Closing the adaptation gap: Harnessing the power of possibilities

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A rice farmer in Kantuta, near Caranavi, Bolivia.

Leanne Zeppenfeldt, Knowledge & Partnerships Officer and Bruce Campbell, Chief Innovation Strategist at Clim-Eat discuss how Earth Overshoot Day highlights the need to not only mitigate climate change but adapt to its effects. By July 28th – Earth Overshoot Day – humans will have used more ecological resources and services this year than what our planet can regenerate. The rate at which we are emitting greenhouse gases and using our clean water, healthy soil, oil reserves, and carbon-storing forests exceeds the Earth’s capacity. Despite the important role it plays to our lives and livelihoods, agriculture is also one of the largest drivers of planetary overshoot, and mitigation action to reduce our natural resource use and emissions is essential to #MoveTheDate of Earth Overshoot Day in the coming years.  Read More

A Double Win: Revolutionising African agriculture to empower youth and sustain the continent’s development

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Dr Dennis Rangi, Director General, Development at CABI, discusses the potential for Africa’s youth in agriculture. An African agricultural revolution can not only help advance the continent’s development progress, but it can also solve the growing challenge of youth unemployment, especially in rural areas.  Africa’s youth hold the key to the continent’s very survival and the burden to sustain wider global development. But we simply cannot rely upon young people to be only producers of food. Through upskilling and a digital ‘knowledge exchange’, they must also be involved across all stages of the value chain – starting from production.  Read More

How Nutrition-Smart Agriculture Can Help Build Resilience Against the “Three C” Crises of Climate, Conflict and COVID-19

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Arun Baral, CEO of HarvestPlus – CGIAR’s flagship programme on staple crop biofortification – discusses how biofortification can help bolster food systems resilience in the face of global crises. We hear a growing chorus of warnings from members of the food and nutrition security community about the dire consequences of the war in Ukraine on global rates of hunger and malnutrition. Arif Husain, chief economist at the World Food Programme, noted recently that threats in numerous countries to food production and availability from the “Three C’s” — climate, conflict, and COVID-19 — are rapidly being compounded by the “Three F’s” — spiking food, fuel, and fertiliser prices. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the number of undernourished people worldwide could increase by 8 to 13 million this year alone. Read More

Enabling Ecosystem Partnerships to Accelerate Sustainable Agriculture and Reach the SDGs

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Natasha Santos, Vice President, Head of Global Stakeholders Affairs and Strategic Partnerships at Bayer Crop Science, outlines how smallholders can be better equipped to help the world achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. When they were released in 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were rightly celebrated as an ambitious blueprint for sustainable development. But could the creators of the SDGs have anticipated the seismic shocks to our planet – and food systems – in the years that followed? Read More

Harnessing Business to Boost Agricultural Productivity

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Katharina Münster, Junior Specialist for Communications and Digital Innovation at the Inclusive Business Action Network, discusses the power of inclusive business to empower smallholder farmers across the globe. “How do we bring workable technologies to the farmers who really need them?” That is the question that guides David Chen’s mission. As the co-founder of Golden Sunland, he helps to run an enterprise that sources rice from smallholder farmers in Myanmar while providing them with hybrid seeds, trainings, and credit opportunities. Read More