On August 6, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) released its World Food Price Trends, reporting that prices fell for the fourth consecutive month since March, when they reached an all-time high, but remained 13% above their level a year ago. The decline reflects, among other things, significant declines in vegetable oil and grain price indexes.

The 8th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD8) will be held on August 27 (Sat) and 28 (Sun), 2022. In conjunction with this event, we created the Information Page on Agricultural Research in Africa which is now available on the JIRCAS website.

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.

Yesterday, July 28, was Earth Overshoot Day 2022. Last year it was August 2, five days earlier. We are now facing climate change and biological resource constraints, and we need to take all possible steps to build a more resilient society. Among these measures are eliminating resource inefficiency in food production, and preventing food loss and waste.

The Ukraine-Russia war is expected to have an enormous impact on global food security in the coming months. Researchers at CIMMYT, a leading international wheat and corn research institute, have proposed short and long-term measures to stabilize global wheat supplies and food security in the journal Nature Food.

On July 22, the United Nations and Turkey brokered an agreement to resume grain shipments from the Black Sea to Ukraine, but within 24 hours an attack on the port of Odessa was reported, casting a pall over the situation. The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2022 (SOCO 2022), released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) at the end of June 2022, addresses the geography of food and agricultural trade and demonstrates that efforts to promote multilateral and regional trade are essential to increase food system resilience to shocks such as conflict, pandemics, and extreme weather events, and to achieve sustainable development.

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.

For the first time, the UK Met Office has issued the Red alert warning of health risks due to an extreme heatwave predicted for the week of July 18/19. This is the first time that temperatures above 40°C have been predicted in the U.K., a tenfold increase in probability under anthropogenic climate change. The EU also issued a warning that nearly half of the EU and the U.K. are at risk of drought, citing concerns over the impact on crop production.

The State Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 by UN agencies (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, WHO) has recently been released. Today, with the permission of the FAO Liaison Office in Japan, we would like to share with you excerpts of the key messages regarding the food and nutrition situation.