“Ending the former will, if anything, pressure fighters to join the latter in order to get paid and receive US protection.”

As the CIA program was winding down over the past three months, 200 vetted Syrian rebels traveled to Tanf to join the US-formed Jaysh Maghawir al-Thawra (Revolutionary Commandos Army) for training, according to Syrian rebel commanders. Hundreds more are said to be considering the offer, but travel from southwest and northwest Syria to the southeast is a dangerous proposition given that swathes of territory are held by pro-regime Shiite militias or ISIS.

“Entering at-Tanf for many would be a suicide mission,” says Mr. Sari, the former air force general. “But if you are starving and worn down by four years of war, many may take that risk.”

Police force?

One proposal allegedly backed by both Russia and the US, which came as part of Russia-US-Jordan tripartite talks in Amman that reached a cease-fire in south Syria, is the transformation of the Free Syrian Army and moderate rebels from a militia to a “police force.”

Under the proposal, which according to those close to the ongoing tripartite talks has gained the support of Jordan, the rebels would change their mission from overthrowing Assad to keeping the peace in recently-announced truce zones in southern Syria and east of Damascus.

As part of the switch, as envisioned by the West, rebels would receive police training within southern Syria and salaries to both police and prevent extremist groups from filling the vacuum. Should it prove successful, the model would be replicated in central and northern Syria, with the presence of a non-regime police force facilitating the return of Syrian refugees from Jordan and Turkey, according to those close to the talks.

Syrian rebel commanders are divided on the initiative; some say they would rather fight to the “last bullet” than abandon their cause.

“Many would rather die as martyrs than live as policemen,” says Abu Kamal, the nom de guerre of a FSA rebel commander in the Damascus countryside, whose fighters came to a standstill due to funding cuts last month, ahead of the Trump decision.

But, while the mission would be a far cry from overthrowing a regime that has committed atrocities, rebels say many fighters, worn down from broken promises and an increasingly sectarian fight, may be ready to accept the offer.

“When we went out and protested for freedom, we did not know that we would be facing jihadists, the world’s Shiite militias, Russia, a civil war, and a sectarian war,” Sari says.

“Right now, if you offer us security and peace on our homeland, many will take it.”

Battered by drought and civil wars, more than 20 million people from Yemen to Tanzania are at risk of starvation in what aid workers call the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. But over the past two decades, nations that once produced searing images of famine's toll have moved to thwart it by strengthening community resilience. Our reporters traveled to Madagascar, Ethiopia, and Somaliland to investigate the daunting challenges as well as the long-term efforts that are saving lives. 

You can tell right away that there is something different about Rova. For a start, the 5-year-old is more than a head shorter than her playmate Jiana, though the girls were born only a month apart.

And where Jiana is solid – you can feel her presence as she and Rova chase each other around a health center in this highland farming town – there is a fragile, ethereal sense to the impish Rova.

Rova, like nearly half of under-fives in Madagascar, was chronically malnourished as a baby. Her mother, Rasoatahina Lovasoa, gave her only rice and the water it had cooked in. “It makes me feel sad to see how much shorter she is,” says her mother. “I’m trying to give her a better diet now.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Rova (l.), a chronically malnourished almost-5-year-old girl, stands next to her friend Jiana Rakuturammambason, who is 'normal' sized for age 5, at a local health clinic in Antsirabe, Madagascar. 47% of children in Madagascar are chronically malnourished - the percentages are higher here in the highlands despite a good variety of food being available.

Droughts and famines tend to afflict countries in cyclical fashion. But where chronic malnutrition is endemic, such as Madagascar, they strike harder – sharply increasing the risks for already-vulnerable children, according to research led by professors at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University.

Rova is a lively girl, but studies show that undersized children are not only weaker, but they tend to do less well in school – a slow start that can complicate adulthood. The UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, estimates the cost of this barrier to development at $740 million a year, 7 percent of Madagascar’s GDP.

The situation is “sad, overwhelming and unacceptable,” says Prime Minister Olivier Mahafaly.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Intervention comes at a fairly low price: $400 million – not much more than one of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films – would pay for a 10-year program to iodize salt, fortify wheat flour and oil with micronutrients, and teach pregnant women and young mothers what to feed their babies, says UNICEF’s nutrition investment plan. If the plan were put into action, chronic malnutrition would end up affecting just 15 percent of Madagascar’s toddlers instead of nearly half of them, the agency says.

But the challenge – and potential solution – lies not just in funding, but in changing attitudes. Health education is a strong start. But in this heavily agricultural country, where 92 percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day, parents may well feel that any extra bit of food not needed for survival is most useful if it can be sold for money. Persuading them that there is greater long-term value in providing their children with a healthy diet is key.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Mothers with malnourished babies attend a nutrition class in Antsirabe, Madagascar. 160 mothers are taking courses. The women learn how to care for their babies - including nutrition, hygiene, and health.

Nirina Razafiarisoa, a young woman with a nine-month-old son at her breast, says she has been getting nutrition advice from women at her local health center for the past 18 months. “I’ve learned lots of things” about how to feed her son and 2-year-old daughter, she says.

But she makes a living by selling soup from a tureen that she drags around her neighborhood on a cart – and that living is thin. “I do what they tell me to do when I’ve got the money, and don’t when I haven’t,” she explains. “I cook the sort of meals they recommend about twice a week, I suppose.”

Empowering parents

For other families, however, ignorance about nutrition is the first hurdle. “When they eat rice and a leafy vegetable or a potato, people think they have eaten properly,” says Leonide Rasoahenikaja, a nutritionist working with UNICEF. “And they have no idea how good soybeans are for kids,” Dr. Rasoahenikaja adds. “Farmers feed it to their cattle and their pigs, and they see milk production go up and their pigs getting fat, but it does not occur to them to give it to their children.”

That’s why a dozen or so mothers – and one young father – were lined up on benches along the walls of a simple clapboard, cement-floored room on the outskirts of Antsirabe one recent morning, their babies in their arms. They were listening to a woman give a nutrition class.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Midwife Rindra Ramarijaona (l.) measures Larissa's height with help from her mom, Aveline Rafanoherantsoa, at a community health clinic, funded by the EU and UNICEF, in Ambohimanarizo, Madagascar. Larissa is receiving treatment for malnutrition.

The women chanted the advice in unison, reading it from an illustrated poster on the wall, before lining up to have their babies weighed and measured. Most of them were doing well, but it is the babies whose mothers do not attend this kind of class that worry Rasoahenikaja. The chronic malnutrition rate among under-fives in Madagascar has hovered around the 50 percent mark for more than a decade, she says, and nothing yet has budged it.

Step by step

If the UNICEF plan gets off the ground, that might make a difference. But in the meantime, it is more a matter of small-scale projects at the village level teaching mothers what to do and helping them to do it, one day at a time.

In Ambohitrimanjato, for example, a sleepy village of mud-brick houses overlooking rice paddies, women are learning to use solar dryers – simple glass boxes fitted with slatted trays – to desiccate fruits and vegetables so that they can be stored and eaten long after they have been harvested.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

People examine a food drier that was donated by a local nonprofit and funded by the World Bank in Ambohitrimanjato, Madagascar. Dried fruits and vegetables will keep until out of season.

“We’ve dried taro, squash, carrots, and bananas,” says local villager and nutrition outreach worker Razafi, a wizened lady who goes by one name. “It’ll be good for the children’s diet, too. We can dry potatoes and grind them up to make flour, and then we can make potato fritters.”

That’s the kind of talk that warms Rasoahenikaja’s heart. “The area around Antsirabe is the breadbasket of Madagascar,” she says. “Everything grows here but farmers often prefer to sell their vegetables than give them to their children.”

“If we are going to get rid of chronic malnutrition, kids’ food needs to be a priority,” she insists. “It isn’t for a lot of families, and that is not going to change in just a year or two.”  

Shane Witters Hicks/The Christian Science Monitor

Shawn Cooney of Corner Stalk Farm uses LED lights to grow greens and herbs inside a converted shipping container.

Shawn Cooney swings open the door of a 320-square-foot industrial shipping container to reveal a futuristic setting: hundreds of edible plants growing in vertical columns, fed by the energy from strings of neon red and blue LED lights. Nutrient-infused water cascades from ceiling spigots down through artificial root systems in the growing towers. The temperature inside feels like a comfortable spring day – about 70 degrees F., with a touch of humidity. There isn’t a speck of dirt anywhere.

Welcome to the new urban farm.

This shipping container is one of four that comprise Corner Stalk Farm run by Mr. Cooney and his wife in the heart of Boston. Once the cargo holds for exhaust-spewing 18-wheelers, these discarded freight vessels have been transformed into units known as Leafy Green Machines outfitted with state-of-the-art growing technology by a company called Freight Farms. Now they help farmers turn out crops of lettuce and herbs at a rapid pace.

In the past, urban farmers have eked a living from food grown in greenhouses, reclaimed brownfields, vacant lots, or rooftop farms. But with these new kinds of urban crops – grown using what’s known as controlled-environment agriculture, or CEA – farmers leverage technology to break free from the seasonal and climatic limitations that bind traditional crops. As a result, these farmers enjoy longer growing seasons and more plentiful harvests – a hopeful promise for urban communities looking to boost access to fresh produce.

“To think that you don’t have to worry about whether it’s going to rain, or whether the sun is too bright because you flick a switch and you know how much light you have, you know how much water is being supplied ... that would take a lot of the stress out of agriculture,” says Joel Gruver, associate professor and director of Western Illinois University's organic research and demonstration farm.

Getting fresh food into urban centers has proved to be a persistent and growing problem. By 2050, 66 percent of the world’s more than 9 billion people will live in cities, predicts the United Nations. While some cities offer farmers’ markets and have worked to open more grocery stores in so-called food deserts, these farmer-entrepreneurs are searching for solutions that will not only grow fresh food within city limits but also mitigate some of the environmental effects of traditional farming.

“People want real food. And increasingly people live in the city. So there has been – unsurprisingly – a lot of innovation and investment in urban farming in the last handful of years,” says Tobias Peggs, co-founder and chief executive officer of Square Roots Urban Growers in Brooklyn, N.Y. Upon launching, the company received more than 500 applicants for 10 farmer slots from those wanting to take up the challenge.

Easing an environmental burden

Small-scale sustainable farming and organic practices have long sought to lessen the environmental impacts of monocropping and pesticide reliance, but CEA has a significant advantage: the ability to scale up without significantly increasing its ecological footprint. The vertical farming market is expected to quadruple from its $1.5 billion market value in 2016 to $6.4 billion in 2023, according to a recent report by Allied Market Research.

In San Francisco, agrotech company Plenty boasts a 51,000-square-foot warehouse that leverages machine learning to optimize plant growth.

Nate Storey, Plenty’s co-founder and chief science officer, says the environmental benefits gained by fusing technology and food production make large-scale CEA a no-brainer.

“We have no runoff, we have no erosion, we have few, if any, pests, we don’t need to use many of the pesticides, we don’t have any soil to sterilize, we don’t have any intensive irrigation, we use a fraction of the water,” he explains. “There are just not a whole lot of reasons not to do this.”

Unlike other large-scale food producers who must optimize their goods for long truck rides and shelf lives, indoor growers located closer to customers can instead prioritize food quality, such as flavor and “mouth feel,” as Dr. Storey puts it.

For independent CEA farmers, starting up a controlled environment for indoor growing doesn’t come cheap. A Freight Farms unit costs $85,000 and the annual operating costs range between $8,000 and $16,500. But Cooney of Corner Stalk Farm, who bases the size of his crop on customer demand, explains that similarly sized outdoor farms are pressured to overproduce during short growing seasons.

“Their losses are much higher. So that’s why it comes out to be about the same,” he says. Moreover, other farms may spend a fortune on transportation and land. Taking up about 1/34th of an acre, Cooney’s lettuce farm can have a marketable yield that’s about the equivalent of 8 acres of traditional farmland yield, according to Freight Farms. And the indoor environment allows for a continual harvest.

But without the government subsidies that larger farms growing subsidized commodity crops receive, greens grown within shipping containers will inevitably cost more than most supermarket greens.

“A bag of our Square Roots greens costs about as much as a Starbucks [coffee],” admits Mr. Peggs. He is quick to add that the enhanced sense of community fostered through farmer-customer relationships makes the price worthwhile.

“Customers come to the farm and hangout – we have a big window on the farm, so everyone can see what’s going on. It’s all about total transparency in the food-supply chain,” Peggs says.

But is high-tech food ‘natural’?

The benefits of CEA may be tantalizing, but Dr. Gruver of Western Illinois University foresees potential difficulties for the burgeoning industry. Controlled-environment agriculture depends upon those who can operate and fix the technology. In other words, finding someone who can troubleshoot a malfunctioning LED system may prove more difficult than finding someone who can repair a tractor, for example.

And while local food and connections to the farmers who grow it have proven to be profitable in urban markets, not everyone embraces the idea of food grown exclusively in an artificial environment.

“I think with any high-tech approach, there is a general concern that it’s not natural,” says Gruver. “There’s more potential for unforeseen, unintended consequences.”

Urban tech growers are well aware of this perception.

“We’re sensitive to that,” responds Storey of Plenty. “We’re really focused on how do we show people that this new growing environment is something that is important for our food supply.”

Before indoor farmers can dominate the urban food arena, however, they’ll need to grow more than lettuce and herbs. The larger the plant, the more energy it costs to grow it, and this energy is currently expensive.

But based on the rapid pace of innovation and technology, Peggs predicts large, affordable produce may not be far off. He thinks his Square Roots entrepreneurs will figure out how to grow sustainable strawberries within 18 months.

“Imagine a farmer traipsing through 2 feet of snow to deliver you a box of freshly harvested, locally grown strawberries in the middle of a New York winter,” he says. “In the near future everyone will have local food and they will know your farmer.”

Reuters

A nearly full moon rises over the Temple of Poseidon, the ancient Greek god of the seas, in Cape Sounion, east of Athens, Greece, July 8.

The European Union’s experiment with a single currency was almost derailed seven years ago when its weakest member, Greece, was caught lying about what turned out to be a mountain of debt. Now with the 19 countries in the eurozone finally experiencing a robust recovery, Greece is once again in the spotlight.

This time, however, it is for Greece’s return to the global financial markets for the first time in years.

Once close to bankruptcy, Greece was able to raise €3 billion ($3.5 billion) in a bond sale on July 25. International investors gave a clear sign of confidence that Greeks may be learning some lessons and making progress on reforms. The economy grew in the first quarter, the jobless rate is falling, and the government has shown discipline in budgets, including pensions. Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has raised its outlook for Greece from “stable” to “positive.”

A high debt burden still looms over Greece’s economic future. But Greeks are now accustomed to economic sacrifices, or what Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras calls “this unpleasant adventure.” His leftist government promises deep pro-market reforms, such as selling off state-run enterprises. And it plans to retrain some 50,000 people for new jobs.

The shift in mood among Greeks was captured in recent polling by the Dianeosis think tank. In a poll two years ago, half of Greeks favored high taxes and a robust welfare state. Now only a third believe that. And more than half believe that “taxes should be low even if there is less state coverage.”

Nearly two-thirds now say the financial crisis was caused mainly by “our own weaknesses.” An even higher percentage said Greeks “grew accustomed to borrowing in order to consume more than we produce.”

Returning to the debt markets, in other words, has required a good deal of soul-searching. “One could argue that today, after several years of crisis, Greek society demonstrates a high degree of collective self-knowledge,” says University of Macedonia professor Nikos Marantzidis.

Europe’s economy has rebounded for many reasons. But a big one is that the EU did not let Greece fail. And the Greeks themselves are slowly reforming themselves.