News Overview

Congratulations to our colleagues at ACRE Africa and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) whose project “Eyes on the Ground: Providing Quality Model Training Data through Smartphones” has been selected for Lacuna Fund’s first cohort of supported projects in the agricultural AI (artificial intelligence) for social good domain. In the Eyes on the Ground project, the team from ACRE Africa and IFPRI will use smartphones

Scientists are calling for accelerated adoption of new hybrid maize varieties with resistance to maize lethal necrosis (MLN) disease in sub-Saharan Africa. In combination with recommended integrated pest management practices, adopting these new varieties is an important step towards safeguarding smallholder farmers against this devastating viral disease. A new publication in Virus Research shows that these second-generation MLN-resistant hybrids developed

Virtual launch event  January 29, 2021, 9:00-10:00 AM EST Forest tenure pathways to gender equality: A practitioner’s guide REGISTER HERE * * Upon registration, you will receive a confirmation email from “IFPRI Events” with the unique link to join the webinar on the day of the event. You will also be able to save it as a Calendar item.  There is

To truly understand the role of gender and inequities in the food system, nutrition and health in low- and middle-income countries, one has to consider gender in the context of all three elements of the food system, namely, the food supply chain, consumer behaviour and the food environment. To this end, a new scoping review (Dec 2020) has been published

UPDATE: The Call for Abstracts is now closed. For the latest information on the 2nd International Agrobiodiversity Congress (scheduled for 15-18 November 2021), please click here.Despite widespread recognition of the urgent need to change the way we grow and consume our food we are far from reaching this goal. Food production remains the single largest driver of environmental degradation and biodiversity

Progressive heterobeltiosis for bunch weight in bred ‘Matooke’ banana hybrids (NARITAs), when grown together with their parents and grandparents in Uganda; A: ‘Entukura’ (3x female grandparent), B: ‘1438K-1’ (4x female parent) and C: ‘NARITA 17’ (3x hybrid)   Plant breeders are generally looking for heterosis, where the offspring of a cross performs significantly better on some measure than the average

As policymakers across the world grapple with the possible trade-offs from shutdowns to decrease what some are calling the third—and hopefully final wave—of COVID-19, One CGIAR is using foresight and trade-off analyses to prepare for alternative futures related to food and nutrition security. As we enter the new year, hindsight shows no one was truly prepared for the health implications

An international team of scientists, led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), has demonstrated how better nutrient management using digital tools, such as the Nutrient Expert decision support tool, can boost rice and wheat productivity and increase farmers’ income while reducing chemical fertilizer use and greenhouse gas emissions. Reported today in Nature Scientific Reports, the results show