A course that trains African scientists to use genetic tools to improve food production on the continent has begun its third round, with guidance and support from UC Davis.
The African Plant Breeding Academy’s third cohort is offered through the African Orphan Crops Consortium, an initiative co-founded with UC Davis. Allen Van Deynze is the AOCC’s scientific director and based in the Department of Plant Sciences.
Six women from around the world, all leaders in their fields, have spent the fall quarter at UC Davis learning from researchers here and from one another. Soon, each will return to her country to improve food systems there and empower more women.
The inaugural Global Food Systems Research Day, held Oct. 24 at UC Davis, underscored the role of scientists in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences in the effort to build sustainable agricultural and distribution systems providing nutritious and affordable food to people all over the world.
Representatives from organizations linked through the African Orphan Crops Consortium met in Kenya recently and planted a jackfruit tree, symbolizing their goal of building a world where food security and peace go hand in hand.
In a rustic-looking garden on the UC Davis campus recently, two dozen young leaders from sub-Saharan Africa viewed simple, low-cost innovations that can reduce postharvest losses, increase food safety and preserve nutritious food in their home countries.
The 2024 Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Horticulture Annual Meeting, themed, Local Leadership in Building Horticulture Resilience to Climate Change, took place in Antigua, Guatemala. It brought together global experts and stakeholders in horticulture to foster collaboration and share knowledge.
Two UC Davis collaborative projects aim to enlarge the share of that wealth for small farmers in Colombia. Undergraduate students from the Department of Plant Sciences played host to five students from Colombia recently, after themselves visiting Colombia last year to study that country’s cultivation of this ancient and storied crop.
Master’s student María José Godoy Harb wants people to know about a remote spot in her native Chile that offers global insights: Easter Island, where the COVID-19 pandemic offered lessons for making food systems more resilient.
People in rural regions like mountainous Nepal produce plenty of food. But before it can get to local markets and into people’s homes, much of it spoils. What’s left often has lost much of its nutritional value.
The African Orphan Crops Consortium launched with a lofty goal in 2013: to help scientists in Africa develop more nutritious, productive and resilient varieties of commonly used but rarely studied crops to improve public health.
