News & Events
Freshwater deficits are affecting more and more people throughout the world. In order to counter this, our global food system will have to change, our author maintains. A case for more research on alternative crops and smart water solutions. Our world today is in the grip of a climate crisis. So grave it is that it is listed as one of the several existential risks to humanity. Climate change is slowly taking a toll on communities, ecosystems and economies. And its costs are rising. The nations least prepared for climate-induced effects are, unfortunately, the most vulnerable.
We need a broad approach to SDG2. CGIAR is working across all 5 SDG sub-targets. This means our selected impact areas focus on universal nutrition – affordable, safe, diverse food – as much as zero hunger; on small-scale farmers’ incomes and purchasing power; and on the environmental foundations of food security. This includes substantial research on water, and addressing both wild biodiversity and agrobiodiversity, including maintenance of the world’s network of regional gene banks for crops and their wild relatives.
While the impacts of arsenic (As) and Magnaporthe oryzae on rice have been well-studied, a dearth of knowledge exists on how rice responds to their combined stress. Moreover, increasing exogenous silicon (Si) can alleviate M. oryzae infection and As uptake, but how increasing exogenous Si affects the combined stress of M. oryzae and As is unknown. We grew three cultivars of rice that varied in their susceptibility to As and M. oryzae under low (50 μM, SiL) and high (1500 μM, SiH) Si
The outbreak of COVID-19 has forced communities to confront what sacrifices they are willing to make to quickly address threats to public health. The pandemic shock is unusual in its rapid appearance, but the question of trade-offs is nothing new. Environmental regulations, safety mandates, and the battles against other infectious diseases all impose both pecuniary and nonpecuniary costs on society in exchange for improved population health.
Over the past four decades, structural biologist Raúl Padrón has elucidated muscle contraction at the molecular and atomic level using a model system that he and his colleague Roger Craig developed: tarantula skeletal muscle. Padrón’s research on how skeletal muscle thick filaments relax and become activated is helping to inform the molecular pathogenesis of human muscle diseases
- Mr. Ngo Minh Dung submitted his preliminary Ph.D Thesis on "Stimulating the dragon fruit crop (Hylocereus undatus (Haw) Britt. And Rose) flowering by compact lamp treatments”, NCS. Ngô Minh Dũng, chuyên ngành: Khoa học Cây trồng.
Endosperm starch synthesis is a primary determinant of grain yield and is sensitive to high-temperature stress. The maize chloroplast-localized 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase (6PGDH), PGD3, is critical for endosperm starch accumulation. Maize also has two cytosolic isozymes, PGD1 and PGD2, that are not required for kernel development. We found that cytosolic PGD1 and PGD2 isozymes have heat-stable activity, while amyloplast-localized PGD3 activity is labile under heat stress conditions.
Herbivory, the feeding on living plant parts by animals, is a fundamental ecosystem process affecting both global autotroph biomass production in natural habitats and crop production in agricultural settings (1). Invasions by herbivorous insects are an ancient threat to food security as evidenced, for example, by their inclusion as one of the 10 Biblical plagues. Insect pests remain a major threat to the world’s food security both in terms of regular annual crop loss as well as periodic catastrophic losses
Probably as never before in its 75-year history, FAO has had to act as driver and convener through a global crisis that threatened to tip the world’s agri-food systems into chaos. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the restrictions and measures associated with it, threw into sharp relief the fragility of millions of livelihoods, both rural and urban, and the precarious position of many unsung farm hands, smallholders and informal market traders.
Food contamination with mycotoxins is a worldwide concern, because these toxins produced by several fungal species have detrimental effects on animal and/or human health. In maize, fumonisins are among the toxins with the highest threatening potential because they are mainly produced by Fusarium verticillioides, which is distributed worldwide. Plant breeding has emerged as an effective and environmentally safe method to reduce fumonisin levels in maize kernels, but although phenotypic selection has proved effective for improving resistance to fumonisin contamination, further resources should be mobilized to meet farmers' needs.
“Tackling extreme poverty can sometimes seem overwhelming, but there are some incredibly simple and effective technologies that can literally change the lives of people living in some of the most remote places in the world,” said Ambrosio Barros, IFAD’s Country Director for Malawi. “Crowdfunding is a quick and effective way to mobilise finance so that we can immediately bring these innovative products to the people who need them.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a brutal truth: while global agricultural markets remained stable with production levels even reaching an all-time high, smallholder farmers and rural communities continue to reel from value chain disruptions, job and income loss, and food price inflation. These challenges are more striking in developing countries across South Asia and Africa, where a huge majority of the population work in small farms and where agriculture has been the lifeblood of rural families for many generations.