Groundnut is acknowledged to be important to Nigeria’s economy – both commercially and nutritionally. The most commonly grown crop in Nigeria, the legume is an affordable source of protein, edible oil, and micronutrients to millions of small-scale farmers’ and farm families on the African continent. As a result, there are a number of development projects aimed at promoting the legume. In development landscapes, crowded with numerous actors, creating and strengthening synergies is a difficult but core requirement of project implementation

Leveling rice fields reduces the amount of water used for land preparation and irrigation, improves the application of agronomic inputs such as fertilizers and herbicides, and increases grain yield and quality. According to research in Cambodia, land leveling has increased yield by 24% per hectare. The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) funded project, Closing the Rice Yield Gap with Reduced Environmental Footprint project (CORIGAP),

African farmers from a remote village in northern Zambia have teamed up with the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to send a giant message to world leaders gathering in New York this week – invest more in agriculture if you want to end poverty and hunger by 2030. And to get their message the attention it deserves, the 16 farmers from Kasama, Zambia carved their case for investment into the very soil they farm, producing a giant “Field Report” with a pie chart,

“When I tried Green Super Rice (GSR), the highest yield that I had was nine tons per hectare,” recalled Maria Lourdes Mateo-Mundoc, an agriculturist at the Southern Cagayan Research Center (SCRC) under the Department of Agriculture (DA) in the Philippines. “The lowest was seven tons per hectare”.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers including those working in agriculture, nutrition, socio-economics, geography, and ethics has received more than $8.9m (£4.4m) from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help alleviate micronutrient deficiencies (MNDs). The GeoNutrition project, led by the University of Nottingham, will focus on Ethiopia and Malawi where MNDs – also known as hidden hunger – are widespread.

From friends meeting over cappuccino in the local café to students pulling all-nighters, we humans count on coffee to put zip in our lives. And around the world, from Brazil to Ethiopia to Vietnam, small farmers depend on the aromatic bean for a livelihood. But a warming climate could stir up the coffee world. Changes in temperature and rainfall may reduce coffee production in some areas, while making new places suitable for the crop. Climate change could also affect bees that pollinate the bushes that produce the little red beans that jolt millions awake in the morning.

On Dec 19-20, the Global Landscapes Forum brought together 1000 attendees from 103 countries in the World Conference Center in Bonn.  In total, 21,610,513 people were reached across social media and fully 51,000 people tuned in live from 114 different countries to connect, learn, share and act around our planet’s greatest climate and development challenges.

A recently published research paper reveals how technology, knowledge and effective communication can help to address dietary misconceptions and encourage better nutritional practices in rural settings. The paper reports on the success of the innovative methodology used for knowledge transfer (collective cooking) among women in rural communities in Mali during the An Be Jigi (‘Hope for All’ in Bambara) nutrition project.

FAO welcomes the UN's decision to create a decade on family farming, a World Bee Day, a day promoting awareness of the need to combat illegal fishing, and declare international years for camelids and artisanal fisheries and aquaculture. From now on, May 20 will mark World Bee Day. And 2019 will mark the beginning of the UN Decade of Family Farming, drawing more attention to the people who produce more than 80% of the world's food but whose own members, paradoxically, are often the most vulnerable to hunger.

A protein that transports the simple chemical choline plays a major role in vesicle trafficking, ion homeostasis, and growth and development in plants, according to two new studies publishing 28 December in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, by Dai-Yin Chao of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, China, and Sheng Luan of the University of California, Berkeley, and co-workers.