News Overview

BY JOHN MCDERMOTT, DANIELLE RESNICK, NICHOLA NAYLOR AND JESSICA WALLACH The COVID-19 pandemic has presented countries with enormous policy challenges. Policymakers have had to balance limited resources between health, food systems, and economies in a continually evolving public health emergency and an associated recession. Low-income countries have faced especially difficult choices because of their limited budgets and administrative capacity. As

26 April 2021 – Mr. Le Minh Hoan, Leader of Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), gave a statement to the 1st Round Table of the Ministerial Policy Dialogues on Transition to Sustainable Agriculture Conference of Agriculture at COP26. He emphasized the country’s remarkable progress in transforming agriculture production to be sustainable and contribute to reduce greenhouse gas

More than ever before, remote evaluations and evaluation approaches that require a rapid and cost-effective assessment of research for development (R4D) interventions are being sought. Such approaches, while not covering the full gamut of evaluation criteria or in-depth exploration of cross-cutting themes, have the potential to bring top-level evidence to decision-makers in a short turnaround time. The CGIAR System Council

Around 2 billion people globally are food insecure. Yet strategies to reduce chronic hunger and improve nutrition and livelihoods are limited by risks related to climate change and ecological resilience. Irrigation has long been used to increase food production, and recent studies suggest that irrigation in severely food insecure areas offers multiple pathways to improved nutrition. Off-grid solar irrigation, in

BY YING VISSER AND MARIËLLE KARSSENBERG IFPRI’s recently-released 2021 Global Food Policy Report (GFPR) is published at a time when the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to grow. With the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit set for September, the global policy focus is on transforming food systems after COVID-19. An April 15 virtual event organized by IFPRI, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Netherlands

The rolling plains of the Aba Gerima watershed cover the upper portion of Lake Tana sub-basin in north-western Ethiopia. Agriculture is its mainstay, with cereal cultivation occupying about 60% of 984 hectares. But the ecology of the landscape is threatened by the conversion of natural vegetated land to cropland, and continuing land degradation has been affecting the livelihoods of farmers.

“On some days I think I can see hopeful signs. On others, I think no, we’re still falling way behind.”  Philip Thornton is a principal scientist and CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) flagship leader at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). He was recently named the 39th ‘hottest’ climate change scientist by Reuters, the only one

We have never had a better understanding of the need to transform food systems. The way we produce and consume food is a major contributor to our climate crisis: about 25% of planet-warming gases comes from agriculture and land use. It also fails to properly nourish humanity, and the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically worsened the situation. Today, United Nations estimates that