— It is widely agreed that smallholder-led agricultural growth would contribute most to improved food security and reduced poverty. Yet, how to achieve broader and more sustainable access by smallholder farmers to productivity-enhancing inputs for food crop production remains a largely unsolved riddle. In light of the great institutional diversity across cotton sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa, th...

Since the early 1990s the US government policy has treated agbiotech as technological progress yielding beneficial products which warrant no special label, and whose safety can be readily demonstrated through ‘sound science’. Federal agencies readily approved or deregulated GM crops for cultivation and other uses. Food regulators routinely accepted company claims that GM foods had substantial e...

Global food production needs to be increased by 60-110% between 2005 and 2050 to meet growing food and feed demand. Intensification and/or expansion of agriculture are the two main options available to meet the growing crop demands. Land conversion to expand cultivated land increases GHG emissions and impacts biodiversity and ecosystem services. Closing yield gaps to attain potential yields may...

Increasing nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) inputs have greatly contributed to the increasing food production in China during the last decades, but have also increased N and P losses to the environment. The pathways and magnitude of these losses are not well quantified. Here, we report on N and P use efficiencies and losses at a national scale in 2005, using the model NUFER (NUtrient flows in Fo...

In this paper we first construct a theoretical model of land use by swidden cultivators when these cultivators can choose whether to grow a cash crop or a food/subsistence crop. Second, we study the land quality accumulation decision faced by shifting cultivators and, in the process, we show how to compute the optimal length of time during which cleared land is to be left fallow. Finally, we in...

1. We examined the effect of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a component of Gram-negative bacteria, on food passage in the digestive tract of chickens (Gallus gallus) in order to clarify whether bacterial infection affects food passage in birds. 2. Food passage in the crop was significantly reduced by intraperitoneal (IP) injection of LPS while it did not affect the number of defecations, suggesting ...

C hronic hunger persists in most African countries even as crop production reaches peak levels on other continents (Johns Hopkins 2000). In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 600 million people live on small farms measuring no more than a few hectares each. Low productivity due to biotic and abiotic factors is responsible for food insufficiency and malnutrition. The rapid increase in population (nea...

Smallholder farming systems in Papua New Guinea are characterised by an integrated set of cash cropping and subsistence food cropping activities. In the Highlands provinces, the subsistence food crop sub-system is dominated by sweet potato production. Coffee dominates the cash cropping sub-system, but a limited number of food crops are also grown for cash sale. The dynamics between sub-systems ...

Arracacia xanthorrhiza is an important secondary food crop in South America and Puerto Rico. The lack of crop protection and improvement strategies leads to infections damaging the storage roots. Here, we report the annotated complete chloroplast genome sequence of A. xanthorrhiza as a step toward developing genomic resources for this crop.

associated with this condition among summer crop growers in Shoushtar Township, Khouzestan Province, Iran. This cross-sectional survey study was conducted from September 2015 to February 2017. The population consisted of summer crop farmers in the Shoushtar Township (N=850). The sample size was determined based on Morgan table (n=150). For analyzing food security level, the 18-item USDA househo...