News Overview

BY CATHERINE RAGASA, ISABEL LAMBRECHT AND MICHAEL WANG While COVID-19 transmission dynamics and impacts have been different in rural and urban areas, big impacts on rural incomes and livelihoods have been observed. In this post, Catherine Ragasa, Isabel Lambrecht and Michael Wang assess income impacts on landed and landless rural people in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone, comparing bi-monthly surveys during the pandemic to pre-pandemic

BY FRANCISCO CEBALLOS, MANUEL HERNANDEZ AND CYNTHIA PAZ Global patterns and local variations of COVID-19 impacts on income, food security, and dietary diversity are gradually emerging. In this post, Francisco Ceballos, Manuel Hernandez, and Cynthia Paz document these effects on the vulnerable population of the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Their findings track those in many places, including greater income losses

In Pullman, Washington, the director and reproductive biologist at the Center for Reproductive Biology, Jon Oatley, and his team have generated a gene-edited goat, known as surrogate sire—a goat that is capable of ‘hosting’ sperm from a different buck. Oatley believes that this technology is the key to unlocking the growing demand for food and nutritional security and has paired

BY JAWOO KOO, CLAUDIA RINGLER, ANIRUDDHA GHOSH AND CARLO AZZARRI India’s devastating second wave of COVID-19 is adding unprecedented numbers of new cases every day, and it seems to be spreading more to rural areas. This trend poses serious challenges for efforts to contain the disease, as rural areas may have heightened pandemic vulnerabilities. It is hard to assess the urban-rural

Public and private sector scientists visited 20,000 pearl millet breeding plots at ICRISAT this week to select material for their breeding programs. The plots displayed promising hybrid parental lines (both seed and restorer parents) bred for different traits and adaptations. Materials with tolerance to drought, heat, downy mildew and blast, iron and zinc biofortified, exclusive forage type and promising lines

The Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA) launched 13 Farmers’ Hubs to service 13,000 sorghum and cowpea farmers in Kano and Jigawa States. The initiative was in response to survey findings on low farm yields attributed to difficult access to quality seeds, inputs and adulterated agro-chemicals (including adulterated fertilizers) in Northern Nigeria. The hubs are an integral component of the

Dr. Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, a CGIAR scientist and nutrition expert from WorldFish, was named today as the 2021 World Food Prize Laureate for improving the quality, quantity, and availability of food in the world through her pioneering scientific work on nutrition, fish, and aquatic food systems. Often referred to as the “Nobel Prize for food and agriculture,” the World Food

As part of efforts to ensure sustainability and scalability of efforts to build capacity in Tanzania to respond to the challenges posed by climate change to agriculture, IITA organized a series of awareness creation sessions for councilors and other district-level planners on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) planning and budgeting. The team from the USAID-funded Building Capacity for Resilient Food Security project specifically met