News & Events

Over the years, Kenya has produced many development policies that have created an enabling environment to address poverty, food security, economic, social, and climate change issues. This puts our country among the top with robust policy and legal instruments that support national growth. In particular, recognizing the importance of climate change, Kenya has developed many policies, plans, and strategies, and ratified international conventions, all in an effort to provide a framework for promoting climate change adaptation and mitigation.

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) has successfully secured the endorsement of ASEAN Member States (AMS) and the support of Plus Three dialogue partners for the launch of ASEAN Rice Net, a new regional network for sharing and evaluating advanced IRRI-developed rice breeding lines. The collaborative partnership is underpinned by the Rice Genetic Solutions for Climate Resilience and Value Addition program.

A novel recessive bacterial blight resistance locus designated as a xa-45(t) was identified from Oryza glaberrima accession IRGC 102600B, transferred to O. sativa and mapped to the long arm of chromosome 8 using ddRAD sequencing approach. The identified QTL spans 80 kb region on Nipponbare reference genome IRGSP-1.0 and contains 9 candidate genes.

The agriculture and science community in the Philippines celebrated the launch of Asi@Connect RICESTATS DATABASE: Leveraging the Cloud for Rice Statistics and Analytics.

RICESTATS DATABASE, which is led by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), intends to create a reference resource by using an ontology to combine data into a one-stop accessible database with a displayable dashboard for rice statistics.

On the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, in the Chagga community’s Shimbwe Juu village, much of the area is divided into ‘Kihamba’, plots of land with a traditional home and garden. Here, the Kihamba help form a multilayered agroforestry system that boasts over 500 types of plants and is rich in biodiversity. Coffee, yams, bananas, ginger, taro and cassava thrive amongst fruit trees that are irrigated even in the dry season by a network of water channels flowing 17 kilometres down the mountainside

Soybean mosaic virus (SMV) causes significant reductions in soybean yield and seed quality. Because seedborne infections can serve as primary sources of inoculum for SMV infections, resistance to SMV seed transmission provides a means to limit the impacts of SMV

FAO recognizes that agriculture and food systems play a fundamental role in feeding a growing population and solving the climate crisis but that these systems must be transformed through inclusive, multisectoral approaches that reduce emissions, draw down carbon, and boost climate resilience and adaptation.

FAO launched today a three-year Global Action for Fall Armyworm Control to scale up efforts to curb the growing spread of the invasive pest which is causing serious damage to food production and affecting millions of farmers across the world. Fall Armyworm (FAW), a crop pest native to the Americas, has rapidly spread through Africa, and to the Near East and Asia in the past four years.

Transposons are controlled by epigenetic regulations. To obtain newly activated autonomous elements of Dart1, a DNA transposon, in rice, seeds of a stable pale yellow leaf (pyl-stb) mutant caused by the insertion of nDart1-0, a nonautonomous element in OsClpP5, were treated with 5-azaC, a demethylating agent. In the 5-azaC-treated M1 plants, 60–70% of the plants displayed variegated pale yellow leaf (pyl-v) phenotype, depending on the concentration of 5-azaC used, suggesting that inactivated Dart1

World food prices rose significantly in November, reaching their highest point in more than two years, driven by jumps in the international prices of meat products and vegetable oils. The FAO Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of commonly-traded food commodities, averaged 177.2 points over the month, up 2.7 percent from October and 9.5 percent from the same period a year earlier.

FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu today participated at the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee Principals Meeting together with UN counterparts whose agencies, like FAO, work on the humanitarian front. The meeting provided an opportunity for the FAO Director-General to exchange ideas with fellow principals on global humanitarian work issues.

Maize grain yield is determined by agronomically important traits that are controlled by interactions among and between genes and environmental factors. Considerable efforts have been made to identify major quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for yield-related traits; however, few were previously isolated and characterized in maize. In this study, we divided a QTL for kernel row number (KRN), qKRN5, into two tightly linked loci, qKRN5a and qKRN5b, using advanced backcross populations derived from near-isogenic lines.