How vulnerable is Cali's food system to climate shocks? A historical perspective

Two of the main effects on the supply system of a city in the agricultural sector due to climatic variations in the agricultural sector are related to the reduction of food supply and the impact on food prices. Knowing how much El Niño/La Niña climatic phenomena affect the agricultural sector that supplies food to a city, municipality or country will help to plan strategies to mitigate these impacts, the fragility of food systems and the protection of the most vulnerable. In this sense, the study is interested in knowing to what degree the supply system of the city of Cali is vulnerable to this type of phenomena, a city in which 1 out of every 2 inhabitants suffers from food insecurity, 1 out of every 2 people is poor and more than 50% of the population has nutritional deficiencies

Who bears the burden of climate variability? A comparative analysis of the impact of weather conditions on inequality in Vietnam and Indonesia

Is climate variability regressive? One argument could be as follows: People living in areas with high risk of climate hazards usually correspond to the most disadvantaged populations. Due to existing structural inequalities, they have limited opportunities to cope with climate hazards and often fall into a spiral of further poverty and social exclusion. In this paper, we investigate whether climate variability indeed has a regressive effect in Vietnam and Indonesia where both climate variability and inequality have been increasing. We directly analyse the effect of annual and seasonal temperature on income and income inequality across years. We do so by looking at the Vietnamese and Indonesian populations as a whole and also investigating more in-depth how these impacts change for the most vulnerable and marginalised groups. Our results suggest that climate variability increases inequality and that its biggest burden is bore by existing vulnerable groups. In Indonesia, these groups are rural, farming, low educated, female headed households, whose income is significantly reduced because of changes in climate conditions. Similarly, in Vietnam, ethnic minorities, rural, farming, and agricultural households bear the biggest impact of climate variability. Interestingly, some households in Vietnam are able to completely offset short-term impact of climate variability, using remittances and transfer as an insurance, but our findings also show that their coping strategy does not withstand longer term impacts of persistent climate variability. Despite the remarkable efforts of the national governments in supporting most vulnerable and marginalised groups in the Vietnamese and Indonesian societies in the past decades, specific interventions are needed to address the needs of those who are still bearing the biggest burden of climate impacts to finally allow even the “last mile” groups to escape poverty and exclusion

Distributions, conservation status, and abiotic stress tolerance potential of wild cucurbits (Cucurbita L.)

Societal Impact Statement Crop wild relatives—wild species closely related to cultivated plants—are valuable genetic resources for crop improvement, but gaps in knowledge constrain their conservation and limit their further use. We develop new information on the distributions, potential breeding value, and conservation status of the 16 known wild relatives of cultivated pumpkins, squashes, zucchini, and gourds (Cucurbita L.). The taxa occur from the central USA to Central America, plus two South American species, with the greatest richness in central Mexico and the western borderlands between Mexico and the USA. We determine the majority of species are of medium priority for conservation, both with regard to collecting for ex situ maintenance, and for enhanced habitat protection. Summary Crop wild relatives are valuable genetic resources for crop improvement. Knowledge gaps, including with regard to taxonomy, distributions, and characterization for traits of interest constrain their use in plant breeding. These deficiencies also affect conservation planning, both with regard to in situ habitat protection, and further collection of novel diversity for ex situ maintenance. Here we model the potential ranges of all 16 known wild cucurbit taxa (Cucurbita L.), use ecogeographic information to infer their potential adaptations to abiotic stresses, and assess their ex situ and in situ conservation status. The taxa occur from the central USA to Central America, plus two South American species. Predicted taxon richness was highest in central Mexico and in the western borderlands between Mexico and the USA. We find substantial ecogeographic variation both across taxa and among populations within taxa, with regard to low temperatures, high and low precipitation, and other adaptations of potential interest for crop breeding. We categorize 13 of the taxa medium priority for further conservation as a combination of the ex situ and in situ assessments, two low priority, and one sufficiently conserved. Further action across the distributions of the taxa, with emphasis on taxonomic richness hotspots, is needed to comprehensively conserve wild Cucurbita populations

Perfil del sistema alimentario de Honduras. Entendiendo mejor los sistemas alimentarios a nivel de país

Los perfiles de país son más que una simple compilación de indicadores nacionales. Se construyen y diseñan en torno a un marco y una metodología comunes para identificar los puntos críticos de insostenibilidad en los sistemas alimentarios de los países y priorizar las intervenciones a múltiples escalas, para abordarlos mediante acciones e inversiones específicas. Una característica importante de estos perfiles nacionales es que se elaboran juntamente con las principales partes interesadas públicas y privadas de los sistemas alimentarios, quienes participan tanto en la identificación de los datos como en la validación de los resultados y los mensajes clave que surgen. El uso de un marco común ofrece una nueva oportunidad para realizar un análisis comparativo global de las transiciones y transformaciones del sistema alimentario, generando así ideas y lecciones para los responsables de la toma de decisiones no sólo a nivel nacional sino también internacional. Esperamos que estos perfiles contribuyan a los procesos internacionales pertinentes, a raíz de la Cumbre de las Naciones Unidas sobre Sistemas Alimentarios de 2021. El presente perfil del sistema alimentario hondureño está conformado por tres grandes bloques de información: (a) los motores del sistema; (b) los componentes del sistema, y (c) los resultados del sistema

Crop wild relatives of the United States require urgent conservation action

The contributions of crop wild relatives (CWR) to food security depend on their conservation and accessibility for use. The United States contains a diverse native flora of CWR, including those of important cereal, fruit, nut, oil, pulse, root and tuber, and vegetable crops, which may be threatened in their natural habitats and underrepresented in plant conservation repositories. To determine conservation priorities for these plants, we developed a national inventory, compiled occurrence information, modeled potential distributions, and conducted threat assessments and conservation gap analyses for 600 native taxa. We found that 7.1% of the taxa may be critically endangered in their natural habitats, 50% may be endangered, and 28% may be vulnerable. We categorized 58.8% of the taxa as of urgent priority for further action, 37% as high priority, and 4.2% as medium priority. Major ex situ conservation gaps were identified for 93.3% of the wild relatives (categorized as urgent or high priority), with 83 taxa absent from conservation repositories, while 93.1% of the plants were equivalently prioritized for further habitat protection. Various taxonomic richness hotspots across the US represent focal regions for further conservation action. Related needs include facilitating greater access to and characterization of these cultural-genetic-natural resources and raising public awareness of their existence, value, and plight

Crop wild relatives of the brinjal eggplant ( Solanum melongena ): Poorly represented in genebanks and many species at risk of extinction

This is the publisher's Early View pdf without final pagination .© 2016 Botanical Society of America. This is an open access article, available to all readers online, published under a creative commons license. The attached file is the published version of the article

Can economic development be a driver of food system sustainability? Empirical evidence from a global sustainability index and a multi-country analysis

Despite representing a growing element of the international community’s discourse, the sustainability of food systems and the challenge of its empirical measurement are still highly debated. In this paper, we propose to address this gap by computing a global food system sustainability index which we then use in a cross-country analysis covering 94 countries in low-, middle- and high-income regions. The analysis reveals a strong non-linear but positive correlation between the food system sustainability index and countries’ individual GDP per capita. This relationship suggests some possible degree of endogeneity between food system sustainability and economic development. We then use the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways framework and Individual Conditional Expectations modeling techniques to explore how the sustainability of food systems is projected to evolve in the future as countries move up the economic development ladder. The projections indicate that for lower income countries, the change is usually more significant than for higher income countries. The analysis also reveals that the different dimensions of sustainability will not all contribute equally to future improvements in food system sustainability. In particular, investments targeting social and food security & nutrition dimensions are projected to have a greater effect on the sustainability of food systems than investment/interventions aiming at the environment or economic domains. For countries located at the lower end of the economic development spectrum, this would imply that, even with limited resources, policy-makers could substantially improve the sustainability of countries’ food systems by prioritizing (sub)national policies and interventions focused on social and food security & nutrition domains

Bangladesh Food System Profile. Better understanding food systems at country level

This Bangladesh food system profile is composed of three main blocks of information: (a) system drivers; (b) system components; and (c) system outcomes. The first main block recognizes how environmental, demographic, technological, political, economic, social, and cultural drivers influence the food system—from production to consumption. The second block considers three components of the system: its actors and activities, the food environment, and consumer behavior. The third block, which is the last, corresponds to the system's outcomes in terms of the nutritional and health status of the population, food security, and the country's environmental and socioeconomic conditions. This profile also presents a comparison of Bangladesh's data against three groups: the country's geographic neighbors (Bhutan, India, Myanmar, and Nepal), countries with similar GDP per capita (Angola, India, Kenya, and Nicaragua), and the world average

Germplasm Collection Gaps and Species Richness of Wild Relatives of Important Root, Tuber and Banana Crops.

The wild relatives of crops represent a major source of valuable traits for crop improvement. These resources are threatened by habitat destruction, land use changes, and other factors, requiring their urgent collection and long-term availability for research and breeding from ex situ collections. We propose a method to identify gaps in ex situ collections (i.e. gap analysis) of crop wild relatives as a means to guide efficient and effective collecting activities

Assessing value chain risks to design agricultural risk managment strategies: A practitioner's toolkit

This toolkit provides step-by-step guidance to perform an Agricultural Value Chain Risk Assessment Study (AVC-RAS) at the country level. The goal of an AVC-RAS is to rigorously assess and prioritize the major risks affecting actors along agricultural value chains and to identify the actionable components of an integrated risk management strategy for the value chain, using a gender lens throughout. This toolkit provides examples and tools for conducting a general AVC-RAS with a focus on managing risks in agricultural production systems and improving value chain resilience at national scales. Assessing and prioritizing risks is a main component of a good risk management strategy and can generate awareness and a shared view of risks. There are many components in combining an identified value chain approach with a holistic agricultural risk assessment. Considering multiple actors and risks, their complex relationships, and the potential effects of diverse events on individual actors and larger systems is important. Integrating different sources and types of data for more informed and robust decision-making rocess is also needed. This toolkit provides a structure and tools to deal with these inherent intricacies in an AVC-RAS, recognizing that assessment teams need a high level of flexibility and practicality to deal with the specific conditions in each AVC-RAS