BACKGROUND Ethiopia faces cyclic food insecurity that alternates between pre- and post- harvest seasons. Whether seasonal variation in access to food is associated with child growth has not been assessed empirically. Understanding seasonality of child growth velocity and growth deficit helps to improve efforts to track population interventions against malnutrition. The aim of this study was ass...

MAIN OBJECTIVES Fresh fruits and vegetables become increasingly recognized as vehicles of human salmonellosis. Physiological, ecological, and environmental factors are all thought to contribute to the ability of Salmonella to colonize fruits and vegetables pre- and post-harvest. The goal of this study was to test how irrigation levels, fruit water congestion, crop and pathogen genotypes affect ...

A major challenge in rice (Oryza sativa L.) production is to enhance water use efficiency (WUE) and maintain or even increase grain yield. WUE, if defined as the biomass accumulation over water consumed, may be fairly constant for a given species in given climate. WUE can be enhanced by less irrigation. However, such enhancement is largely a trade-off against lower biomass production. If WUE is...

Citrate is one of the most important organic acids in many fruits and its concentration plays a critical role in organoleptic properties. The regulation of citrate accumulation throughout fruit development, and the origins of the phenotypic variability of the citrate concentration within fruit species remain to be clarified. In the present study, we developed a process-based model of citrate ac...

Post harvest loss has been a bane to food security in Nigeria. Although increased crop yield has been found to be feasible. Post harvest losses especially in fruits such as citrus, banana and pineapple are enormous, the marketing system of these fruits places about 75% of the burden of these losses on the fruit marketers. This study evaluated post harvest losses in fruit marketing in Lagos metr...