Foreword [Volume 19 No. 4 (2019)]

We are ready to publish issue 87 of AJFAND. As we head towards the end of the year, there is always keenness to wrap up and tie up loose ends.

This issue serves as a tribute to a special person, a professional, a great scientist, a professor who has been mourned by his colleagues and students and a good friend whose path and mine have interacted many times over the years. This is none other than the late Prof Diran Makinde. At the time of his death, he was Senior Advisor on Biosafety to the Head of Industrialization, Science and Technology. He served as Vice-Chair to Biolnnovate Program Advisory Committee which I joined some two years ago. Prof Makinde was sharp, committed, and passionate about science and innovation and believed that the two could spur economic growth in Africa. I will miss the very heated intellectual arguments we would get into. We would in the end resolve them with a big laughter. We miss him already. We pray for his family to have comfort, and for his soul to continue to rest in Eternal Peace. Issue 87 carries 18 rigorously peer-reviewed papers, which cover a broad spectrum of the food systems landscape. We hope in the future to see more papers on sustainability and environment and how they link to our food systems and survival. We need to save mother earth. How do we do this when we have deliberately and viciously destroyed her for millennia? Now young people are challenging us. We each have a major responsibility, individually but we should also influence everyone else around us to ensure that together we save mother earth for our own survival. I spoke recently at the WWF Annual Fuller conference and I am happy to see this huge and well-renowned organization begin to accept that we need everyone on board, including the communities we serve, if we expect to have any lasting impact that is positive.

I invite you now to enjoy this Issue 87.

Ruth Oniang'o
Editor-in-Chief, AJFAND