Home garden

– From Annual Report 2024 –

Selected highlights

• Low-cost technologies for urban gardening in Dhaka, Bangladesh were tested, with popular vegetables such as Malabar spinach, chili, and red amaranth, using aquaponics, hydroponics, self-watering geobags and sacks, and traditional container gardens.
• 679 urban households in Dhaka, Bangladesh were surveyed after training in gardening and nutrition, which found that training led to a greater diversity of fruit and vegetables produced, more frequent harvesting and sharing with neighbors, and more vegetable portions eaten per day.
• In Cambodia, Chamkar and Plantix pest and disease identification apps were used by 14,632 extension personnel and farmers.
• A lab-in-the-field experiment on the willingness of urban consumers in Cambodia to pay for safer vegetables found that shoppers were willing to pay 100% more for USDA-certified organic produce and 55% more for a local safe vegetable certificated than non-certified produce.
• 20,000 vegetable farmers Cambodia and Laos directly benefitted from good agricultural practices for safe and off-season vegetable production in 2020-2024.
• Work in Fiji showed that a quarter of all households cannot afford a healthy, and a national stateholder forum has been established to assess the means to address this.
• A WorldVeg mungbean variety was released by the Department of Agricultural Research, Myanmar, that is early maturing (62 days), high yielding (1.5–2 t/ha), highly resistant to Mungbean yellow mosaic disease, with good sprouting quality and high protein content (27.8%).
• 221 promising bitter gourd selections from a recurrent selection program identified in Thailand and advanced to S8 generation through inbreeding (controlled hand pollination), for further evaluation.
• 279 WorldVeg loofah lines resistant to Tomato leaf curl New Delhi virus and downy mildew along with 329 F1 hybrids were sown in Thailand for demonstration to loofah project member seed companies.
• 600 interviews were conducted to analyze food behavior of three population groups with low fruit and vegetable consumption in Bangkok, Thailand: the elderly, migrant laborers, and Buddhist monks.
• A two-year scoping study explores the contribution of urban agriculture to diets and livelihoods in Tagaytay, the Philippines and Hanoi, Vietnam. A household survey found that food safety is a great concern for Hanoi residents, particularly pesticide residues in vegetables; Tagaytay residents are concerned about affordability of fresh produce.
• New begomovirus variants were identified in the Philippines, and an effective combination of Ty genes was discovered to confer resistance to tomato plants.
• 413 virus disease samples were collected from the Philippines and Taiwan for characterization.
• A new pepper variety derived from WorldVeg breeding lines was registered and released in Taiwan.
• 90 accessions of tomato and pepper were tested in Taiwan for resistance to Tomato chlorosis virus and Pepper vein yellows virus, and two tolerant tomato lines were found for Pepper veinal mottle virus.
• 5 heat-tolerant tomato hybrids were selected and distributed to farmers and research institutes for multilocation trials in Taiwan, and 5 S1 tomato lines all demonstrating resistance to bacterial spot.

Home garden