In Australia, over 90 percent of local wheat varieties can be traced back to CIMMYT varieties, reports Kim Honan in a 17 September article on ABC’s Rural website.

The Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) and CIMMYT organized a two-day annual wheat planning meeting at the National Agricultural Research Centre (NARC) in Islamabad.

The impending threat of global climate change makes the storage and maintenance of crop diversity, held in the form of seeds in gene banks around the world, more important than ever before.

On 11-12 September, 61 scientists from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal convened in Kathmandu, Nepal, for the 6th Wheat Breeding Review Meeting of the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) objective 4 program.

Food insecurity is a persistent problem in Sindh, a province in Pakistan slightly smaller than Tajikistan and home to 42.5 million residents. Almost three-quarters of the population are subject to regular food shortages due to the stagnation of staple food production and pressures caused by a doubling of the population since 1999.

In Asia, maize production is growing at a faster rate than any other cereal. The demand for maize has grown in response to changing consumer habits; with greater demand for meat in consumers’ diets, maize is in high demand as feed for the growing livestock sector. At the same time, there remains great opportunity to increase the area under maize production in the region, as well as tremendous opportunities for innovations in crop improvement, management and diversification.

During the training courses for MasAgro Network seed producers given in 2014, surveys were conducted to determine their training needs in 2015.

A field day was held on 4 September at CIMMYT’s Toluca experiment station to give CIMMYT scientists the opportunity to explain their program objectives and research activities to colleagues who may not have been familiar with their work. Dr. Sanjaya Rajaram, 2014 World Food Prize recipient, and several retired CIMMYT employees who had worked with him also attended. Over 100 current and former staff members attended, with one group receiving presentations in English and the other in Spanish.

MAIZE CRP has announced its third call for proposals as part of the Competitive Grants Initiative (CGI). The call is directed at researchers from outside CGIAR, allowing a greater variety of research partners worldwide to apply for funds to support research and capacity-building activities that will make a significant contribution to the MAIZE vision of success.

M.L. Jat, senior cropping system agronomist in the Global Conservation Agriculture Program at CIMMYT, in collaboration with Hirak Banerjee, Rupak Goswami, Somsubhra Chakraborty, Sudarshan Duttac, Kaushik Majumdar , T. Satyanarayana and Shamie Zingore, recently published a study examining the socio-economic determinants of yield gap in maize.

The inaugural CGIAR Development Dialogues will focus attention on the vital role of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, landscapes and food systems in achieving sustainable development. The one-day event will be held at the Faculty House of Columbia University in New York City on 25 September. A by-invitation-only audience of some 300 will attend. Thousands more will be included online through live webcasting and social media channels.