June 2014: Bioversity International has released its ’10-Year Strategy’ for 2014-2024, which aims to enable the organization’s response to emerging challenges and trends and aligns its work with recent developments on the global agenda, such as outcomes from the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD or Rio+20) and the incipient Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Strategy’s vision “agricultural biodiversity nourishes people and sustains the planet” describes the overall challenge of expanding food availability by 60% by 2050 to feed an expected nine billion people. This task is aggravated by the growing challenge of simultaneously combating under-nutrition and rising over-nutrition, the impacts of climate change on agricultural production, the increasing vulnerability of food systems through land degradation, and declining agricultural biodiversity, according to Bioversity.

To address these challenges, the Strategy lays out four strategic objectives: expanding access of low income consumers to diverse, affordable and nutritious diets; increasing productivity, ecosystem services and resilience of farming systems, forests and landscapes; increasing access to diverse quality seeds and planting materials for farm households and rural communities; and the assessment, safeguarding and monitoring of agricultural biodiversity by policy makers, scientists and rural communities.

The document further explains how the Strategy reflects developments on the global agenda as well as recent reforms within the CGIAR consortium, of which Bioversity International is a member. It also outlines new approaches and partnerships that will support the Strategy’s implementation. [Bioversity International News Release][Publication: Bioversity International’s 10-Year Strategy 2014-2024]