Laura Boykin, The University of Western Australia; Joseph Ndunguru, Mikocheni Agricultural Research Institute; Monica Kehoe, Department of Agriculture and Food - Western Australia, and Peter Sseruwagi, Mikocheni Agricultural Research Institute
Rapid genetic disease screening will be the key to saving East Africa’s crops - just as it was during West Africa’s ebola crisis.
The world’s driest areas are tipped to get even drier, with potentially worrying implications for soil productivity.
The world’s ‘drylands’ – already home to 38% of the world’s people – are set to dry out even more. And that could harm the soil microbes that keep soils healthy and help crops to grow.
Australia’s risks losing its valuable native plants that could help solve a global food problem. So do we need new laws to stop the seeds being taken overseas?
Fires, such as this one in eastern Sierra Leone, are an annual occurrence across Africa.
Reuters/Finbarr O'Reilly
On the African continent, more fire for crops leads to less rainfall.
Children from a village in Papua New Guinea’s Western Highlands Province stand in one of countless sweet potato gardens destroyed by frost across the country, August 2015.
Kud Sitango
Papua New Guinea is now facing a drought and frosts that look set to be worse than 1997, when hundreds of people died. So how can memories of 1997 save lives over the next few months?
South African’s maize crops are an example of a GMO crop.
Reuters
Jeannette Rapicavoli, University of California, Riverside
Vaccines aren’t just for animals anymore. Research shows priming plants with pathogen-derived compounds strengthens their immune systems and enhances protection against future attack.
India has been sweltering recently – but plants can cope better than people.
Sanjay Baid / EPA
Africa will be able to feed itself in the next 15 years. That’s one of the big “bets on the future” that Bill and Melinda Gates have made in their foundation’s latest annual letter. Helped by other breakthroughs…
Tractors may have revolutionised farming but to protect biosecurity, farmers could do with some extra help.
Ben McLeod/Flickr
New technology to tackle biosecurity challenges down the track is one of the five megatrends identified in today’s CSIRO report Australia’s Biosecurity Future: preparing for future biological challenges…
We are in the middle of one of the biggest experiments in human history. At its core is the homogenisation of global food systems, which increasingly must deliver the same products to an expanding population…
Laboratory-based genetic modification is relatively new when you consider the centuries of selective breeding that precedes it.
IRRI Photos/Flickr
Peter Langridge, Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics
Welcome to GM in Australia, a series looking at the facts, ethics, regulations and research into genetically modified crops. In this first instalment, Peter Langridge describes two GM techniques: selective…
Not all that which is greening is green.
André Künzelmann/UFZ
The European policies designed to encourage a more biodiverse environment that is better able to support wildlife and plants are failing. In fact, our analysis of the reforms designed to “green” the EU…
Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook I’ve seen mentions that only two months before Napoleon’s final defeat in Belgium on June…
Wild food is generally wilder than this.
irrational_cat
In the UK, the wild food trend has re-acquainted people with the various edible plants to be found in the countryside. But around the world wild foods are relied on by a billion people as a key part of…
PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, and Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney