News Overview

BY SUMAN CHAKRABARTI, SAMUEL SCOTT, HAROLD ALDERMAN, PURNIMA MENON AND DANIEL GILLIGAN By April 2020, schools in 170 countries were closed to curtail COVID-19 transmission. In India, 247 million children have been out of the classroom for over a year. Beyond the devastating consequences school closures are having on learning, health experts are particularly concerned about vulnerable Indian children missing out on

WorldFish’s Resilient Small-Scale Fisheries Research Analyst, Joctan Dos Reis Lopes, answers questions on the role of digital innovations in transforming aquatic food systems to be more equitable, inclusive, and accessible to young people in the Pacific. Read more

In Myanmar, just four out of ten households have access to nutritious diets. This lack of diverse, nutritious foods means one in every three children under five years of age suffers from stunting, and one in every five is underweight. Read more

Smallholder farmers are often torn between maize seed varieties that have multiple desirable traits. Since they cannot always have it all — there are limits on what traits breeders can integrate in any given variety — they face the dilemma of which seed to pick at the expense of an equally desirable option. Trait preference trade-offs among maize farmers in

New digital communication strategies are forging international partnerships and boosting collaboration between WorldFish and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in service of smallholder aquaculture farmers. Read more

After a gap of 14 years, Odisha state in India officially released a new groundnut variety ‘Kalinga Groundnut-101’ as an alternative to ‘Devi’, the ruling variety. Both the varieties are of ICRISAT origin. The new variety has a pod yield and kernel yield advantage of 12.1 % and 20.7% respectively. It is tolerant to drought, foliar fungal diseases, late leaf

BY UMA LELE AND MARK ROSEGRANT Increasing public and private investment in agricultural research and innovation by only $4 billion per year would achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2) in East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean and reduce the risk of hunger from 24.3% to 11.8% of the population of Africa south of the Sahara.