Approximately 80% of human food is composed of crops, which are dominated by cereals that collectively make up 50% of global food production (Langridge and Fleury, 2011). Among cereal crops, rice, wheat, and maize provide approximately half of the calories consumed worldwide. Nevertheless, crop production is seriously hampered by influential abiotic stresses like drought, climate fluctuations, ...

A number of crop products generated by using biotechnology have been introduced to the marketplace. These biotechnology products have been carefully evaluated for their overall safety from an agronomic, environmental, performance, and equivalence perspective, and the safety of the newly expressed protein(s). One aspect of the safety evaluation is the question concerning potential allergenicity....

A five year Joint Project between SASEX and the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs was initiated in 1996, aimed at improving the crop production capabilities of small scale cane growers. As part of this Project, research trials were conducted to investigate the economics and practicalities of intercropping cane with food crops. Results from the first two years of ...

This study is an endeavor to evaluate statistically predicts a weather-crop yield-forecasting model to generate early crop production estimates. The weather-crop yield-forecasting model was applied to estimate prospective production of Aus rice in Jessore and Rajshahi districts of Bangladesh. This model is the relationship between the crop yield and input weather parameters influencing the crop...

Issues of enhanced food security depend primarily on increasing agricultural production. Given this challenge, existing and new, appropriate technologies need to be integrated into agricultural research, to focus on the problems related to improving nutritional security. Among the different approaches, mutagenesis and the isolation of improved or novel phenotypes in conjunction with conventiona...

Nanotechnology is one of the most important tools in modern agriculture, and agri-food nanotechnology is anticipated to become a driving economic force in the near future. Agri-food themes focus on sustainability and protection of agriculturally produced foods, including crops for human consumption and animal feeding. Nanotechnology provides new agrochemical agents and new delivery mechanisms t...

Information on the outlook of yield and production of crops over large regions is essential for government services dealing with import and export of food crops, for agencies playing a role in food relief, for international organisations with a mandate in monitoring the world food production and trade, as well as for commodity traders. In Europe, such information is provided by the MARS (Monito...

BACKGROUND Humanitarian relief agencies use scales to assess levels of critical food shortage to efficiently target and allocate food to the neediest. These scales are often labor-intensive. A lesser used approach is assessing gathering and consumption of wild food plants. This gathering per se is not a reliable signal of emerging food stress. However, the gathering and consumption of some spec...

The detection of genetically modified crops in foodstuff relies on detection of transgenic DNA or protein material in the sample matrix. Purified DNA or proteins are used as analytical material for polymerase chain reaction technologies and immunodiagnostics. Successful sample preparation is critical to the validity of subsequent analysis. For routine analysis, a good sample preparation techniq...

In his letter (1), Berti argues that our failure to find a relationship between farm production diversity (PD) and household dietary diversity (DD) may be due to the fact that PD and DD were measured using different scales. First, we would like to clarify that the main result of our article is not a zero relationship. What we find is a relatively small relationship between PD and DD (smaller th...