News Overview

National, regional, and international partners at the CGIAR Plant Health and Rapid Response to Protect Food Security and Livelihoods Initiative launch in Nairobi, Kenya, on May 12, 2022. (Credit: Susan Otieno/CIMMYT) CGIAR together with national, regional, and international partners kicked off the Plant Health and Rapid Response to Protect Food Security and Livelihoods Initiative also known as the Plant Health

Not many organizations can claim to have saved a billion lives. But CGIAR’s crop breeding work has been credited with doing just that. Its research catalyzed the Green Revolution by developing high-yielding wheat and rice varieties, mostly for Asia, where starvation loomed. But today’s challenges cannot be overcome using the same approaches that delivered those life-saving varieties. Poverty, food and nutrition

Public breeding is undergoing a slow transformation as it adopts better, faster, more modern technologies and practices – all with the goal of ensuring farmers get the crop varieties they need.  With an improvement plan that focuses on centralized and modernized breeding, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is setting the pace for CGIAR. IRRI has been making big advances, including designing

A quiet transformation is underway at the Kenya Agriculture & Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO). New facilities are being developed, flows of digital data are coming online, ways of working and partnerships are being redrawn. All this, as part of a new way of investing in crop breeding research in a bid to finally end hunger in the region. Over the last

CGIAR-sponsored Nutrition for Growth side event grapples with challenges to provide nutritious diets for everyone, everywhere At the United Nations Food System Summit this past September, nutrition was identified as a key action area deserving renewed focus as the world continues its pursuit of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. While Zero Hunger is still a primary objective, focusing on this end alone is not enough. Now, as the world prepares for

Nature Reports published an open-access paper on a big plant-genome sequencing study conducted by ICARDA and ICRISAT scientists which will facilitate the breeding of more climate-smart, disease-tolerant chickpea crop varieties for better food security. Food legumes are essential for nutrition security. Chickpea, ICARDA staple crop and the third most-produced food legume worldwide, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, is

Adaptation investments urgently needed for agriculture-dependent regions like Africa that have done the least to cause the climate crisis but suffer the most. Glasgow, UK (November 2, 2021) – Facing mounting evidence that climate change will fall hardest on agriculture-dependent regions like sub-Saharan Africa, a coalition of funders at the United Nations climate summit pledged $575 million today to deliver climate-smart solutions to

Looking ahead, food system researchers and national governments around the world are concerned about achieving Sustainable Development Goal #2 – Zero Hunger – by 2030. Moreover, they are apprehensive about our ability to achieve this goal without increasing agriculture’s impact on the environment.   Improved crop breeding and seed delivery are two innovations that herald great promise for solving this challenge. This morning, in a virtual panel… The post Crops to End