News

The U.S. Drought Monitor website does not look pretty. Iowa has seen two consecutive years of drought. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says corn production decreased by 13 percent from 2011-2012 because of drought. Crop...

Cassava isn't afraid of a changing climate

For poor farmers in the tropics, there are few upsides to climate change. Cassava, however, is set to take off under higher temperatures – if pests and diseases don't drag it down.

Cass...

By LUIGI GUARINO | Director of Science and Programs

John Galsworthy quipped that headlines are generally twice the size of the events they refer to. So such examples of that artform as “Cost of Conserving Global Biodiversity Set...

By LUIGI GUARINO | Director of Science and Programs

Quick, who won the marathon at the London Olympics? Come on, it was only a couple of weeks ago. No? Well, don't worry, I can't remember either. So here's an easier question. Who...

Luigi Guarino

The US Affordable Care Act has proved complicated, divisive and controversial, but it will help to protect people against disease and medical misfortune. The world’s crops have the same sort of health problems....

Luigi Guarino

I’m not saying for a moment that the world of crop diversity conservation is anything like a screwball comedy. But I do sometimes wish meet-cutes happened in that world as Billy Wilder would have written them.

A...

Luigi Guarino

Getting a chenopodiaceous Andean pseudo-cereal on a coffee shop menu is as difficult as it sounds. My friend Stefano Padulosi is endearingly self-effacing about this achievement in a recent blog post extolling the...

Luigi Guarino

The fact that this year – on June 20, to be precise – the ten-yearly Earth Summit roadshow (or the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, to give it its full moniker) is returning to where it all...

Luigi Guarino

The Copenhagen Consensus sounds like a minor Robert Ludlum novel – perhaps something from his unjustly neglected, more sedate late period – but it’s actually far scarier. The consensus is that of economists, about...

Luigi Guarino

Good vs Evil. East vs West. Capulets vs Montagues. Barça vs Real. We like to deal in such binary choices. It makes life so much easier. None of that groping around in the grey shadows of doubt. Love it or leave it....

Luigi Guarino

Californians flipping through the news over their organic, high-fibre muesli must have spluttered orange juice all over their shiny new iPad3s. Huanglongbing has come to their state. This nasty disease -- also known...

Luigi Guarino

What you – and they – are looking at is a small fraction of the world’s largest collection of bean diversity. You can admire it, like these guys are doing, at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, whose...