Many of the undernourished people on the planet obtain their entitlements to food via agricultural-based livelihood strategies, often on underperforming croplands and smallholdings. In this context, expanding cropland extent is not a viable strategy for smallholders to meet their food needs. Therefore, attention must shift to increasing productivity on existing plots and ensuring yield gaps do ...

Humans and animals are exposed to aflatoxins, toxic carcinogenic fungal metabolites, through consumption of contaminated food and feed. Aspergillus flavus, the primary causal agent of crop aflatoxin contamination, is composed of phenotypically and genotypically diverse vegetative compatibility groups (VCGs). Molecular data suggest that VCGs largely behave as clones with certain VCGs exhibiting ...

Improving environmental adaptation in crops is essential for food security under global change, but phenotyping adaptive traits remains a major bottleneck. If associations between single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) alleles and environment of origin in crop landraces reflect adaptation, then these could be used to predict phenotypic variation for adaptive traits. We tested this proposition in ...

Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is the staple food and second most important food crop after rice in the country, which contributes nearly one-third of the total food grains production. It is consumed mostly in the form of bread as “Chapati”. Wheat straw is used for feeding cattle. Wheat contains more protein than other cereal and has a relatively high content of niacin and thiamine [1]. It is bas...

The rapid increase in population in the world has propelled pressure on arable land. Consequently, the food basket has continuously declined while global demand for food has grown twofold. There is need to monitor and update agriculture land-cover to support food security measures. This study develops a spatial-temporal approach using conditional random fields (CRF) to classify co-registered im...

1. We assessed the impacts of deforestation on the energy base of headwater food webs in seven headwater streams in the Upper Chattahoochee basin, GA, U.S.A where percentage forest in catchments ranged from 82 to 96%. We measured terrestrial organic matter standing crop and determined consumer (crayfish and insectivorous fish) dependence on terrestrial versus aquatic energy sources via gut cont...

This paper shows how agricultural productivity shocks can generate large industrial output fluctuations in poor countries, using a static general-equilibrium model with Stone-Geary preferences. A negative shock to agricultural productivity increases food prices, which affects manufacturing output through two channels: (1) meeting subsistence requirements in the face of rising food prices causes...

Severe food shortage is associated with increased mortality and reduced reproductive success in contemporary and historical human populations. Studies of wild animal populations have shown that subtle variation in environmental conditions can influence patterns of mortality, fecundity and natural selection, but the fitness implications of such subtle variation on human populations are unclear. ...

In this study we use long-term satellite, climate, and crop observations to document the spatial distribution of the recent stagnation in food grain production affecting the water-limited tropics (WLT), a region where 1.5 billion people live and depend on local agriculture that is constrained by chronic water shortages. Overall, our analysis shows that the recent stagnation in food production i...