This report explores the role of agricultural growth in reducing and preventing undernutrition — deficiencies in energy, protein, and essential vitamins and minerals.

It describes how agricultural growth increases the capacity of households to produce more nutritious food and to buy more nutritious food by boosting income levels. Agricultural growth also improves nutrition through a broader effect on the economy, such as increasing government revenues to fund education, health, infrastructure, and nutrition intervention programmes.

The report gives an overview of the relationship between nutrition and growth, examines different growth patterns and their nutritional outcomes, and identifies factors that influence this dynamic — such as a country's stage of economic development.

A new paradigm for agricultural development is needed, says the report, where agricultural growth leads not only to increased production and reduced poverty, but also to improved nutrition. It concludes with recommendations for future research, and aims to provide policymakers with knowledge about development and investment strategies that can improve nutritional outcomes.

This report provides an overview of fisheries and aquaculture, future challenges and the technological tools available to help manage them. It reveals the key role of this sector in meeting global fish demand, as well as its importance as a source of cash and high-quality protein — particularly in poorer countries.

A section devoted to case-studies reviews current scientific knowledge of the impacts of a changing climate. It also highlights a range of issues including standards and certification, development of aquaculture in South-East Asia and the use of geographical information systems to manage aquaculture.

Elsewhere, the document outlines efforts to control illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing by establishing trade measures and improving the collection of global records about fishing vessels.

The report also pinpoints challenges ahead, including biodiversity protection and a greater demand to address concerns about public health and environmental protection.

This report presents evidence that people with mental health conditions meet major criteria for vulnerability and should be targeted for protection by development programmes. Mental illness such as schizophrenia, depression or bipolar disorder are common but largely neglected.

The WHO makes the case that because of their vulnerability, people with mental health problems need to be given opportunities for education and work, and to be included in decisions that affect them.

It argues that mental health should be built into sectoral and broader plans for development, with government agencies, NGOs and other stakeholders playing a key role in ensuring this. To make implementation a reality, interventions and mainstreaming efforts should be funded adequately, and recipients of development aid should be encouraged to address the needs of people with mental health conditions. The report recommends actions as a starting point towards these aims.

This report, published by the Meridian Institute describes the growing interest of developing countries including Brazil, China, India and South Africa, in nanotechnology. The ways nanotechnology applications could solve health, sanitation, and pollution problems and provide faster, cheaper information and communication technology are outlined. The challenges of using and developing nanotechnology for and in developing nations including the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders are also discussed.

The Meridian Institute says nanotechnology can play a role in achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals. As a result, rich nations should dedicate a reasonable portion of their overseas development assistance to nanotechnology.

This report, published by the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT), describes twelve projects to illustrate successful scientific partnerships between developed and developing countries.

The projects cover research into water-borne disease, natural disasters, brain drain and forest management, and include partnerships with researchers in Chad, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam.

The report reveals how high-quality local and global scientific knowledge can lead to local development benefits. For example, collaboration between developed-country researchers and their counterparts in locations where infections are likely to arise can halt epidemics at the local level, benefiting the global sphere.

The authors suggest that future research budgets must take into account the global and cross-diciplinary nature of research and encourage scientific cooperation.

They say that approximately 85 per cent of global research and development resources are invested in countries within the Organisation for Co-operation Development (OECD), compared with just five per cent given to developing countries.

This report, published by the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, highlights areas where high carbon content and high biodiversity overlap. The authors argue that by identifying target areas, such spatial analyses can help tropical countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change while maximizing biodiversity benefits.

Regional maps of tropical Africa, tropical Asia and the Neotropics give overviews of carbon stocks and biodiversity values. National-scale maps covering Panama, Vietnam and Zambia show more detailed data on carbon storage and on the species richness of mammals, birds and amphibians.

The maps highlight protected areas of tropical Asia, which suffer the highest percentage of forest loss. The authors suggest that although mapping can help in conservation planning, it must be accompanied by effective management on the ground and monitoring of land-use change to effectively reduce emissions. It is also important to account for national priorities and country-specific pressures.

This report is the WHO's official record of data produced by its technical programmes and regional offices in close consultation with countries and in collaboration with researchers and development agencies. The WHO produces the statistics to provide an evidence base for strategies to improve global public health.

The report clearly shows that the global burden of disease is shifting from infectious diseases to non-communicable diseases, with chronic conditions such as heart disease and stroke now being the chief causes of death globally. The shifting trends indicate that leading infectious diseases — diarrhoea, HIV, tuberculosis, neonatal infections and malaria — will become less important causes of death globally over the next 20 years.

The report documents in detail "the levels of mortality in children and adults, patterns of morbidity and burden of disease, prevalence of risk factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption, use of health care, availability of health care workers, and health care financing."

This joint publication between the World Health Organization and the Global Forum for Health Research reveals mental health research capacity in 114 low-income and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The extensive review identified over 10,000 articles, 4,633 mental health researchers and 3,829 other stakeholders. The authors argue that this is "the first systematic attempt to confirm the pressing needs of improving research capacity in mental health".

The publication provides useful details in table and charts, analysed by group of stakeholders and by region, on topics such as: researchers' profiles; priority-setting process; amount and type of research production; services and technical support available to them; courses and trainings offered; funding patterns; and dissemination of research findings. The appendix provides two extensive lists — by country — of policy and practice that resulted from research evidence, as well as research evidence that was never translated into policy and practice.

Nine recommendations indicate how the management of mental health research can be strengthened so that it meets the national needs of the countries as well as contributes to the global fund of knowledge. The authors say their report thus enables evidence-based decision-making in funding and priority setting in the area of mental health research in low-income and middle-income countries.

These consist of two reports: SuRF1(Surveillance of risk factors related to non-communicable diseases: current status of global data) and SuRF2 (Surveillance of chronic disease risk factors: country-level data and comparable estimates).

These reports are the result of a large WHO project to set up for the first time a global database of the prevalence of risk factors for non-communicable diseases collected from WHO member states. The first report is largely a collection of the country profiles; the second analyses the data to produce comparable estimates for risk factor prevalence in the countries. The WHO designed this as an advocacy tool to highlight where primary prevention and health promotion need to be directed.

The eight risk factors were chosen because they are easily measurable and theoretically can be changed through prevention efforts. They are: tobacco and alcohol use, patterns of physical inactivity, low fruit/vegetable intake, obesity (as measured by BMI), blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes (measured by blood glucose).

The second report presents country-level estimates for overweight/obesity and systolic blood pressure. It also shows the attributable mortality and disease burden from all causes of death due to these overweight and high blood pressure for the 11 most populated countries. 

(See WHO Global InfoBase Online for electronically searchable data contained in the reports http://www.who.int/infobase/surf2/online.html.)

Chronic diseases — heart and lung disease, cancer and diabetes — are having a negative economic impact on both the developed and developing world, says this report, which is why they should be properly addressed by domestic and international policy makers. Compared to the epidemiological evidence on the rise of non-communicable diseases in developing nations, there is little information on how this increase will affect their economies.

This report investigates the demographics of the problem and finds that contrary to popular belief, the disproportionate burden of disease on the elderly does have economic implications. The reason is that though the elderly may not be part of the workforce, they are still consumers and therefore a part of the economic equation.

Whether approaches to tackling chronic diseases are cost-effective or not is a vital issue for countries whose health budgets are already overstretched — the report outlines some of the interventions that offer most bang for buck. The authors point out that strategies that work well in developed countries are not so effective in developing countries, and call for more research to assess what will be appropriate.

This extensive report was one of the first to document the scale of the problem of chronic diseases in developing countries, and crucially, to offer guidance on feasible and practical methods of tackling them.

The document starts by laying out in detail the profiles of chronic diseases in different countries, projections for the future, and how chronic diseases are linked with poverty. It also examines in depth the economic costs of such diseases and the macroeconomic consequences of not tackling them quickly enough. The authors outline interventions — whether community, workplace, or school — that have robust evidence supporting them.

The report ends with a call for a unifying framework of global health experts and stakeholders, in which the government has a key role. It also specifies what policymakers need to do to ensure that measures to tackle chronic diseases are put into action.

This paper presents a review of the challenges of international scholarly scientific collaboration. It looks at institutional constraints and points out that the challenges and problems multiply when collaborators come from different countries with differing conditions, resource endowments and institutional structures. It is easier to call for more and better forms of international collaboration than it is to design them. The report asserts that good design is helped by a better understanding of what collaboration is and how it has been carried out. It draws on social research insights to help reduce the transactional, financial, ethical and emotional costs of international linkages and exchange and provides a conceptual framework for thinking about international collaboration issues.

Biofuels offer an attractive solution to escalating oil prices and concern over how fossil fuels affect global climate. They also provide new prospects for rural communities.

But their full implications, for developing countries and the environment, remain unclear. Balancing economic efficiency and environmental sustainability is not easy, and many key questions remain unanswered.

This essay addresses some of these questions, investigating the pros and cons of biofuels for the developing world. It examines economic and social factors, and the role of science and technology in biofuels production. It explores experiences from Brazil and other developing nations, as well as trade-offs between producing biofuels and food.

This report evaluates the impacts of genetically modified (GM) crops in Argentina between 1996 and 2005, alongside wider trends in the country's agriculture and national economy.

The authors calculate the financial benefits of three GM crops — soybeans, maize and cotton — to be over US$20 billion, although they also estimate that about US$2.3 billion is needed to restore soil fertility after soybean cultivation.

They say that introducing GM crops to Argentina resulted in approximately one million new jobs over ten years, and led to lower global soybean prices.

The authors conclude that the benefits of introducing GM crops such as soybeans outweigh the costs.

But they call for public debate and policy intervention to address the environmental problems caused by long-term soybean monocultures, and the risks of depending too heavily on soybean exports.

This study uses empirical data to analyse the extent to which technological spillovers occur as a result of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Argentina. It discusses why FDI is often assumed to be fundamental to human capital formation and technological development in developing countries.

The authors argue that FDI may not be the most effective instrument to foster technological development. They observe that FDI spillovers are not extensive and that they depend on multinational corporations' assets and investment decisions as well as domestic firms' absorptive capacity, as indicated by their investment in training and equipment.

One of the study's key conclusions is that only those firms that have invested heavily in improving their absorptive capacity will receive positive spillovers from FDI.

The authors suggest that governments must make broader efforts to promote local firms and science and technology organisations, and improve the links between these.