You may never have heard of it before. A globetrotting crop by all accounts, it’s thought to have been introduced into Southeast Asia in the Philippines from Mexico in the 19th Century. As our diet becomes ever more complex, cassava – or tapioca – a root crop like sweet potato originally from South America, has been transformed far from it’s center ofRead More …
Reporters for The Economist write about banks all the time – but usually focus on the ones that are stuffed with money. This week, however, in an article titled Banks for bean counters, the heavyweight news magazine puts the spotlight on seed banks and their vital role in combating global hunger. The plant genetic resources stored in seed banksRead More …
In agricultural research, time-frames are long and funding often short, so getting the priorities right is crucial. Scientific organizations must be doubly sure they’re focused on tomorrow’s challenges and not yesterday’s, if they expect to remain relevant and effective. This is the spirit in which CIAT’s Decision and Policy Analysis (DAPA) Research Area has prepared a new policy brief examiningRead More …
RTBMaps is a flagship online atlas developed by the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB) that provides all sorts of geographic information on RTB crops worldwide for the benefit of the research and development community. RTBMaps aggregates individual maps provided by researchers and scientists around the world through “scientific crowdsourcing”, hence compiling a wealth of criticalRead More …
Fifty years ago palm oil was virtually non-existent in the Colombian diet. Now over 25% of the fat in national food supplies comes from the crop, making it the single most important plant for the provision of this macronutrient in the diet. Intercropped maize and oil palm in Colombia. Photo: CIMMYT Along with Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Nigeria, ColombiaRead More …
As experts have been suspecting for a while, and as many of us have certainly noticed, people’s diets around the world have become very similar. So much so that in the past 50 years the whole world has come to rely increasingly on just a few crops for most of its food supplies – including old favorites such asRead More …
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is pushing for the acceptance of genetically modified (GM) crops co-existing with organic crops, Voice of America reports. However, opposition remains strong from food safety advocates who say that contamination of non-GM crops is inevitable while the two are grown, processed, or stored within range of one another. In fact, the Center ofRead More …
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