One of the three goals of the United Nations for sustainable food security is to ensure that all people have access to sufficient, nutritionally adequate, and safe food. Decades of tin mining in the Bitsichi area of the Jos Plateau, Nigeria, have left a legacy of polluted water supplies, impoverished agricultural land, and soil containing abnormally high levels of naturally occurring radioactiv...

Heavy metal contamination of the soil has become a serious problem confronting both scientists and regulators around the world. The occurrence and accumulation of these heavy metals in farm soils has far reaching implications on human health as humans occupy a key position on the food chain. Within the last ten years, studies on heavy metal accumulation in food crops and agricultural soils cond...

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) regulates environmental releases of plants with novel traits, which include transgenic plants such as Bt crops. Bt crops are regulated in Canada because they express insect resistance novel to their species. Commercialization of crops with novel traits such as the production of insecticidal Bt proteins requires an approval for environmental release, as...

About 10,000 years BC, people harvested their food from the natural biological diversity that surrounded them, and eventually domesticated crops and animals. During the process of domestication, people began to select better plant materials for propagation and animals for breeding, initially unwittingly, but ultimately with the intention of developing improved food crops and livestock. Over tho...

Background: Ever increasing global population requires to find additional options or increase the efficiency of food and feed supply to fulfil its dietary needs. In agricultural sector, competing situations with energy supply occur and ask for more sustainable solutions in an ethically correct manner. Methods: The Sustainable Process Index (SPI) provides a powerful method for an ecological eval...

The Pacific islands have a diverse range of food and cash crops with indigenous and introduced nematode problems. The staple food crops have serious nematode pests, such as Meloidogyne spp. on sweet potato, Hirschmanniella miticausa causing corm rot of taro, and Pratylenchus coffeae and Radopholus sp. producing tuber dry rot of yams. Bananas are infested with P. coffeae or R. similis, citrus wi...

Background and scope Genetically Engineered (GE) crops have been the most rapidly adopted agricultural technology in mankind history, as evidenced by a 100-fold increase from 1.7 to 181.5 million hectares globally cultivated between 1996 and 2014 1. Their environmental and economic benefits for farmers, farm workers, and society have been extensively reported elsewhere 2,3. Although GE crops ar...

G engineering can improve crop quality and agronomic performance. Biotech crops produced by this technology can potentially benefit producers as well as consumers in both developed and developing countries. The creation of the first genetically engineered (GE) organisms in the 1970s initiated a still ongoing debate regarding their safety. Despite this concern, GE crops have been increasingly ad...

This paper investigated the response of major food crop yields namely beans,cassava, Irish potatoes, maize and sweet potatoes to ongoing changes in climate inRwanda. The projected daily precipitation and temperature data for the period2000-2050 used in this study were generated by stochastic weather generator(LARS-WG) from daily raw data for the period 1961 -2000. These data werecollected from ...

Introduction: Human activities, such as mining, result in the elevation of natural ionizing radiation in the environment. Jos-Plateau, Nigeria, including Kuru-Jos has experienced commercial tin mining in the past, and local mining is still being practiced in this area. Therefore, it is important to assess the radiation exposure due to grown crops and the farm soils in ...