State-of-the-art solutions for today’s challenges

Increasing uptake

Since the establishment of the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture in 1964, applications of nuclear techniques in agriculture have increased hugely, bringing benefits across the world.

Crop production is being increased through the use of isotopes to optimize plants’ uptake of water and nutrients, and the use of radiation to produce crop varieties with higher yields, greater resilience and improved quality. Millions of hectares of crops are grown following mutation breeding, netting farmer billions of dollars every year while protecting their soils and environment.

Pests are being controlled through the release of sterilized insects to control and manage the population — an approach that has worked with fruit flies, moths, and the tsetse and screw worm flies. Areas free of fruit flies or that have low pest prevalence have been established from South America to the Middle East. This saves hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced production losses, and results in better quality food and increased exports, jobs and income.

The environment is being protected through the use of isotopes to minimize land degradation and water pollution and improve soil fertility. These techniques are used to determine critical factors, such as the optimal placement of fertilizer and the timing of its use. The economic benefit from fertilizer savings is at least $6 billion per year.

The list goes on: from increasing animal health and productivity through irradiated vaccines and molecular techniques that rapidly identify pathogens to improving food safety using food irradiation techniques to destroy bacteria, insects and other organisms, all these innovations translate into socioeconomic and environmental benefits for all — people, animals, plants and the entire ecosystem.

Accelerating change

The FAO/IAEA partnership has been instrumental in stimulating funding for and the implementation of initiatives. This unique R&D partnership — with proven scientific solutions — has had a positive impact on the transformation of agrifood systems. To respond to today’s complex and overlapping challenges, however, we must accelerate collaborative actions. That is why the FAO and the IAEA launched the Atoms4Food initiative in October 2023. With the aim of giving countries ground-breaking solutions tailored to their specific needs, the initiative provides greater access to scientific evidence and capabilities to inform policy-making, enhance R&D, upscale application and standardization, improve technical and management capacity, and strengthen knowledge exchange and collaboration.

The partnership’s guiding principles include equitable access to innovations for small-scale farmers and other underrepresented groups; gender equality; country ownership; alignment with the One Health approach; and sharing information on the risks and benefits of new technology. Innovations are only adopted once their added value has been confirmed and nuclear applications have proven beneficial, with high regional or global applicability.

The initiative has laid out a comprehensive strategy, including country assessments and a robust action plan, to help countries propel themselves towards a better future through the FAO’s ‘four betters’: better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life, leaving no one behind.

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