According to the FAO, 30% of food is lost or wasted along the supply chain every year. This is a whopping 1.3 billion metric tons of food that doesn’t ever reach the consumer. This lost or wasted food could be used to feed 1.6 billion people every year. In Africa, the losses are even higher: between 30% and 50%.
Instead of focusing on the supply of subsidised machinery, governments should provide public goods and services to support the emerging private markets. Such support includes strengthening the capacity of the education and training domain, improving the customs process, maintaining market stability, and focusing on institutional solutions for smallholders.
Breeding nitrogen-efficient plants could boost crop productivity and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions while reducing fertilizer use.
Food Evolution film makers Scott Hamilton Kennedy and Trace Sheehan sit down with the Food and Farm Discussion Lab community for a free wheeling chat about making the film, the state of the GMO debate, and doing science communication well.
Despite the fact that the protein gap theory has been thoroughly debunked, the focus on protein deficiency still persists in many minds.
In Peru, as yellow rust disease has devastated top quality coffee harvests, coca for cocaine is filling for farmers who need to bolster sagging incomes.
Edible insects have long been a staple source of protein in many African countries. Domesticating production is now taking pressure of local ecosystems.
New research concludes that a total ban on the practice of transshipment on the high seas is necessary to help stop illegal fishing and reduce the human trafficking and labor rights abuses that often accompany unlawful fishing activities.
Wild coffee exhibits much greater genetic diversity than commercial varieties, which increases its chances of adapting to new challenges and reduces the possibility of extinction. It represents an insurance policy for plantation coffee, in case commercial strains are ever badly damaged.
If cash transfers replace in kind contributions in development, will essential services be lost? Can the development community transition to a fee for service model?
Stuart Thompson, Senior Lecturer in Plant Biochemistry at the University of Westminster lays four key challenges to global food security: drought, emerging diseases, salty soils, and fertilizer dependence.
The dysfunction of Uganda seed markets and aid efforts gives a number of lessons on ways that markets, regulation, and aid efforts fall into familiar traps over and over. They also point the way past those traps.
The continued representation of famines as disastrous events largely sprung upon populations by the forces of nature, prevents us from understanding famine – and food insecurity – as a socio-political process, even though doing so is especially important for realising its future prevention.
There are tremendous opportunities to increase yields throughout South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Increasing yields through new farming practices could triple maize production in sub-Saharan Africa and increase wheat and rice production in South Asia by about 50 percent. Gains on this scale could dramatically reduce hunger and food insecurity in some of the most vulnerable nations in the world.
SANQUIANGA NATIONAL PARK, Colombia – Along the northern edge of Colombia’s Pacific coast region, thousands of people rely on an unassuming shellfish called a “piangua” for daily survival. The small, black clam lives tucked deep in the stinky mud of mangrove trees.
But the global decline of mangrove forests at about 1 percent annually, years-long decline of the piangua, encroaching drug traffickers, and the stigma surrounding piangua pickers are endangering the traditional practice of piangua picking
New research has revealed that Tanzania’s official statistics on irrigation often don’t include initiatives set up and run by individual farmers. This is either because they’re not aware of it, or because they don’t consider it to have much potential.
Compared to formally engineered projects, this ‘farmer-led’ irrigation is often small-scale and interspersed among non-irrigated fields. This makes it harder to record. It also takes diverse forms. These range from watering via pumps, wells, flooded valley bottoms, or even via stream diversions or small dams.
Uganadan farmer Richard Namunyu discusses the World Agroforestry Centre’s project – Trees for Food Security: Improving sustainable productivity in farming systems and enhanced livelihoods through adoption of Evergreen agriculture in eastern Africa
This article from IPES-Food responds to the claims made in a essay by Øystein Heggdal from December, 2016. Through this essay, IPES-Food welcomes the opportunity to demonstrate the wealth of data underpinning IPES-Food’s June 2016 report: ‘From uniformity to diversity: a paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems’
GUEST AUTHOR: Bob Doherty | University of York This article originally appeared on The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons license. At a […]
GUEST AUTHOR: Delia Grace | International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) veterinary epidemiologist and food safety expert This piece previously appeared on ILRI News. It appears […]
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