The call came from the WHO Director-General in May 2016 for a renewed attack on the global spread of vector-borne diseases. "What we are seeing now looks more and more like a dramatic resurgence of the threat from emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases," Dr Margaret Chan told Member States at the Sixty-ninth World Health Assembly. "The world is not prepared to cope."

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is pushing forward with a massive campaign that has so far treated more than 12 million animals in less than three months, protecting the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of families who rely on their livestock's meat and milk for survival.
 

Scientists have successfully engineered a rice plant with an adjustable immune system to make it resistant to multiple diseases at once without decreasing its yield. "For as long as I have been in this field, people have been scratching their heads about how to activate a defense system where and when it is needed," says Jonathan Jones, a professor at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, U.K. "It is among the most promising lines of research in this field that I have seen."

A high-level delegation from Kenya visited Malawi's Bt cotton National Performance Trial (NPTs) fields on May 11, 2017. The team consisted of board chairs from the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS), Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), as well as the Managing Director of RIVATEX, a textile company in Kenya. Farmers, media, and other key players were also represented.

In a study that aims to increase soybean plants' nitrogen-fixing ability, and thus reduce the need for chemical fertilizers, a research team from the University of South Dakota has discovered that the gene SUR2 plays a key role in the production of auxin, a hormone that affects nodule development in soybean plants.

Researchers from Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) and the Shanghai Normal University report a new draft genome of spinach (Spinacia oleracea). The researchers have sequenced the transcriptomes (all the RNA) of 120 cultivated and wild spinach plants, which allowed them to identify which genetic changes have occurred due to domestication.

The Director for Crop Resources in the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry, and Fisheries (MAAIF), Mr. Okasaai Opolot, has appealed to journalists in Uganda to increase their efforts in informing the public about the products of modern biotechnology.

FAO 24 May 2017, Juba, South Sudan - All parties to the conflict in South Sudan must cease violence and work together to ensure that food and other lifesaving support can reach people to end famine and severe hunger, the heads of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said yesterday.

Attention turns to implementation at first Meeting of Parties on Port State Measures Agreement. FAO 29 May 2017, Oslo - The first Meeting of the Parties to FAO's bold new international treaty aimed at cracking down on illicit fishing opened today in Oslo, as delegates began hammering out ways to make the agreement a success.