Like quinoa before it, açaí has become a craze among health-conscious Americans - creating a bonanza in the regions where it's grown.

Cocoa-growing countries will fight a price rout by banding together and co-ordinating production strategies, the International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO) has said.

In 2012, Matt Scanlan, the founder and chief executive officer of Naadam Cashmere, was just a young New York University alumnus with an unsatisfying job at a venture capital firm. "After a couple years of working as an analyst - which is a pretty thankless job - I left," he says. "A week after I quit, I booked a flight" to Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, to visit a college friend who lived in the region. The two of them met a newspaper reporter who hailed from Scanlan's hometown of Westport, Conn., and soon happened to hit it off with a couple of the reporter's sources, nomadic goat herders."

The European Investment Bank (EIB) and Dutch bank ABN Amro have signed an agreement to support investments for greening the European shipping fleet.