Study sheds new light on roles of women and men on RTB farms
Oct 14, 2019 rtbcomms
Results from a household survey of farmers in Rwanda and Burundi challenge our stereotypes about how women and men engage in growing roots, tubers and bananas. In male-headed households, decision-making and labor-provision were most of the time joint efforts by men and women, while in female-headed households, men made most of the decisions and […]
Scientists show which genetic loci is associated with bunch weight in highland banana
Oct 1, 2019 rtbcomms
Scientists have, for the first time, located the position of major quantitative trait loci associated with bunch weight and its component traits in Matooke, the East African Highland cooking banana. This is an important breakthrough in efforts to speed up the breeding of improved high-yielding varieties for both food security and improved household incomes in […]
Scaling up the use of Orange Fleshed Puree for Baked and Fried Products
Sep 27, 2019 rtbcomms
In late May the International Potato Centre (CIP) organized a stakeholder engagement and launch meeting in Nairobi, Kenya bringing together over 20 organizations involved in sweetpotato value chain in Kenya. The launch involved representatives at the national level from the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), Ministry of Health and the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS). The new […]
More equitable crop improvement
Sep 19, 2019 rtbcomms
Ensuring plant breeders can take women into account M9 is the code name of a new banana variety developed for the smallholder banana farmers of Uganda, where banana is a very important staple. Yields can be 60% higher and, because the variety is resistant to pests and diseases, it does not need to be replanted […]
Researchers look deep under the banana’s skin
Sep 5, 2019 rtbcomms
The very thing that makes bananas so easy to eat – they don’t have seeds – also makes them hard to breed. Beneath that simple observation, however, lies a very complicated evolutionary history, one that three recent papers by researchers with the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas help to uncover and, as […]
Africa and Asia will propel the world’s population towards 10 billion – but are their food systems ready?
Aug 7, 2019 rtbcomms
Improving access to other key inputs like water and fertilizer, as well as wider technical services such as agricultural machinery, would help to boost resources, but change needs to happen fast Talk of the global population reaching 10 billion by 2050 has been around for some time. Yet, this statistic actually hides the real source of this […]
FoodSTART+ featured in the latest iMPACT magazine issue
Apr 22, 2019 rtbcomms
FoodSTART+ Principal Investigator, Diego Naziri, and CIAT Market Access Specialist, Brice Even shared how the partnership between grant projects and investment projects can facilitate taking innovations to scale. From the experience of FoodSTART+, the success of the project highly depends on the outcome of the partnership with investment projects — who are the primary drivers […]
University of Florida Researchers Develop Model to Help Keep Crop Seeds Healthy
Apr 11, 2019 rtbcomms
Working with international researchers, University of Florida scientists have developed a model that will help protect good seeds, which are necessary to plant healthy crops and determine what areas are at higher risk for unhealthy seeds. In many parts of the world, people lack adequate access to nutritious food because there aren’t enough quality seeds […]