Daily Star: Food Security, Free Agency, and Climate Policy—A 2025 Crossroads

If you want to understand the pulse of 2025, you could do worse than to flip through the pages of The Daily Star. This year, the publication’s coverage has been a mosaic of stories—each distinct, but collectively capturing the anxieties and ambitions shaping our age. Whether it’s the silent crisis of soil salinity on Bangladesh’s coast, the seismic shifts in baseball’s labor landscape, or the tense dance over climate funding in Puerto Rico, these narratives aren’t just headlines; they’re signposts pointing to the crossroads where policy, history, and human resilience meet.

Let’s start where the ground itself is changing—literally. In coastal Bangladesh, rice fields are quietly vanishing as salt creeps into the earth, turning paddies into shrimp ponds. There’s no dramatic disaster here, just a steady ‘physiological drought’ that leaves seedlings surrounded by water they can’t drink. According to The Daily Star, nearly 50,000 hectares have slipped out of rice cultivation in recent years, a transformation that’s almost invisible until, one day, the fields go quiet. Shrimp exports bring in impressive revenue—over Tk 700 crore from a single district in one season—but the exchange is deeper than economics. Rice feeds families, shrimp feeds the market.

This isn’t just a Bangladeshi story. Salinity is redrawing coastlines from the Mekong to the Nile Delta, eating away at farmland worldwide. The United Nations estimates over 1.4 billion hectares of cultivated land are now salt-affected. Hunger, in this new era, doesn’t arrive with famine—it creeps in with erosion. Even high-capacity nations treat this threat with gravity: the Netherlands builds dikes and breeds saline-tolerant crops; Australia invests in recovery programs; California shifts from almonds to pistachios as the water table drops. In Bangladesh, adaptation is happening—but slowly. The country’s research institute has developed salt-tolerant rice, yet those seeds remain largely theoretical until they reach real farmers’ hands. The real danger is generational: if the land ceases to offer dignity or income, the next generation may simply walk away.

Meanwhile, the world’s urban centers build upward—flyovers, megaprojects, power plants. Each is celebrated, but as The Daily Star points out, “concrete does not feed families.” The challenge is to fund and govern irrigation infrastructure with the same intensity as transport or energy, to zone shrimp ponds thoughtfully, and to get innovative seeds into the hands of the people who need them. The echoes of past recoveries—where research, extension, and resilience turned back the threat of famine—are reminders that solutions are possible. But they demand a seriousness that matches the scale of the problem.

Elsewhere, another system is at its own crossroads. It’s been fifty years since free agency redefined baseball’s labor landscape—a story recounted in The San Juan Daily Star. The seismic shift began in 1975 when arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled in favor of pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, breaking the grip of the reserve clause that bound players to teams indefinitely. That decision not only changed the economics of the sport but tilted its power structure, giving athletes the ability to negotiate and shaping decades of salary inflation.

Today, the numbers are staggering: Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million contract, Juan Soto’s $765 million deal, and dozens of multimillion-dollar agreements. But with the collective bargaining agreement due to expire, both owners and the players’ union are preparing for a new clash. Owners argue that salaries have spiraled out of control; players want certain teams to spend more. The story is cyclical—each side seeking a system that protects its interests, as Phil Garner, a negotiator from the original free agency era, recalls: “We weren’t demanding more money. We demanded a different system. And now what the owners need is a system to protect themselves, and they don’t have it.”

The impact of free agency is both immediate and enduring. Salaries for average players soared in the late 1970s—some earning a million dollars a year after struggling for decades. The sport’s economics became a fire hose, overwhelming old structures and creating new opportunities. But as The Athletic observes, the coming negotiations could reshape baseball once again, with consequences for everyone from superstars to fans.

And hovering above all these stories is the persistent challenge of climate change and how societies respond to it. In Puerto Rico, Governor Jenniffer González Colón recently vetoed a bill that would have guaranteed at least $500,000 annually for the Climate Change Committee. Despite broad legislative support and a favorable report from the Senate’s environmental committee, concerns from the Office of Management and Budget about unspent funds led to the veto. The Committee’s responsibilities—drafting mitigation plans, engaging sectors, conducting workshops, and reporting progress—remain crucial. But as the debate over funding shows, even well-intentioned policies can stall on the shoals of bureaucracy and competing priorities.

Each of these stories, from the quiet erosion of food security to the high-stakes negotiations in baseball and the halting progress on climate policy, reveals a common thread: the systems that feed, employ, and protect us are always in flux. The question is whether the changes will be shaped by vision and cooperation—or by inertia and delay.

History, too, is a backdrop. On December 26, 610, a massive earthquake triggered the Asian tsunami, killing over 230,000 people. The anniversary, noted by The Daily Star, is a stark reminder of how quickly nature can upend societies—and how resilience and preparedness are never optional.

Assessing the facts across these domains, one thing is clear: the challenges of 2025—whether in agriculture, sport, or climate—require more than piecemeal fixes. The real story is whether leaders, communities, and institutions will act with enough urgency and foresight to ensure that today’s crossroads lead to renewal, not retreat.