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.

A new, first of its kind impact investment was launched 7 November to bring much-needed financial support for sustainable development in the Brazilian Amazon. The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), as a cornerstone investor in the Althelia Biodiversity Fund Brazil (ABF), sees this as a unique opportunity to support new economic models that promote biodiversity while using its core expertise to evaluate, understand, and share the learning that this model generates, globally. It is novel in many respects.

The Inter-American Development Bank, through its innovation lab – IDB Lab, approved US$2 million funding for a project that will improve the productivity and sustainability of rice farming in Colombia.

Michael Selvaraj is the leader of the Phenomics Platform team from the Agrobiodiversity Area at CIAT. He is a Champion, because he developed the smartphone App Tumaini, which makes it possible to identify five diseases and one pest affecting banana plants.

Malnutrition remains a serious problem for many people in East Africa. Poor consumers are willing to pay a premium for healthier foods, pointing to a new strategy for improving nutrition at a large scale

The EATS and CIAT have started to gather, synthesize and make accessible existing food system data on the poorest communes to the Zero Hunger agency. The final result from the synthesis is a website where users can see maps of key food systems indicators in the provinces of the poorest communes. These indicators are divided into three main areas: global drivers, food supply processes and health and nutrition outcomes.

Representatives from farmer’s organisations from southern African countries, from the Government of Mali and Ethiopia, IFAD project staff and donors recently participated in a one-week learning journey in Ethiopia, focused on transformative approaches to mainstream climate, gender, nutrition and youth. The purpose of the journey, organised by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and IFAD, was to learn and exchange on challenges and best practices to promote transformation approaches on mainstreaming climate change, gender, youth and nutrition into programming, as well as witness examples of rural transformation in Ethiopia.

Data-driven agriculture can boost smallholder production threatened by weather and climate change, but data scientists need to work with farmers and governments. Four years of collaboration in Colombian maize fields shows what success looks like

Sara Rankin was born in Cali and she is a researcher from the Sustainable Food Systems team at CIAT. This Champion has worked towards understanding the food system in Cali to develop a municipal public policy on food safety and sovereignty that meets the specific needs of this territory, among other goals. In this process, she has been able to meet one of the hidden pearls of the food initiatives in Cali: urban orchards, which are increasingly popular.

Uganda’s newest health food craze began in the slums of Kampala. It started when a handful of women tried an unusual porridge, which is made from five grains grown in nearby hillsides, instead of their normal porridge, which is typically made from a single main ingredient like maize. Soon they began selling the new product door-to-door. Nutreal Limited, the local company that produces the porridge flour is now rushing to keep pace with demand.

In his World Food Day blog, Juan Lucas Restrepo, Director General of Bioversity International and CEO-Designate of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, explains why systems thinking is key to fixing the food system and introduces a new strategy for accelerated change at the nexus of food, agriculture, health and the environment.

As part of our activities to support SDG 2.5, we began construction of new genebank late last year. Once completed, Future Seeds, as we call it, will greatly increase our capacity to safeguard threatened crop varieties. It will also give our scientists the modern facility they need to study the full extent of the crops we’ve already conserved. The current facility is just not up to it any more.

Smallholder poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is often linked to sandy soils, which hold little water and are low in nutrients. A new technology may be able to enrich fields and farmers without massive investments in irrigation and fertilizer

With this year’s implementation of a European Union regulation that strictly limits the amount of cadmium permitted in cacao and its products, farmers and other value chain actors need to know if their cacao can be made into products that meet the food safety standards. This is not straightforward. Different limits apply to different products, depending on the product composition and consumer characteristics. A new online tool developed by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) can help producers, processors, and exporters know if their cacao meet the requirements of the food safety regulation once processed into a product for the EU market.

The Social Progress Index (SPI) is a comprehensive measure of the well-being of a society, which aims to support decision-makers in identifying development priorities to generate plans and projects in pockets of high social and environmental vulnerability. The index is based on social and environmental indicators, such as wellness (health, shelter, and sanitation), equality, inclusion, sustainability, and personal freedom and safety.

Not a new: agriculture is not an exclusive business from rural areas. For that reason, several years ago, CIAT began to respond to the need of building an inclusive and resilient food system in one of the most important cities in Colombia: Cali.