Access to enough safe and nutritious food is a key to sustaining life and promoting good health. Food can however also be a vehicle of disease transmission if contaminated with harmful microbes (bacteria, viruses, or parasites) or chemicals/toxins. Around the world, an estimated 600 million - almost 1 in 10 people – fall ill after eating contaminated food each year, resulting in 420,000 deaths and the loss of 33 million healthy, disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) (WHO, 2022).

A two-day advanced training session on semen cooling technique was conducted at the Doyogena
CBBP site in Ethiopia. The training specifically targeted researchers involved in implementing sheep
and goat CBBPs. In Ethiopia, ICARDA and its partners, under the previous CRP program, established
ten low-cost reproductive technology laboratories across different regions. These laboratories are
equipped with mobile equipment for semen collection, evaluation, and insemination for sheep and
goats. More information about these labs can be found at

Climate change has intensified food security challenges, especially in Africa, where a significant portion of produce is reliant on smallholder farmers in rainfed conditions. Prolonged flooding and droughts, driven by erratic weather patterns, have significantly elevated the risk of food scarcity. Floods, in particular, have been responsible for severe crop losses, raising concerns about increasing import costs if this issue is not mitigated. Africa is actively working to mitigate the impacts of flooding and enhance food security, although progress has been gradual.

As part of the Livestock and Climate initiative, we have been working together with MediaE to improve the advisories related to climate and financial aspects of agriculture. For instance, we have been developing content on Shamba Shape-Up (SSU) television episodes which is one of the products of MediaE. However, one of the key learnings from developing content is whether the episodes are actionable or not.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), one of the research centers within the global Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), has a long history of gender research relevant to its mission of reducing poverty and ending hunger and malnutrition. Over the last two decades, gender has been effectively incorporated into all of IFPRI’s strategic research areas and into all phases of research. There is abundant evidence of IFPRI’s role as a leading global think tank on gender issues.

Fruits & vegetable value chains (F&V VC) in Nigeria hold significant potential to continue toward sustainable, inclusive food system transformation. Domestic food system growth, including that of F&V, remains crucial in achieving a healthy food environment and serving as a source of various micronutrients. There is a need for bundles of innovations to address multiple challenges along F&V VC in Nigeria, characterized by a set of challenges that are unique to developing countries and F&V.

There is growing recognition that a better understanding of how food systems respond to crises is critical to build and protect the food security of local populations. But rigorous and reliable methods to measure food system resilience are still missing. In this paper, we build on the current literature to develop an analytical framework aimed at assessing the resilience of food systems at local level. The novel element of the analysis lies in the levels at which resilience is considered.

This paper uses comprehensive and long time series monthly food price data and a panel dyadic regression framework to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated policy responses on spatial market integration across a diverse set of food items in Nigeria. The empirical results reveal several important insights. First, we show that a significant slowdown in the speed of adjustment and price transmission occurred during the pandemic.

The increasing use of Solar Irrigation Pumps (SIPs) has raised concerns about the overexploitation of groundwater. So, this study aims to evaluate the impact of SIPs on pumping behaviour of farmers and its subsequent effect on overall groundwater resources in Bangladesh and India. In Bangladesh, the study is being carried out in the intensively irrigated North-West region, where the government is promoting the feefor- service model for solar irrigation. This model creates a solar irrigation command area by setting up centralized sponsored SIPs.