News Archive

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How viable are schemes to give poor people making and selling ‘informal’ milk greater market access?

Artworks on this page: Various Jugs, by Katie Grobler. A new re port from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) reviews the effectiveness of training and certification schemes designed to give small-scale ‘...

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More on why outright banning of ‘wet markets’ (while ‘giving virologists the heebie-jeebies’) won’t work

Pork handling at Wambizzi Pig Cooperative Society, Uganda’s only centralized pig abattoir (photo credit: ILRI/Danilo Pezo). Liam Taylor, a reporter for The Economist , recently interviewed Uganda-based food safety experts at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and at Uganda’s...

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Wildlife markets in the pandemic: Prohibit or preserve them? Ban or promote them?

Pork sold in a wet market in Cambodia (photo credit: ILRI/David Aronson). ILRI and UN experts say preserve and protect the world’s ‘informal markets’ AND invest and enhance these markets, which provide billions of people with food and incomes. An opinion piece by ILRI scientist Kristina Roesel and...

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A call for a holistic view of meat eating by Lawrence Haddad, of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition

Standing Rib, by Roy Lichtenstein, 1962. ‘Eat less meat’ is seen by many as a way of improving the health of the planet and its people. But the issue isn’t quite so simple—at least where the nutrition security and livelihoods of millions of people in the Global South are concerned. A call for a...

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US nutrition experts say limits on saturated fats should no longer be recommended to reduce heart disease

Graphic by the Aldas Project , 2012. ‘Following a two-day, DC-based workshop entitled “Saturated Fats: A Food or Nutrient Approach?” a group of leading nutrition scientists, mainly from the U.S., released a consensus statement detailing their findings on the latest research regarding the intake of...

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On vegan diets and brain nutrients—some unsettling research reports in a (surprisingly) still murky research area

Meat and Eggs, by Felix Vallotton, 1918 (via Wikiart). The vegan diet is low in—or, in some cases, entirely devoid of—several important brain nutrients. Could these shortcomings be affecting vegan’s ability to think? ‘. . . The idea that avoiding meat is bad for our brains makes some intuitive...

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The meat wars: A backlash is occurring on the backlash to meat dietary recommendations published late last year

Roy Lichenstein, Standing Rib (via Wikiart). On 19 Nov 2019, guidelines were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that caused a backlash, and now a backlash on the backlash is occurring. The abstract to the original 2019 Annals article, titled Unprocessed red meat and processed meat...

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Inalienable imperative—More, and more sustainable, meat, milk, eggs and fish for more than one billion people

A new scientific article from the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems judiciously pushes back against some of the on-going anti-livestock rhetoric appearing in Western media. The new paper has four big messages: Meat, offal, milk, eggs and fish are vital to—and missing from—the...

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On why the EAT-Lancet’s ‘Great Food Transformation’ will require a ‘Great Economic Transformation’—and more

Illustration by Hiroko Yoshimoto. A new paper by scientists at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Tufts University analyses the costs of adopting the ‘universal reference diet’ recommended for both human and planetary health by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett et al.,...

ILRI News

Livestock in context: A plea for intellectual rigor and collegial disagreement

Photo credit: ©IFPRI/David Popham Lawrence Haddad, the executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and 2018 World Food Prize co-winner, gave two presentations at the International Tropical Agriculture Conference held 11-13 November in Brisbane, Australia. The first, titled Let...

ILRI News

ILRI holds a livestock symposium at the International Tropical Agriculture Conference this week

The International Tropical Agriculture Conference, TropAg2019, is being held next week in Brisbane, Australia. The theme of the conference is ‘Shaping the science of tomorrow’. Five program themes will cover the fields of tropical crop, horticulture and livestock agriculture in addition to...

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This is ‘Livestock Month’ on Agrilinks: USAID’s Andrew Bisson on sustainable livestock for sustainable development

Andrew Bisson, livestock specialist for the Bureau for Food Security at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), introduces ‘Livestock Month’ by Agrilinks, USAID’s knowledge platform. ‘A warm welcome to the Agrilinks Livestock month! Over the course of November, we will...