At a time when Africa's food security stands threatened, Realizing Africa's Rice Promise provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research and recommendations for dealing with future challenges. With contributions from the key scientists working on rice in Africa, this volume addresses policy, genetic diversity and improvement, sustainable productivity enhancement, innovations and value chains. The book is useful for researchers, policy makers, agricultural ministries, donors, regional and sub-regional organizations, non-governmental development organizations and universities.

This book presents field studies on crop production in developing countries such as Vietnam, Kenya, Namibia, Colombia, Afghanistan and Sudan. Further, it examines the achievements of SATREPS, a development assistance program sponsored by the Japanese government that promotes international joint research to address these global issues. In this context, multidisciplinary research teams consisting of breeders, physiologists, soil scientists, agronomists, and other scientists related to agricultural development worked together to tackle the challenges involved in enhancing the capacity of crop production in the respective regions. In addition to presenting novel scientific findings, this book highlights practical field studies that verify the effectiveness of the scientific findings in actual environments. The achievements will help to improve crop production worldwide, and the lessons learnt will be useful in re-designing strategies to address global issues in crop production, particularly in developing regions. Lastly, the outcomes discussed will be useful to policymakers and professionals engaged in crop production and food security in developing countries, as well as researchers and students.

This book presents the history of, and current approaches to, farmer-breeder collaboration in plant breeding, situating this work in the context of sustainable food systems, as well as national and international policy and law regimes. Plant breeding is essential to food production, climate-change adaptation and sustainable development. This book brings together experienced practitioners and researchers involved in collaborative breeding programmes across a diversity of crops and agro-ecologies around the world. Case studies include collaborative sorghum and pearl millet breeding for water-stressed environments in West Africa, participatory rice breeding for intensive rice farming in the Mekong Delta, and evolutionary participatory quinoa breeding for organic agriculture in North America. While outlining the challenges, the volume also highlights the positive impacts, such as yield increases, farmers’ empowerment in the innovation and development processes, contributions to maintenance of crop genetic diversity and adaptation to climate change. This collection offers a range of perspectives on enabling conditions for farmer–breeder collaboration in plant breeding in relation to biodiversity agreements such as the Plant Treaty, trade agreements and related intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes, and national seed policies and laws. Relevant to a wide audience, including practitioners with experience in plant breeding and management of crop genetic resources and those with a broader interest in agriculture and development, as well as students of international cooperation and development, this volume is a timely addition to the literature.

This book focuses on the conventional breeding approach, and on the latest high-throughput genomics tools and genetic engineering / biotechnological interventions used to improve rice quality. It is the first book to exclusively focus on rice as a major food crop and the application of genomics and genetic engineering approaches to achieve enhanced rice quality in terms of tolerance to various abiotic stresses, resistance to biotic stresses, herbicide resistance, nutritional value, photosynthetic performance, nitrogen use efficiency, and grain yield. The range of topics is quite broad and exhaustive, making the book an essential reference guide for researchers and scientists around the globe who are working in the field of rice genomics and biotechnology. In addition, it provides a road map for rice quality improvement that plant breeders and agriculturists can actively consult to achieve better crop production.

Technology is key to the development of nations yet is not freely or easily accessible. This book aims to contribute to the debate about empowering Africa to play a more meaningful role in the global innovation system. It emphasizes the important role of technology transfer in assisting Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in Africa to expand their technological capabilities. The book surveys IP and innovation policies in Africa's past and present, providing theoretical, policy, and legal frameworks, as well as specific measures that will help African LDCs. It proposes solutions to overcome challenges currently posed by inefficiencies in the flow of technologies to LDCs and by the fragmentation of the international legal framework that regulates technology transfer. Notably, the book proposes maximal implementation of the TRIPS Agreement provisions related to technology transfer and recommends the adoption of a uniform international legal instrument under the framework of the WTO to be designated as the Agreement on Trade-Related Issues of Technology Transfer and Innovation (TRITTI). The book advocates for proactivity from African LDCs and urges them to cultivate environments that attract and enable technology transfer into their respective states. This will facilitate technological learning, accelerate absorption and adaptation fit to an African context, and will catapult African LDCs down the road of innovation.

This book presents climate change as a global phenomenon which affects the entire food chain. Many studies analyzing environmental impacts of food systems confirm significant effects of food production on climate change. Most of them associate primary production with emission of greenhouse gasses identified as one of the causes resulting in warming the atmosphere and global climate effects. A wider perspective shows that the food chains start at farms with consumers being at the end of the pipeline. This approach emphasizes the role of the entire food chain highlighting different kinds of environmental impacts affecting climate change. On the other side, temperature changes and variations of precipitation patterns, together with extreme weather events and water reduction, are recognized as predictors for producing less food, decreased food quality, new food safety risks, biodiversity losses, and depletion of resources associated with food production in modified circumstances. Last but not least, these effects introduce new threats known as food security where some assumptions stress that almost one billion of people are hungry not receiving enough food as a result of climate changes. As a result, the UN highlights the need for combating climate change and promotes sustainable (food) consumption and production. Based on the perceived need to promote and disseminate information on climate change related to food system, the “Handbook of Climate change across the food supply chain” is being produced. The publication compiles information, experiences, practical initiatives, and projects around the subject matter and makes it available to a wide audience. It is expected that the “Handbook of Climate change across the food supply chain” makes many benefits of climate service clearer and, inter alia, leads to an increase in the demand for such important services.

This book provides up-to-date and comprehensive coverage of the research and application of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in tropical regions. The first section explores the agro-ecological framework that represents the foundations of IPM, in addition to emerging technologies in chemical and biological methods that are core to pest control in tropical crops. The second section follows a crop-based approach and provides details of current IPM applications in the main tropical food crops (such as cereals, legumes, root and tuber crops, sugarcane, vegetables, banana and plantain, citrus, oil palm, tea, cocoa and coffee) and also fibre crops (such as cotton) and tropical forests.

Africa is not on track to meeting the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 targets to end hunger and ensure access by all people to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round and to end all forms of malnutrition. The number of hungry people on the continent has risen by 47.9 million since 2014 and now stands at 250.3 million, or nearly one-fifth of the population. The 2017, 2018 and 2019 editions of this report explain that this gradual deterioration of food security was due to conflict, weather extremes, and economic slowdowns and downturns, often overlapping. A continued worsening of food security is expected also for 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to hunger, across all countries in Africa millions of people suffer from widespread micronutrient deficiencies, and overweight and obesity are emerging as significant health concerns in many countries. This report shows that the food system in Africa does not provide food at a cost that makes nutritious food affordable to a majority of the population, and this is reflected in the high disease burden associated with maternal and child malnutrition, high body-mass, micronutrient deficiencies and dietary risk factors. The report also shows that current food consumption patterns impose high health and environmental costs, which are not reflected in food prices. The findings presented in this report highlight the importance of prioritizing the transformation of food systems to ensure access to affordable and healthy diets for all, produced in a sustainable manner.

Advances in Agronomy, Volume 157, continues to be recognized as a leading reference and first-rate source for the latest research in agronomy. Each volume contains an eclectic group of reviews by leading scientists throughout the world. As always, the subjects covered are rich, varied, and exemplary of the abundant subject matter addressed by this long-running serial. - Includes numerous, timely, state-of-the-art reviews on the latest advancements in agronomy - Features distinguished, well recognized authors from around the world - Builds upon this venerable and iconic review series - Covers the extensive variety and breadth of subject matter in the crop and soil sciences