New Foods and Old Food Policy: the Great Asian Disconnect Lecture given at the Asian Society of Agricultural Economists Conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh on October 15, 2014.

As reported by TCi partner HarvestPlus, there has been a breakthrough in breeding for vitamin A in maize (corn) by a team of researchers from Purdue, Cornell and Michigan State. Purdue agronomy professor Torbert Rocheford (pictured), a longtime HarvestPlus collaborator, worked with the labs of Cornell plant breeder Michael Gore and genetiticist Edward Buckler, to identify…

TCi intern Alex King spent the summer in Mumbai researching and advancing TCi’s understanding of the iron-fortified food market. TCi is working to develop new products, partnerships and/or opportunities for promoting iron-fortified foods for rural and urban India. As of now, anemia represents a major human health crisis in the region, with close to 40% of women in…

Water storage (natural or manmade) is one way in which we buffer against climate risks involving inadequate water. Not only is irrigation a way to deal with the occasional dry spell, but in many places it is critical to maintaining current crop yields. This makes agriculture by far the biggest consumer of water amongst human…

TCi summer intern Nathaniel “Alex” Cordova, a graduate student in public administration, discusses the analysis phase of the work that was undertaken late in the summer after the fieldwork phase was complete. Read up onTCi’s Minimum Nutrition Dataset work here and check out prior posts about the project. While the data collection process was operationally taxing, the data analysis…

TCI summer intern Nathaniel “Alex” Cordova, a graduate student in public administration, discusses the analysis phase of the work that was undertaken late in the summer after the fieldwork phase was complete.

Read additional posts about TCi’s work in creating a minimum set of nutrition metrics for use in agriculture surveys here. It’s an exciting time for the TCI intern team – we’ve just completed data collection and are now analyzing the results to see how the MNDA household dietary diversity scores compare with ICRISAT’s extensive nutrition survey….

TCi director Prabhu Pingali shares his thoughts on how the new Indian government should approach the agricultural and nutritional needs of its growing nation. Despite overall economic growth that the country has been experiencing over the past few decades, rural India has largely been left behind.  Poverty and malnutrition are becoming increasingly concentrated in rural areas,…

Latest TCI blog highlights development communications work in India.

TCi intern Christian DiRado-Owens, a development sociology student at Cornell University, reflects on the first round of data collection in the field. Christian is among five interns and TCi staff members who are spending the summer in India testing the dietary diversity module of the Minimum Nutrition Dataset for Agriculture (MNDA). Read previous posts about the project here….