CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

We're moving!

We’re moving!

After almost 12 years, the CABI blog is migrating to a new platform and a new URL: https://blog.cabi.org/ Our new blog will be built on WordPress, which means it’ll look better and load faster on mobile devices and feature better social media integration. The commenting system is also more robust, and the CABI blog is now better integrated with CABI’s other blogs (on Plantwise and Invasives).

 

If you currently subscribe to the blog via RSS or email you will no longer receive updates. To keep receiving alerts whenever we post a new article, please visit https://blog.cabi.org/ and re-subscribe. Don’t worry about losing your favourite article from the last 12 years – all of our archives have been migrated as well.

 

We look forward to sharing stories about our online resources, publishing products and our work in international development in our new home!

CABI board member Paulus Vershuren explains how CABI is delivering on SDG17: Partnerships for the Goals

 

The world we live in today faces complex and interconnected challenges that individual organisations alone cannot easily resolve. When the scale of the challenge is global, organisations must find ways of strengthening their partnerships and coming together to find the best and most sustainable solutions.

This is why partnerships are at the heart of everything we do at CABI. We believe that real answers are found when individuals and organisations, countries and regions work together to solve problems and build sustainable futures.

CABI board member Dr Prem Warrior explains how CABI is delivering on SDG15: Life on Land

 

CABI helps prevent, detect and limit the impact of invasive species by training government officials about the way they arrive and spread, supporting early detection and removal, and advising on natural, sustainable control (biocontrol) and pest management.

By conserving biodiversity and ecosystems, we're improving the preventing and management of invasive species.

CABI board member Professor Dame Anne Glover explains how CABI is delivering on SDG12: Responsible Consumption and Production

 

In future, farmers will need to produce more food from fewer resources. They will also need to significantly reduce crops losses. But without the right information, farmers cannot easily introduce new, highly productive and sustainable ways of farming.

Sustainable production is central to CABI's work. We promote resource efficient farming and help farmers access the tools and training they need to lose less produce and grow more. We believe this approach leads to better livelihoods for farmers and safer, more sustainably grown produce.

CABI board member Akhter Mateen explains how CABI is delivering on SDG1: No Poverty

 

One in five people in developing regions still live on less than $1.25 a day and many of these are the 500 million smallholder farmers around the world.

But CABI is working hard to help small-scale farmers lift themselves out of poverty. We collaborate with people and organizations working across the supply chain that brings food from 'field to fork', helping farmers receive a fairer share of the value they create.

CABI board member Roger Horton explains how CABI is delivering on SDG4: Quality Education

 

Sharing scientific agricultural and environmental information helps people tackle global challenges like food security.

CABI creates resources that give access to science-based information on agriculture and the environment. Our mission is to improve people's lives worldwide by sharing knowledge. As a scientific publisher we produce materials for academics and researchers that make education easier and lifelong learning a reality.

Open-access Knowledge Bank tackles malnutrition

Adequate nutrition, particularly in the first 1,000 days of life, is critical to both physical and mental development and long-term health. However, 15% of babies are born with a low birth weight[i] and 1 out of 3 people in the developing world suffer from a micronutrient deficiency; both important indicators of malnutrition. Poor access to agricultural and health information has been recognised as a major barrier in the uptake of improved nutritional practises, particularly for women and vulnerable groups in marginalised areas.

The Nutrition Knowledge Bank, part of the mNutrition Initiative, aims to help bridge the gap between information providers and users by providing an open-access store of both nutrition-sensitive agricultural approaches and nutrition-specific health interventions.

How crop diversity could help secure our future food supply

Diversity within maize. Image source: Sam Fentress, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1293212

16 October is World Food Day (#WFD2016); this year’s theme is ‘Climate is changing. Food and agriculture must too.’ Jennifer Cunniff, plant scientist in CABI’s editorial team looks at how harnessing crop diversity is vital for us to meet the challenge.

Of the wide variety of edible plant species growing on our planet it’s amazing how few of them we actually include in our diet. Around 30 000 edible plant species are known, yet only 30 of these feed the world, and we are heavily reliant on a handful of cereals - rice, bread wheat, maize, millets and sorghum - provide 60% of the energy intake of the world population (FAO). This narrowing of our food base largely started with the advent of farming – before then, there is plentiful archaeological evidence that shows we were foraging across a much wider breadth of plant species (e.g. Weiss et al. 2004; Fairbairn et al. 2006). Once we formed settled societies we began to focus on crops that offered the best level of return and were best adapted to the cultivated environments we created. Furthermore, even though multiple accessions¹ of our widely grown cereal species exist (naturally and through breeding) only a few dozen are grown on a wide scale. This strategy has consequences – genetic variability for adaptation to future climate change is lost.

¹ A single collected variety or cultivar. It could be a wild variety, a landrace or a bred cultivar.

 

Adapt – Amplify – Accelerate – recommends new report on rural development

According to a new report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) economic growth is not enough to transform rural areas in developing countries; governments need to develop inclusive policies and tailor investments if they want to make a fundamental change in rural peoples’ quality of life.

Open data revolution: Constraints and opportunities for increased agricultural productivity and food security in Africa

 

It is a well-known fact that small scale rural farmers are responsible for producing over 70 per cent of the food consumed in Africa. As a result, they have been the target of many agricultural development efforts for many decades. This is especially because building the capacity of small scale farmers to produce more food through efficient and sustainable methods will improve food security and nutrition in Africa.