On December 1, JIRCAS will hold a hybrid seminar “Toward Building a Sustainable and Resilient Food System in Africa”, an official side event to commemorate the 30th anniversary of TICAD (Tokyo International Conference on African Development), initiated by the Japanese government in 1993. This event will introduce issues related to agriculture, forestry and fisheries in Africa, Japan's contributions to them, the history and current status of international joint research, and research needs. The diversity of African agriculture in terms of crops, water resources, soil, microorganisms, agricultural management, and nutritional supply will be discussed, as well as the points that need to be taken into consideration and future international collaborative research.

As fertilizer resources continue to be depleted and soar in prices, the use of farmyard manure derived from locally available organic materials is attracting attention to achieve increased food production in infertile soils widely distributed in Africa. In order to use farmyard manure to efficiently improve crop growth, it is important to know where and what kind of farmyard manure to apply. A research team from JIRCAS and the University of Antananarivo conducted rice cultivation trials in a poor-nutrient paddy field in Madagascar to determine the characteristics of the paddy soil and the farmyard manure that are more likely to increase yield when applied to the paddy fields.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary the Africa Rice Center (formerly WARDA) which is one of the CGIAR centers, Field Crops Research (Elsevier), an internationally renowned research journal has published a special issue on "Sustainable productivity enhancement of rice-based farming systems in Africa". Nineteen papers in the special issue were written by researchers at the forefront of research on rice agronomy in Africa, and JIRCAS researchers contributed to two of the papers.

On July 28, the winners of the 7th Niigata International Food Award, which is given to individuals who have devoted themselves to solving problems in the fields of food and agriculture, were announced. Among the five awardees this year, Dr. SAITO Kazuki, an affiliated researcher at JIRCAS, received the 21st Century Hope Prize.

As recently announced in Pick Up, the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA) and JIRCAS will co-host a TICAD 8 side-event “Healthy Soils for Food Security in Africa - Potential of Regenerative Agriculture” online via Zoom on August 5 (Fri), 2022. The poster of the event is now available. Please take a look.