Around 200,000 young men and women will be trained in seed production of sorghum, cassava and rice. The training will enable them not only to produce high quality seeds but also to serve as out-growers for seed companies.The National Youth Training on Seed Production and Processing Technology is part of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda Support Program – Phase 1 (ATASP-1), supported by the Federal Government of Nigeria through African Development Bank.

A month after the United Nations called for $4.4 billion for famine prevention, only 10 percent of the needed funds have been mobilized to help 20 million people on the verge of starvation and death in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen.

One of the main challenges of modern agricultural biotechnology is maximizing plant architecture to enhance productivity, stress tolerance, and water use efficiency.

Due to the increasing number of animal and human cases of influenza A(H7N9) outbreak in China, preparation is crucial in preventing the intrusion of the virus in the country and minimizing its impacts if it happens.

With partial funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID),  Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN-FAO) Viet Nam

Rutgers University researchers led by Pal Maliga reported that grafted plants exchange mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cells which contain their own genomes. Furthermore, when the whole mitochondria from one plant get into the cells of another, they combine their DNA with that of the existing mitochondria. These findings, published in PNAS, show that farmers from all over the world who graft plants have been doing unintentional genetic engineering.

Researchers of Monsanto Vegetables are conducting studies to develop crops that would help increase yield with less labor using modern biotechnology. This is to address the shortage of workers faced by many farmers around the world. "Some of it is having better agronomic traits, things like disease-resistances that allow for better management of crops, but others are making sure we have very uniform maturities so it reduces the time it takes to harvest.

Amidst massive and collective efforts of international organizations to address food challenges, around 108 million people in 48 food-crisis countries are at risk or were in severe acute food insecurity in 2016, according to the Global Report on Food Crises 2017.

Intensifying rice production has been increasingly dependent on machines to speed up the work, such as for harvesting. But what to do about the rice straw that remains in the field? In the old days, rice straw was commonly burned to prepare the field for the next cropping, but the practice has been found to harm the air and environment and is thus no longer encouraged. There are also those who think that rice straw can actually have economic value.

University of Tokyo researchers genetically engineered rice that does not flower until it comes in contact with a specific fungicide. The results are published in Nature Plants. Takeshi Izawa and colleagues developed non-flowering rice plants by overexpressing a floral repressor gene (Grain number, plant height and heading date 7) to block natural flowering.

Photosynthesis, the ability of plants and algae to generate oxygen, evolved only once, roughly 2.3 billion years ago, in certain types of cyanobacteria. This process has never been duplicated, and according to endosymbiotic theory, all the "green" oxygen-producing organisms (plants and algae) simply subsumed cyanobacteria as organelles in their cells at some point during their evolution.