News & Events

In 2025, India launched two significant genome-edited rice varieties, DRR Rice 100 (Kamala) and Pusa DST Rice 1, using CRISPR technology for enhanced climate resilience, higher yields, and water savings, marking India as the first nation to release such varieties, with goals to boost food security and sustainability by improving drought/salinity tolerance and reducing emissions.

A one-day CIMMYT–CGIAR Scaling for Impact (S4I) workshop with BARI on 8 Dec 2025 brought together 25 early- and mid-career scientists (56% women) to strengthen creative and systems thinking for more innovative, inclusive, and scalable agricultural research. Through hands-on sessions on problem mapping.

Bigger, tastier tomatoes and eggplants could soon grace our dinner plates thanks to Johns Hopkins scientists who have discovered genes that control how large the fruits will grow. The research—led by teams at Johns Hopkins University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory—could lead to the development of new varieties of heirloom tomatoes and eggplants, including those that help support agriculture in areas around the world where local varieties are currently too small for large-scale production.

After a sharp decline in 2023, the global forest products sector saw signs of stabilization in 2024, according to Global forest products facts and figures 2024 , released today by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The report highlights that global international trade in wood and paper products has regained momentum, with modest growth recorded across most major product groups.

Carboxylesterases (CXEs) are ester hydrolyzing enzymes closely associated with the degradation of volatile esters and aroma release in fruit. Pineapple possesses a strong, ester-rich aroma, yet its CXE gene family has not been characterized. Here, we performed a genome-wide identification and analysis of the pineapple CXE family, detected 20 members, and pinpointed AcCXE4 and AcCXE7 as key negative regulators of aroma accumulation and prime candidates for aroma-oriented breeding

If you like your tomatoes sweet, the smaller cherry tomato varieties are currently the ones to go for. But bigger tomato varieties could soon get a sweetness boost with the help of CRISPR gene editing. The bigger a tomato is, the lower its sugar content usually is, says Jinzhe Zhang at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. Efforts to boost the sweetness of larger varieties have had downsides such as lowering yields.

Partnerships are increasingly the foundation of successful development initiatives and are essential to addressing the global challenges facing the transformation of global agrifood systems to be more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable, and for ensuring the Four Betters: better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life, leaving no one behind.

Many coral reefs have fish stocks that are depleted below the level at which sustainable production is maximized. Lower production means that millions of people are losing out on potential food, income, and livelihoods. Rebuilding these stocks to maximize sustainable production can contribute toward ending hunger and malnutrition but requires active and effective fisheries management. Yet, for fish stock recovery plans to be implemented, recovery benefits, targets, and timeframes need to be quantified.

This perspective addresses two of humanity’s greatest challenges: feeding a growing population and conserving biodiversity. We begin by examining the legacy of Nikolai Vavilov, who pioneered the improvement of crops such as wheat and beans by hybridizing them with their wild relatives. This strategy used wild species biodiversity to introduce new genetic variation into crops, making them more resilient and productive.

FAO’s digital transformation journey began with the launch of the Digital FAO initiative on 1 December 2019, under the leadership of the Director-General QU Dongyu. The overarching goal was to modernize operations, moving from paper to process, from delays to delivery, and from ordinary to extraordinary.

Mutualism between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) is imperative for sustainable agricultural production. Jasmonic acid (JA) signal transduction has been demonstrated to play an important role in AMF symbiosis with the host. In this study, SC9 cassava was selected as the research object to investigate the effect of the jasmonic acid signaling pathway on symbiosis establishment and cassava growth in AMF and cassava symbiosis.

The Cassava Biotechnology Network (CBN) was formed in response to the need for a forum to discuss cassava biotechnology issues and to foster cassava biotechnology research on priority subjects. In CBN, the experience and efforts of many different organizations and countries are pulled together to collaborate in research and to share techniques, results, genetic materials, and training opportunities. Through broad-ranging dialogue across disciplines, CBN has defined a set of cassava biotechnology research priorities.