Simple processing is spreading the advantages of orange-fleshed sweetpotato, with benefits for farmers, food producers and family nutrition.The CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB), through an initiative supported by its Scaling Fund, is promoting the use of a purée made from orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) as an ingredient in baked and fried foods in Kenya, Malawi and Uganda.

Did you know that vehicles with steering wheels on the left are often cheaper to make than right hand-drive cars? They are mass-produced in much larger batches. But many drivers and governments were just unwilling to change to this dominant design. We humans are not so adept at change. Instead of embracing novel ways of thinking, we’d rather stick to the old ones. We cling onto what is safe, what is familiar, or what we are already good at.

Multiple stresses on our natural resources are making it harder and harder to produce our food. Farmers and food producers are having to contend with a climate that is becoming more unpredictable by the day, along with the consequences it brings such as water scarcity and soil degradation, just to name a few. Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of fresh water withdrawals. With only 2.5 percent of the world’s water being fresh water,

The Global Network Against Food Crises (GNAFC) today held a high-level event to present a review of the most recent global data available on how the knock-on effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are driving up acute hunger in vulnerable countries that were already wracked by food crises even before the novel coronavirus arrived on the scene. The meeting was also important for international resource partners and relevant actors to discuss emerging priorities, financing and programming implications in light of COVID-19.

Researchers led by Dr. Guilhem Reyt from the School of Biosciences and Future Food Beacon at the University of Nottingham have discovered how a protein in plant roots controls the uptake of minerals and water, a finding which could improve the tolerance of agricultural crops to climate change and reduce the need for chemical fertilizers.

Experts from Spain developed a new, more efficient type of transcription activator-like effector nuclease (TALEN) for gene editing. The description of the new bicistronic TALENs is published in Current Protocols in Stem Cell Biology. The researchers generated bicistonic genes wherein the classical TALEN coding sequences are connected by 2A elements to different reporter molecules including fluorochromes (TALEN‐F) or membrane receptors (TALEN‐M).

As the 10^th Annual Summit of the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) takes place this week, Africa is confronting a unique set of intertwined challenges. While African countries have on average seen far fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita than many countries in North America and Europe, the effects of the pandemic are reverberating through the continent’s food systems, impacting vulnerable urban and rural Africans.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) announced its proposal for a new rule that will ease the regulation of some National Priority List sites. The public is being invited to comment on the said proposal. US EPA is proposing exemptions under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for certain plant-incorporated protectants (PIPs)

The first-ever government-funded research project on Synthetic Biology in Kenya has been launched. The project, funded under the country's National Research Fund, will employ synthetic biology innovations in addressing intractable challenges in food security and healthcare. Led by a multidisciplinary team of local researchers, the project titled Developing low-cost diagnostic tools and biosensors for rapid detection of crop and human pathogens in Kenya aims at harnessing the power of synthetic biology to provide viable solutions to delayed disease surveillance and intervention in the country.

The first coronavirus infection in Nigeria was recorded on February 27, 2020. Samples were sent to the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID) by the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control for genome sequencing. As a result, the first SARS-CoV-2 sequence data on the African continent was published on March 6, 2020. Now, scientists at ACEGID in Nigeria's Redeemer's University identified seven lineages of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus out of over 1,000 in the world.