This document explains ongoing activities and preliminary plans for the establishment of a
multipurpose innovation hub at the WorldFish Nusatupe Research Station in Western Province,
Solomon Islands.The innovation hub concept responds to national demand for a facility to convene research, training and services with national and provincial partners.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are rapidly transforming the way people work, providing opportunities for improving efficiency, accelerating innovations, and supporting human decision making. The area of policymaking is no exception. To explore the advantages and disadvantages of customized chatbots for supporting food policy research, we created a virtual food policy expert using a customized AI system using training literature drawn from about two dozen food policy research reports or food policy documents.

The Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia (TAFSSA) district agrifood systems assessment aims to provide a reliable, accessible, and integrated evidence base that links farm production, market access, dietary patterns, climate risk responses, and natural resource management with gender as a cross-cutting issue in rural areas of Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. It is designed to be a district-level multiyear assessment.

To improve the farming efficiency, Egypt has been struggling to narrow the water, energy, and yield gaps owing to exacerbated water shortage. For quantitative diagnosis of farming performance, the paper presented an on-farm water, energy, food, and carbon-footprint (WEFC) nexus index made up of four equally pillars. The arithmetic average preserved the multi-centric approach and equal importance of the four pillars.

Agriculture plays a major role in economic growth, but it is also an important source of greenhouse gas emissions in Kenya. To achieve Kenya’s NDC target of cutting GHG emissions by 32% by 2030 relative to business-as-usual (BAU) of 143 MtCO2 eq, there is need to identify and promote scalable innovations for food system emissions reduction. The CGIAR Initiative on Low-Emission Food Systems (Mitigate+) can contribute towards Kenya’s NDC. The Mitigate+ Initiative aims to reduce annual global food system emissions by 7% by 2030. Kenya is among the prioritized countries for the initiative.

There is an urgent need to rethink our global food systems. The world is facing a nutrition crisis, and the way we produce and consume food is altering the equilibrium of our planet, causing environmental damage and biodiversity loss, and climate change which further compromises food security. Children are disproportionately affected, and school meals are being increasingly recognized as a key investment for governments to tackle these challenges. Through national school meals programs, around 418 million children currently receive a meal at school every day.

The increasing population and changes in the climate in Africa demand a more sustainable approach to water usage for improved food and water security in the region. One of the key users of water, agriculture serves as the primary livelihood in Ghana, with a growing focus on cocoa production. To effectively implement sustainable water management strategies, it becomes imperative to conduct hydrological studies, including water balance components and water quality at sub-national and watershed scales. This would assist decision-makers in the proper planning and interventions for agriculture.

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).

Soil acidity is a major constraint to crop production in Ethiopia. It has affected soil health resulting in, inefficient use of fertilizer, significant crop yield losses, and shortage of feed for livestock in wheat-based mixed farming systems. Soil acidity level in the country is highly variable and require context-specific lime recommendations.

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.

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.

This study investigates the effect of married couples’ joint decision-making on rice variety selection on rice productivity—a measure of food security. The study uses the 2016 Rice Monitoring Survey and the endogenous switching regression (ESR) method. Results show that rice farms with joint decision-makers (husband and wife) would have higher yields, particularly in households that adopted MRVGen1 (before 1986) rice varieties. Thus, families with joint-decision making have higher food security.