News Overview

Scientists with the International Potato Center (CIP) and Uganda’s National Crops Resources Research Institute (NaCRRI) are harnessing the latest scientific developments to breed disease-resistant, high-yielding and climate-resilient sweetpotato varieties to improve the livelihoods and food and nutrition security of smallholder farmers. To accelerate the adoption of those varieties and achieve widespread impact, they’ve adopted a strong customer-driven mindset. The adoption

Six boxes of wheat seed sit in our cold store. This is the first time in a decade that my team has not been able to send to Ukraine the improved germplasm we’ve developed as part of the Global Wheat Program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Texcoco, Mexico. International postal and courier services are suspended. The

When Ukraine banned the export of wheat this month and started scattering land mines in fields of winter cereals and sunflowers to slow invading Russian troops, it was bad news for Egyptian families struggling to put food on the table. Egypt, which counts on Ukraine and Russia for half its food imports, was already facing food supply disruptions and high

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the disruption, by sanctions or war, of two of the world’s largest grain exporters. This means 2022 is shaping up to be a very difficult year for the global food system. With global prices of food and fertilizers already reaching worrying highs, the continuing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in

Emerging plant diseases threaten Africa’s food security, but international scientific collaboration can help to turn these menaces around. Looking out across a crop nursery filled with diseased plants, you’d be forgiven for thinking there is something wrong. However, these are no ordinary nurseries – they are “disease nurseries” filled with crop samples and breeding lines gathered from around the

Bangladesh will be the fourth focus country of SPIA’s national data systems team. We recently launched a recruitment for two positions (a Postdoctoral fellow and a Liaison officer)* to be based in Dhaka to join our virtual team with members in Vietnam, Uganda, Ethiopia, France and the United States. We hope to have filled those positions by July 2022. The

The livelihoods of millions worldwide continue to be at risk after UN Member States failed to agree a new treaty to ensure protections for the high seas, according to WorldFish Interim Director General Essam Yassin Mohammed. Read more

BY SWATI MALHOTRA OPEN ACCESS | CC-BY-4.0 For decades, governments have provided massive support to agriculture—an average of $639 billion per year during 2016-18—yet global food production is environmentally unsustainable and a major contributor to climate change, and food security remains tenuous for many. A Feb. 2 IFPRI policy seminar explored potential solutions to these problems laid out in the new IFPRI-World