News Overview

The double burden of malnutrition—the coexistence of underweight and micronutrient deficiencies with overweight and obesity—has become a major global public health concern. It is particularly acute in rapidly expanding urban areas, where the ready availability of cheap, processed foods and sugary drinks along with increasingly sedentary lifestyles have contributed to overnutrition, particularly among poorer populations. At the same time, socioeconomic

Ask any child who is well versed in Aesop’s fables and you will learn that golden eggs can be a source of continual or guaranteed success or wealth. And in that vein, successful agricultural research and development innovations that sustainably contribute to food and nutrition security and better livelihoods for all can be like golden eggs. The CGIAR Research Program

The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) announced a new three-year public–private partnership with the German development agency GIZ and the beverage company Grupo Modelo (AB InBev) to recharge aquifers and encourage water-conserving farming practices in key Mexican states. The partnership, launched today, aims to contribute to a more sustainable use of water in agriculture. The project will promote

A team of researchers in India has bettered an immensely popular pearl millet hybrid, HHB 67 Improved, endowing it with 58% higher resistance to downy mildew (DM) disease. The latest improvement has also increased the hybrid’s blast resistance by 12%, grain yield by 15% and dry fodder yield by 21% while retaining its hallmark early-maturity trait. Researchers at ICRISAT partnered

Historically, most of Malawi’s food has been produced by small-scale farmers operating on less than one acre. With poorly developed supply chains, persistent droughts and suboptimal crop yields, food production is largely characterized by subsistence farming. These challenges to subsistence farming are further exacerbated by increasingly common climate extremes, inadequate crop diversification, overdependence on rainfed… The post Biofortified sweetpotato improving

BY WEI ZHANG AND JESSICA WALLACH Maintaining healthy soils is crucial to long-term agricultural sustainability and food security—yet soils face major stresses worldwide. In 2015, the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils rated one third of land worldwide as moderately to highly degraded. The impacts are especially serious in Africa south of the Sahara and South Asia, where smallholder farmers must contend

COVID-19 may have forced the 50th anniversary of Earth Day to be commemorated online last year, yet millions of people participated in calls to action. As we begin to look beyond the pandemic, however, it’s vital to remember that we cannot go back to business-as-usual as far as our planet is concerned. Against the backdrop of Earth Day 2021’s theme of

Interview with Peter Laderach by Nina de Ayala Parker For the 51st Earth Day 2021 I spoke to Peter Laderach – climate scientist with more than 20 years of experience globally, and lead of CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security – about how CGIAR and CCAFS are contributing to ‘the restoration of our Earth’.  Earth Day was first established in 1970 so that a growing global community of activists could demonstrate