Feature

Asia and the Pacific is the world’s largest food market. By 2030 it will likely account for half the global increase in annual beef and poultry consumption.Source: Asia’s Future Farms Globally, 815 million people went to bed unfed or half-fed in 2016, compared to 777 million the year before. If unchecked, this trend could cause a mass exodus of rural populations to urban… Read more

IFAD president Gilbert Houngbo makes the case for a ‘rural transformation’ backed by affordable technology. Gilbert Houngbo took over the presidency of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in April this year, following posts with other UN agencies and a four-year term as prime minister of Togo. At the UK parliament last week (October 31), the All-Party… Read more

MANILA, Philippines – Ideas to recycle waste products and promote agriculture – these were just some of the concepts pitched by finalists in the environment and climate change category of the 2017 HackSociety semi-final round held on Friday, September 15. Four teams pitched their ideas on the second day of the hackathon that aimed to crowdsource innovative solutions to some of the… Read more

Gianna Bonis-Profumo is passionate about food and nutrition security issues, particularly those affecting women and Indigenous populations in different cultural settings. Bonis-Profumo’s work in sustainable agriculture projects inspired her Food and Nutrition Hub research project proposal, which won the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition (BCFN) Yes! Competition in 2014. After spending… Read more

When we access an app on our phones, our main concern is how much it’s going to make our lives easier. Facebook lets us connect to our loved ones (and keep tabs on our frenemies). Yelp keeps us away from shady food joints that host typhoid fevers. And of course, there’s Tinder to identify the creeps in our neighborhood. And find true love, I guess. What we don’t think of is… Read more

Experts recently gathered in Bali to develop regulations that will help small-scale fishing operations and their sustainable methods thrive in our overfished seas. In this series of images, photojournalist Paul Hilton visits fishing communities in Asia where locals work in harmony with their environment.   Read more

All Mr Jack Ng wanted was to be a vegetable farmer in his retirement. But he was lazy. The idea of toiling in the fields, battling weather and pest woes, did not appeal to the engineer. Then, the perfect solution struck him. Mr Ng figured, "Why not build a farm vertically? It'll be perfect for land-scarce Singapore." In 2011, after two years of R&D, a prototype of Mr Ng's sky farm was… Read more

What does Zero Hunger mean to you? Children who receive school meals from the World Food Programme (WFP) in 22 countries answered this question through the drawings they submitted as part of the WFP Children’s Design Competition 2017. Twenty of them will receive cash prizes for themselves and their schools. Every day, millions of children around the globe turn up for school on an empty… Read more

One of the largest drainage canals ever dug through Indonesia’s peat swamps is being blocked in Kalimantan, the archipelago country’s portion of Borneo island, part of President Joko Widodo’s efforts to rewet some 2 million hectares of peat damaged in the great fires of 2015. The canal in question is one of the main branches in a giant, treelike canal network that stretches… Read more