Engaging with rural women farmers for technology dissemination and value chain development was the focus of the United Nations’ regional “Sharefair for Rural Women’s Technologies” held in Nairobi, Kenya. ICRISAT was represented by Dr Esther Njuguna-Mungai, Scientist – Gender Research, CGIAR Research Program on Grain Legumes, and two women innovators of the ‘Harnessing Opportunities for Productivity Enhancement’ Project.

Uganda Biotechnology Information Center (UBIC) organized a one-week biotechnology internship programme for students from secondary schools and tertiary institutions who submitted winning essays in the National Biotechnology Essay Writing Contest in 2014. The activity was held from January 11-16, 2015.

An interdisciplinary team from the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland, has produced real time images of what happens when plants beat off insects and respond to disease and damage. Their research, published in Nature Communications, focused on the plant hormone jasmonic acid, a defense compound which is released during insect attack and controls response to damage and disease.

In Madagascar, the battle against an ongoing plague of locusts risks being lost as funds to continue operations to subdue widespread infestations of the crop-hungry insects run out, posing a serious food security challenge for 13 million people. Failure to carry through the joint 2013-16 FAO/government anti-locust programme would annul the more than $28.8 million mobilized so far and could trigger a food-security crisis in a huge part of the country.

Through the analysis of the data collected from the physical examination of Chinese farmers, a study shows that GM rice significantly decreases pesticide use and adverse effects on farmers' neurological, hematological, and electrolyte system. The study is published in Science China Life Sciences journal.

Agricultural gene banks will cease from simply serving as storage of plant seeds, but will now be used to find traits that can be utilized to develop better crop varieties. The new initiative, called DivSeek aims to unlock the potential of crop diversity stored in gene banks around the world and make it available to all so that it can be used to improve productivity

This is the invitation from Ngonidzashe Chirinda, a soils researcher at CIAT that is more than interested in finding a concrete answer to a complex challenge in deeper layers of soils: how do we cost-effectively get the carbon to deeper soils layers? In order to store more of it and in that way contribute in reducing greenhouse gases emission that feed global warming and climate change.

Reducing poverty is one of IRRI’s primary goals. Through the coordinated efforts of IRRI and our more than 900 partners worldwide, we have made headway toward achieving this seemingly insurmountable objective.

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have passed a new law that will allow EU member states to restrict or ban the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops on their own territory, even if this is allowed at EU level. The legislation, originally tabled in 2010, but was then deadlocked for four years due to disagreement between pro- and anti-GMO member states, was informally agreed by Parliament and Council in December, and will come into force in spring of 2015.

16 January 2015, Berlin – Increasing competition for natural resource and emerging resource bottlenecks mean that global agriculture can no longer operate using a "business as usual" approach – the input-intensive agricultural development model used for the past 40 years is no longer sustainable, and a "paradigm shift" in food production is needed.