Mushimiyimana and her family are one of the more than 420,000 farming households in Rwanda who cultivate iron-biofortified bean that were developed by HarvestPlus, the Rwanda Agriculture Board, and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), and first released in the country in 2012. In just a few years since then, iron bean cultivation has expanded rapidly and currently accounts for 20 percent of all beans grown in Rwanda; more than 1.8 million Rwandans, or about 15 percent of the total population, were estimated to be eating these nutritious beans—and the market continues to grow.

When Simon and Sylvia Kiruja started their farm three years ago, they never imagined it would get so big they would need a bigger plot. Their three cows used to bring them 7 litres of milk a day. Today, their 45 cows deliver more than 250 litres daily, contributing around US$1,700 monthly depending on the season, to the Kiruja’s income.

As Ethiopia approaches 105 million people, the growing demand for food is expanding agriculture into marginal, forest, and natural conservation areas. Human-induced activities include population pressure, agricultural expansion, logging, and development, which have been challenging development and conservation efforts. As cultivation and grazing expand into peripheral and conservation areas, land degradation in the form of deforestation, soil erosion, and nutrient mining as well as conflict between land uses and users accelerate the vulnerability of local farmers to climate change. Despite the environmental, social, and economic benefits of biodiversity and natural ecosystem conservation, the reality is that views that strictly exclude the human element are no longer an option.

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The wild relatives of chile peppers, pumpkins, carrots, and lettuce join a growing list of poorly conserved plant species. These ancient plants have genes that may help our food withstand the harsh climate of our future. If they don’t go extinct first Growing up in the wild makes plants tough. Wild plants evolve to survive the whims of nature and thrive in difficult conditions, including extreme climate conditions, poor soils, and pests and diseases. Their better-known descendants – the domesticated plants that are critical to a healthy diet – are often not nearly as hardy. The genes that make crop wild relatives robust have the potential to make their cultivated cousins - our food plants - better prepared for a harsh climate future. But a series of new research papers show these critical plants are imperiled.

The climate change point-of-no-return may still be 1 degree C away. But that is of little solace to the people whose lives have already been upended by a warmer climate. They include growers and consumers of one of the most important protein sources in low-income countries: the common bean, a staple in diets from the highlands of Central America to the vast expanses of sub-Saharan Africa.

Scientists tossed aside the shovel and studied cassava roots as they grew in real time, suspended in the air. The innovative use of aeroponics may usher in a new era of science for cassava genetic improvement and sustainable intensification.

The prize intends to award 10 participants from around the globe who have compelling visions of what regenerative and nourishing food environments will look like in 2050. Individuals, organizations, institutions, companies, and other entities across the globe are encouraged to participate.

Throughout his university studies at Africa Nazarene University, where he studied computer science (B.S. degree), Leroy Mwanzia focused on only one thing: software development. So great was his passion that, after graduating, he turned down a computer networking opportunity at East Africa Breweries Limited and instead opted to become a lecturer at an affiliate training center of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), a job that paid much less. Two years later, he went to a different college to teach the UK-based BTEC Higher National Diploma in Computing.

In one day, a cow can eat between 25,000 and 30,000 morsels of grass. What do the differences in these amounts depend on? They will depend on how accessible the grass is to them, and the height of the grass could make a difference.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is the proposed approach in the face of climate variability. The government of Kenya, through the Ministry of Agriculture, is playing an active role in advocating for the uptake of CSA both nationally and subnationally.

The Food System Vision Prize, launched by the Rockefeller Foundation and powered by SecondMuse and OpenIDEO is an invitation for organizations, institutions, companies, governments and other entities across the globe to develop a concrete and actionable Vision of the food system that they aspire to see in the year 2050. 

Going forward, the UM6P and the Alliance between Bioversity International and CIAT will work to initiate cooperation in research, education, and outreach with the aim of contributing to the advancement of science to address the challenges of sustainable agricultural intensification globally.

Our planet – both humans and the natural world – faces four global crises of relevance to the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT): climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and the so-called triple burden of malnutrition – hunger, nutrient deficiencies, and overnutrition.

Following up a successful implementation of Partial Food Systems Baseline Assessment at the Vietnam Benchmark Sites in 2018 under Agriculture for Nutrition and Health program (A4NH), the food systems profile is a visualized and collaborative product led by International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in collaboration with local authorities in the benchmark sites along rural-urban transect in Vietnam to provide a synopsis of the food systems of three sites in Vietnam.

Over the years, Kenya has produced many development policies that have created an enabling environment to address poverty, food security, economic, social, and climate change issues. This puts our country among the top with robust policy and legal instruments that support national growth. In particular, recognizing the importance of climate change, Kenya has developed many policies, plans, and strategies, and ratified international conventions, all in an effort to provide a framework for promoting climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Along with the support of numerous partners across the region, CIAT has put together and ambitious research project titled “Establishing sustainable solutions to cassava diseases in mainland Southeast Asia”. This project was commissioned by the Australian Center for International Agriculture Research (ACIAR) for four years with a total investment of AUD4 million.

The Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA) was awarded the 2019 edition of the US$1 million Al-Sumait Prize for African Development on November 25. PABRA, which is coordinated by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), shared the award with the Africa Rice Center, said the Al Sumait Prize Board of Trustees in a statement after choosing the winners. PABRA received the award “for serving a dynamic network of scientists and practitioners specializing in improving the productivity, processing, and the value chain of beans throughout Africa,” according to the announcement.

Monitoring and periodic analysis of the network of past, present, and future relationships within and outside the Partnership Platform for the Amazon (PPA) are an important component of the overall PPA learning agenda. To implement the Social Network Analysis (SNA) monitoring of the Catalyzing and Learning Platforms and Partnerships for Biodiversity Conservation (CALPP) Program, the specialists on statistics, SNA, and modeling from CIAT-Colombia, Jean-François Le Coq (overall project coordinator), Carlos Eduardo Gonzalez (SNA and modeling specialist), Bryan Mora (statistical analysis specialist), Camilo Andrés Méndez (statistical analysis specialist), and Vivian Zeidemann (program evaluation coordinator), have been working with their Brazilian collaborators Sylvia Mitraud (project coordinator in Brazil) and Valderli Jorge Piontekowski (IT development coordinator) from IPAM (Instituto de Pesquisas Ambientais da Amazônia), with the objective of monitoring some of the activities of CALPP through SNA.

As noted in an analysis on the opportunities emerging from cacao production to contribute toward peace conducted by CIAT and Purdue University, cacao farmers in Colombia come in different forms. Some members of the International Climate Initiative (IKI)-funded Sustainable Land Use System (SLUS) Project team saw this reality for themselves when they recently visited cacao-growing areas in the departments of Caquetá and Cesar.

The outcomes will nurture new CIAT collaborations in Brazil and help us jointly build a biodiversity monitoring approach that can meet both CIAT’s and USAID’s objectives. Furthermore, the approach will be useful for other institutions specialized in biodiversity monitoring, as well as for the private sector as a way to evaluate the performance of their activities in the Amazon region. In fact, such a tool can benefit all sectors of society engaged in the difficult task of balancing the trade-offs between development and environmental conservation.

Agrosavia and the Bioversity-CIAT Alliance enter into a cooperation agreement. Plantain, banana, cocoa, pastures, restoration, circular farming, and Future Seeds are some of the research projects that will be strengthened in the next five years.

This text is about a great scientist retiring from CIAT after working as a chemist at the Agrobiodiversity Area for 28 years. Here is the part of her life story spent in this beautiful campus.

A global food system sustainability study builds the first map of its kind to score the sustainability of food systems, country-by-country. The study goes beyond usual questions of productivity and nutrition, and includes economic and social variables.

A Colombian researcher is to be awarded with the Young Scientist recognition of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan (MAFF) and the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS).

Bernard Gitobu spent most of his life working in bank, but deep down his heart, he knew he would retire into farming. After all, his parents were farmers.

Everyone in the coffee industry craves information, perhaps even more than a morning jolt of caffeine. Across Uganda – one of the world’s top ten coffee producers – scientists, producers, industry, and the government collect data on coffee production. They do this to obtain valuable information, ranging from yield and prices to weather impacts and disease, and hopefully reduce risk in the process.

The idea of visualizing soil data at a glance electronically is exciting to many actors in agriculture and land-use planning. Previously, soil characterization required traveling to the field to collect soil samples and sending them to the lab for analysis. Digital maps, however, save the time (travel, carry soils samples to the lab and wait for results) before making crucial site-specific decisions.

This was Rachel Kinyua’s experience before she met the team from the Piloting of Improved Brachiaria and Panicum Forages for Increased Livestock Production – a joint project between CIAT and the Netherlands Development Organization (SNV) in Kenya.