The central province of Bình Thuận, which has more than 9,500 ha of dragon fruit cultivated under VietGAP (Vietnam Good Agricultural Practices) standards, plans to expand the area to 9,800ha this year, according to the province’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department. With more than 27,600ha of dragonfruit and 262ha for GlobalGAP, Bình Thuận Province has the largest area allocated to the fruit in the country, with annual output topping more than 550,000 tonnes, Mai Kiều, director of the department, said in a local conference on January 15.

Fifty years ago, economists and population experts predicted millions were about to die from famine. India and other Asian countries were expected by scholars like Paul Ehrlich in The Population Bomb to be especially hard hit in the 1970s and 1980s, given the region’s high population growth rates. South Asia braced for mass starvation as hunger and malnutrition spread while multiple droughts plagued India and neighboring countries – but it never happened.

The idea that “Educating women/girls is nothing but a loss,” used to be a common sentiment amongst members of rural Ethiopian communities where the Nutritious Maize for Ethiopia (NuME) project works. Now one is more likely to hear “Women are the foundation for change.”

It is an irony in the developing world that those who produce food are most often the ones that are nutritionally-deprived themselves. There are many factors contributing to this status quo, and one that the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) is currently investigating is the impact of agricultural biodiversity.

Tsinghua University associate professor Liang Zheng, who studies China’s science policies, said the State Science and Technology Prizes were recognition of progress made but also pointed to the future. “You can certainly feel the pulse of thinking in the head of decision makers by reading the names and titles on the awards lists,” Liang said. “They are not just awards for past achievements, but hints to what is to come.”

UN Environment and WHO have agreed a new, wide-ranging collaboration to accelerate action to curb environmental health risks that cause an estimated 12.6 million deaths a year. Today in Nairobi, Mr Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment, and Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, signed an agreement to step up joint actions to combat air pollution,

Speaking at the seminar, Dr. Nguyen Tri Ngoc, Vice President and General Secretary of Vietnam Agriculture and Rural Development Association, emphasized the great role of biotechnology in socio-economic development, as well as improving the lives of farmers and responding to climate change. In the Prime Minister's decision to approve the agricultural restructuring plan, biotechnology applications in agriculture is regarded as a breakthrough solution for the development of agriculture in a comprehensive modern direction.

Food derived from Provitamin A rice line GR2E can be sold in Australia and New Zealand. Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) released the approval report for Application A1138 submitted by the International Rice Research Institute seeking approval for food derived from rice line GR2E, genetically modified (GM) to produce provitamin A carotenoids, especially beta-carotene, in the grain.

"There are a lot of losses in crop yields due to bacteria that kill plants…With this work, we set out to understand the underlying mechanism of how resistance works, and to see how general it is," said Joanne Chory, senior author of the study and a 2018 recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. The research team studied a protein (SOBER1) in Arabidopsis thaliana, which was previously reported to impede the plant's immune response to a bacterial protein (AvrBsT). The researchers perceived that studying immune suppression may lead to more information about infection resistance.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), in collaboration with  ETH Zurich Plant Biotechnology Lab has started the confined field trials of transgenic cassava. The research aims to reduce starch breakdown in storage roots of cassava after pruning the shoots, before the crop is harvested. It is also a fact-gathering process to gain fundamental knowledge about starch metabolism in the storage root and about cassava as a crop.