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According to the latest FEWS.net Food Security Outlook Reports, West Africa could face sharp increases in food insecurity in the coming months, specifically in areas surrounding Lake Chad. Boko Haram-related conflicts continue to disrupt markets in the region, impacting many households’ income-generating potential.

This blog was originally posted on the Together for Nutrition website .

This conference took place on 15th June in Addis Ababa. Almost 150 people attended from diverse sectors and organizations to learn and to share the latest research on food and nutrition.

The introduction, presented by Bart Minten, program leader for ESSP, Stuart Gillespie, CEO Transform Nutrition and Ferew Lemma, Ministry of Health, captured the essence of why we were gathered together – to collectively improve nutrition in Ethiopia.

An estimated 202 million hectares of land suitable for farming remain uncultivated in Africa, despite near-constant calls for the region to intensify its agricultural production to keep up with the food demands of a rapidly growing population. So why is so much potentially productive land not being used for agriculture? In many areas, unreliable rainfall and poor soil fertility make the land, while cultivable, difficult to farm.

Data M web , created by the European Commission- Joint Research Centre, Institute of Perspective Technological Studies (Seville, Spain) thorough work with the PROGNOZ software company, provides an easy mechanism to visualize multiple datasets related to food security and nutrition.  Data M stands for Data on Agriculture, Trade, and Models, and the online data repository allows visualization in a number of ways, pulling data from a number of International Organizations (e, g., FAO and World Bank) and other relevant sources .

Over the past decade, Ethiopia’s agricultural productivity has exploded, particularly for cereal crops. This expansion in agriculture has led to impressive economic growth, but it’s unclear exactly what is behind the advance in productivity. Additionally, Ethiopian agriculture relies heavily on smallholder farmers, and some researchers are concerned that the recent growth may not be sustainable on the country’s increasingly small landholdings.