Agriculture occupies about 40 percent of global land, and food systems are responsible for up to 30 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions and 70 percent of freshwater use. At the same time, hundreds of millions of people are food insecure, with wide-scale undernutrition still occurring alongside increasing prevalence of overweight, obesity, and non-communicable diseases, leading many to conclude: “Our food system is broken, we need to fix it.”

Ministers and other representatives of FAO Members in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) region shared today their concerns and priorities over how to respond to the COVID-19 disruptions and accelerate progress towards sustainable food systems, in a high-level roundtable during the FAO Regional Conference for the Near East.

Research conducted in different universities found RNA from SARS-CoV-2 in stool samples from COVID-19 patients, which led to more questions about the virus including "Can COVID-19 spread through feces?" One of the symptoms of many COVID-19 patients is diarrhea, which indicated that the virus had attacked the intestinal tracts. Further studies are being conducted to investigate if outbreaks in certain areas were caused by wastewater transmission of the virus.

The world is lagging in attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) by 2030, and the COVID-19 pandemic is making it even harder, according to the report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations."We need better data to better understand the path we need to take to get to our destination," said FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero. "Knowing more about where we are and how slowly or quickly we are moving will help us focus our efforts and actions to target interventions to achieve SDGs.

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).