To respond to the growing demands for high oleic peanuts, groundnut scientists from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and partners across India have just developed the first-ever oleic-rich peanuts in Spanish and Virginia bunch types, adapted to Indian farm conditions. Until now, Indian groundnut farmers have not benefited from the fast growing global confectionary market, as they could not supply high oleic content peanuts as required by the confectionary industry.

Freshwater is the fuel that runs the engine of modern society. Without enough fresh water, life as we know it would grind to a halt. Freshwater is also the lifeblood of rice farming in Asia. It is a crucial part of the equation that produces the staple food that feeds both small towns and massive cities. Now, the relationship is under threat.

Did you know that scientists have designed rice plants that can flower on demand? How about the study on rice enriched with antioxidant resveratrol? These are just some of the interesting news on crop biotech in 2017.
 

Global warming has affected not only plant biodiversity, but also altered the way plants grow. A team of researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) joined forces with the Leibniz Institute for Plant Biochemistry (IPB) to discover which molecular processes are involved in plant growth at high temperatures. This could help breed plants that adapt to global warming.

The South Asia Biotechnology Centre (SABC), New Delhi and Indian Society for Cotton Improvement (ISCI), Mumbai have released a comprehensive publication on "Cotton Pink Bollworm Management Strategy" during the program on "Management of Pink Bollworm". The event was organized by the Cotton Association of India (CAI), the apex body of cotton sector in the country on January 10, 2018 at Mumbai, Maharashtra.

Researchers at NRGene and Wageningen University & Research are working on creating multi-genome mapping of commercial food potatoes. Potatoes are known to be the fourth most consumed food crop globally. Mapping the genome of potatoes is extremely difficult because it is an auto-tetraploid, wherein each potato cell contains four nearly identical copies of each chromosome and gene.

Global food prices decreased in December 2017, led by sharp declines for vegetable oils and dairy products, according to the latest Food Price Index issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

In response to Ethiopia’s worst drought in 50 years and the country’s critical shortage of maize and wheat seed for sowing in 2016, Ethiopian organizations, seed producers, and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) partnered to deliver to farmers over 3,400 tons of high quality seed that was sown on more than 100,300 hectares. “We went three years without rain,” says farmer Usman Kadir, whose 1.5-hectare homestead in Wanjo Bebele village, Halaba Special Woreda, supports a household of 11 persons

The 2nd Annual Expert Meeting and Youth Dialogue of the UNESCO Global Pilot Project “Open Digital Library on Traditional Games” will be on 15-16 January 2018 at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France. The Meeting is held in the framework of a global pilot project launched in 2015, for the “Creation of an Open Digital Library on Traditional Games - Innovative use of ICTs to Safeguard and Promote Indigenous and Local Knowledge for Learning, Development, and the Rapprochement of Cultures.”
 

A recent paper by Dr Carl Lachat of Gent University, Jessica Raneri of Bioversity International, and others introduces Dietary Species Richness, a new food biodiversity indicator to help examine the correlation between agrobiodiversity and diet quality. Nutrition Research Specialist, Raneri explains, “Food system sustainability, biodiversity and nutrition are current hot topics, yet we didn’t actually have any validated indicators that could measure the nexus between these three. Now we do.”