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
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,