News Overview

Poor diets are now the leading global risk factor for chronic disease—and in India, unhealthy diets account for an estimated 56% of the total disease burden. A new policy note from IFPRI, CGIAR’s TAFSSA initiative, and MSSRF unpacks what’s driving India’s cereal-heavy, increasingly ultra-processed diets, and lays out practical, evidence-based actions to shift the food environment—such as front-of-pack labelling, smarter marketing restrictions, nutrition education, and more nutrition-sensitive safety nets like ICDS and PM-POSHAN. This blog was prepared under CGIAR’s Scaling for Impact (S4I) and Better Diets and Nutrition Science programs.

Boeng Sneh Lake in Ba Phnom, Prey Veng, Cambodia has reached a major milestone in sustainable water and fisheries management. In late 2025, the District Technical Working Group (DTWG) secured Provincial Department of Water Resources and Meteorology (PDoWRAM) funding to replace the lake’s deteriorated water gate—critical infrastructure for regulating flows, reducing dry-season shortages and wet-season overflow, and easing conflicts between farmers and fishers. Building on inclusive, evidence-based planning and community consultations that boosted lake water retention by 28% in 2024–25, the upgrade signals how local coordination can unlock real government investment and strengthen climate resilience and biodiversity recovery.

As the world marks 2026 as the International Year of the Woman Farmer, CGIAR is positioning its science, innovation, and partnerships at the centre of the global agenda. Vivian Atakos, Global Engagement and Policy Lead, spoke with Nicoline de Haan, Director of the CGIAR Gender Equality and Inclusion Accelerator, to unpack what the Year entails and how CGIAR colleagues and partners can engage.

In many agricultural markets, the limited ability to measure product quality at the source and trace it through the supply chain remains a key barrier to improvement, as the absence of reliable quality information blunts incentives for upstream actors to invest in better practices

With nearly 40,000 captive wild animals raised across hundreds of small-scale facilities, Thai Nguyen Province in northern Vietnam is emerging as a critical frontline for preventing zoonotic disease outbreaks.

We mourn the passing of our colleague Salma Kadry, who always put people first in her work as a climate, peace, and security specialist with the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT and CGIAR. Her contributions were fundamental in representing the Middle East and North Africa in climate security science and policy.