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A renewed focus on agricultural development is critical to successfully reducing global poverty and hunger, according to a new World Bank report co-authored by UC Berkeley economists. The report was released Friday, Oct. 19, at the World Bank's annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, accepts cans of coins donated by UC Berkeley students for the rebuilding of his homeland from Kyleigh Kühn, a Berkeley peace and conflict studies major. Kühn is co-founder of the Pennies for Peace campaign, which has raised more than $150,000 to replace minefields with agricultural lands. Jawad was on campus Tuesday to deliver a talk on "Winning the Peace" in war-torn Afghanistan.

Genetically engineered crops are rising by 20 percent, part of an eight-year trend. These crops covered 200 million acres, an area the size of California and Texas combined. Genetically engineered crops are now grown in 17 countries, on nearly 20 percent of the world’s 3.7 billion acres devoted to food crop cultivation. In China, which trails only the U.S. in biotech research funding, half of the country’s farm fields could be growing genetically modified crops in a decade. And, though only a handful of GM crops (corn, cotton, soybeans, and canola) account for the vast majority of acreage planted, several dozen new biotech crops, including raspberries, lettuce, and peanuts, are in development. Despite this remarkable growth, persistent concerns over the technology’s economic, social, environmental, and public-health impacts cast a continued shadow of controversy over GMOs. And perhaps no place is more emblematic of that clash, or more appropriate as a setting to reflect on the competing claims, than the University of California, Berkeley

Some 20 to 30 pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are licensed for spraying on corn, and Midwestern ponds reflect this -- they're a brew of chemicals that can persist through the entire growing season. Experiments at UC Berkeley show that the chemical mix, not just one pesticide alone, screws up the sexual development of frogs and makes them prone to a deadly bacterial disease.

A relatively benign compound contained in a widely used group of insecticides can mix with and increase the toxicity of existing pesticides in the environment, according to a new study led by UC Berkeley biologists. Based upon these findings, regulators should not only consider the toxicity of individual active ingredients in a product, but also how ingredients may interact with other chemicals in the environment, the researchers said.

A sellout crowd turned out on a rainy, blustery evening for a conversation between a reporter and a grocer — Berkeley professor and food detective Michael Pollan, and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who discussed the history of agriculture and the future of organic food.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has awarded the Cozzarelli Prize to ARE assistant professor Max Auffhammer and his co-authors for their 2006 paper showing that reductions of human-generated air pollution could create unexpected agricultural benefits in one of the world's poorest regions.

An analysis by researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego found that the combined effects of atmospheric brown clouds and greenhouse gases negatively affected growing conditions for rice in India. The study suggests that reducing the man-made sources of pollution could increase harvest growth.

Pollinators such as bees, birds and bats affect 35 percent of the world's food production, increasing the output of 87 of the leading food crops worldwide, finds a new study co-authored by a UC Berkeley conservation biologist. The study is the first global estimate of crop production that is reliant upon animal pollination. It comes one week after a National Research Council (NRC) report detailed the troubling decline in populations of key North American pollinators.