News Overview

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

Researchers will source useful gene variations from CGIAR genebanks to develop climate-smart crops A new US$25.7 million project, led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), a Research Center part of CGIAR, the world’s largest public sector agriculture research partnership, is expanding the use of biodiversity held in the world’s genebanks to develop new climate-smart crop varieties for

Scientists from the International Livestock Research Institute, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Liverpool and elsewhere have published an article in Nature Microbiology on how diverse strains of a common pathogenic bacteria spread in Nairobi, Kenya. The article titled ‘Population genomics of Escherichia coli in livestock-keeping households across a rapidly developing urban landscape’ sheds light on how diseases might emerge

The world’s largest genetic library for beans, cassava and tropical forages has been officially opened in Colombia to preserve plant biodiversity and support cutting-edge agricultural research. The Future Seeds genebank, situated near Cali, provides long-term conservation of the world’s largest collections of crops, including two of the most important staples in the Global South along with the plants eaten by

Post-harvest losses stemming from poor post-harvest handling of their crops is one of the challenges facing farmers in Lango sub-regions in districts of; Dokolo, Apac, Amolatar, Otuke, and Kwania and Teso sub-region in districts of Amuria and Kapelebyong in Northern Uganda. Like their counterparts across sub-Saharan Africa, poor post-harvest handling is one of the main contributing factors to food insecurity,

Africa is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, impacting the emergence, re-emergence and spread of vector-borne diseases. The epidemiology of tick-borne diseases in tropical Africa is complex, often characterized by co-infection of livestock and wildlife with multiple tick-borne pathogens. Added to this complexity is the diversity of livestock production systems on the continent, ranging from extensive pastoral systems

BY ZHE GUO AND BILLY BABIS Accurate and precise monitoring of agricultural output in developing countries is a crucial tool for the proper allocation of public funds and services, in addressing poverty, and in sustainably increasing yields to feed growing populations. But accurate crop yield estimation is particularly challenging in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where heterogeneous smallholder farms predominate, making data

A success story in global cooperation, CGIAR’s network of genebanks is helping scientists climate-proof food systems and address some of humanity’s most pressing challenges The Bezos Earth Fund pledged US$17 million for Future Seeds, a new CGIAR genebank inaugurated today. The new genebank will bolster global efforts to safeguard the world’s future food supply.   Future Seeds houses the world’s largest