A state-of-the-art facility funded by the Chinese government to promote collaborative research with African countries in the field of agriculture and biodiversity conservation has beenofficially handed over to a Kenyan university.
A hand-over ceremony was held on the campus of the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) where the …
B4FA Fellow Michael Ssali reports: Empowering smallholder farmers to become more productive should be more than mere provision of free seed and planting material—a practice that is apparently going across the country.
New challenges keep cropping up as time passes. With our rapidly increasing population, the small plots on which our …
Former anti-GMO campaigner Mark Lynas discusses what changed his mind about GMOs. He addresses why the green movement is so threatened by GMOs and why the environmental movement should be an ally in promoting biotech that reduce environmental impacts of agriculture. See …
University of Guelph plant scientists have shown for the first time how an ancient crop teams up with a beneficial microbe to protect against a devastating fungal infection, a discovery that may benefit millions of subsistence farmers and livestock in developing countries.
The M6 microbe lives in the roots of finger …
University of Adelaide researchers have made a breakthrough in investigating salt tolerance in plants which could lead to new salt tolerant varieties of crops, and also answer unresolved questions in plant biology.
The researchers, also from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology and in collaboration with the University’s …
Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) announces that it has developed a new deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) analysis technology called Genotyping by Random Amplicon Sequencing (GRAS) using analytical materials that have been provided by the Kyushu Okinawa Agricultural Research Center (KARC) of the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO). This technology is …
Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming the battleground of the world’s giant seed companies, which are in the process of negotiating a series of corporate consolidations that could leave almost 60 percent of the world’s seeds in the control of three firms, according to a report in The Guardian.
Until recently, six or …
B4FA Fellow Noah Nash reports: “Some beneficiary farmers under the smallholder Farmer’s Empowerment For Food Security Project are optimistic the new farm management practices introduced to them have improve their crop yields.
“The farmers said this during a field day interaction exercise in the Tolon District for 10 communities.
“The Smallholder Farmer’s …
Research by Ugandan scientists offers hope for farmers in the face of dry conditions. The National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) working with the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project recently released a new drought tolerant maize variety named Drought Tego or Drought Shield. Released only in July this year, …
Ghana is currently running confined field trials of some selected GE crops, but analysis of ongoing genetically modified organism (GMO) debates and published opinions shows a considerable amount of opposition to GE agriculture and GMOs in Ghana. This notwithstanding, we suggest that Bt cotton cultivation in Burkina Faso—Ghana’s immediate neighbor …
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