IFAD Support for International Agricultural Research Provides a Key to Food Security

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is an informal association of fifty-seven public and private-sector members that supports a network of sixteen international agricultural research centres. Research at the CGIAR centres covers crops that provide 75% of the food and protein requirements of developing countries.

This exhibit provides a snapshot of programmes and technologies developed by CGIAR scientists with the valuable support of IFAD. These programmes and technologies are designed to help meet future world food requirements and to protect the natural resource base upon which food production depends.

The mission of the CGIAR is to contribute, through its research, to promoting sustainable agriculture for food security in the developing countries.

IFAD support for improving crop yields means more food for the growing global population. Edge of Vision Productions.

Outlook for Agriculture

During the 1980s, food production did not keep pace with population growth in 75 developing countries. Less food per person was produced at the end of the decade than at the beginning.

• More than 1 billion people earned less than a dollar a day. Many cannot afford to buy all of the food they need, even at historically low world food prices.
• During the next 20-30 years, farmers and policymakers will have to provide food at affordable prices for almost 100 million more people every year.
• If recent yield growth rates for cereals continue to 2025, there will be a shortfall of 0.7 billion tonnes.
• Farmers will have to meet increasing food and feed demands from land currently under cultivation. Area expansion is no longer a feasible option in most of the world.

The Challenges

Challenges posed by the interrelated global issues of poverty, hunger, population growth and environmental degradation confront the world as it approaches the twenty-first century. The partnership between IFAD and the CGIAR to improve sustainable agriculture is part of the response to these challenges, because agriculture is the cornerstone of development in poor countries, where over 70% of the people depend on the land for their livelihood.

IFAD financing CGIAR-led research – In support of a continuing tradition of achievement and excellence.

The Role of Research

Agricultural growth must preserve the productivity of natural resources without further damage to the Earth’s life-support systems – land, water, flora and fauna. Research is the means by which the world’s knowledge of agriculture is increased and improved. IFAD’s commitment to support agricultural research can help the world’s poorest people make lasting improvements in their lives, and in the lives of their children.

Increasing Productivity

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) works to make developing-country agriculture more productive through genetic improvements in plants, livestock, fish and trees, and better management practices. In collaboration with IFAD and other partners, the CGIAR has helped to increase food productivity in developing countries through the application of research-based technologies.

Improved Forage Cultivars

An IFAD-sponsored project carried out by the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is seeking to increase the livestock-feed productivity of the barley-based farming systems in Iraq and Lebanon through the introduction of improved cultivars of forage legumes. In 1997, Iraq produced 40 tonnes of vetch seed for distribution to farmers, and Lebanon released three forage-legume cultivars.

Stress-tolerant Maize

IFAD and the International Centre for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) have formed a partnership to refine and deliver stress-tolerant maize varieties to poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. CIMMYT researchers have developed experimental varieties over the past decade that provide 20-30% more yield under drought. These varieties also tend to be much more efficient in absorbing nitrogen from the soil, making them potentially more productive. These experimental materials now need to be adapted to local production conditions and, once that job is done, delivered to farmers. With IFAD support, CIMMYT and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) are working with national research programmes in Africa, refining and adapting the new varieties to the environmental circumstances faced by local producers. This IFAD-CGIAR-national programme partnership will begin making a significant difference in the lives of poor African farmers within the next five years.

Improving Crop Management in Latin America

With IFAD’s support, CIMMYT has been working with colleagues in Argentina and Brazil in an innovative training programme aimed at improving the ability of Latin American scientists to develop new crop management practices. The scientists participate in focused training programmes that equip them with skills needed to develop better maize and wheat crop-management methods for the conditions under which the farmers are labouring. Over two hundred researchers are now alumni of these training programmes – more than double the number of researchers that CIMMYT would have been able to train by itself in Mexico during the same time period. And because the training is done in situ, under many of the same environmental circumstances that farmers face in the region, trainees come away with a much better sense of the real constraints they must help producers overcome.

Working with Farmers

Understanding farmers’ seed-management strategies is a prerequisite for supporting their activities. Farmers’ selection criteria and methods and the channels for seed acquisition and exchange shape the variability of local landraces. Knowing farmers’ needs and preferences for specific traits allows us to provide them with appropriate material while further strengthening indigenous systems.

Fighting Poverty through Farmer Participation

Hundreds of farmers in eight countries have participated in ICARDA's Mashreq and Maghreb project, supported by IFAD and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development. Abu-Hassan, a poor farmer from Sauran in Syria, is one of them. He devoted his two-hectare farm to barley-variety demonstrations three years ago, and adopted the improved barley variety when he experienced higher yields and saw the interest expressed by his neighbors. He has expanded his barley production by sharecropping an additional ten hectares, from which he sells the harvest as seeds to his neighbors. Through his participation in the ICARDA project, Abu-Hassan has considerably raised his family income and has started an independent business as a seed producer.

Farmers and Scientists Improve Cassava for Semi-arid Environments

In northeast Brazil, smallholder farmers are evaluating advanced genotypes of cassava – with the help of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) – as a routine part of the breeding scheme of the national agricultural research programme. Several varieties selected by the farmers are now being multiplied for release by the national programme.

With IFAD’s support, CIAT has trained more than 40 Brazilian scientists in this farmer participatory approach, and has started to apply it to other crops. The best germplasm has been sent to sub-Saharan Africa for evaluation, since varieties that perform well under semi-arid conditions in Brazil stand a good chance of doing well under similar conditions in Africa. Such varieties could benefit African farmers in areas where drought is a common problem.

Crop Production

Integrated-pest-management (IPM) programmes and biological control methods are saving crops from destruction while enabling farmers to reduce the use of pesticides.

Diffused Light Storage

Research on diffused light stores funded by IFAD has made available to subsistence farmers a simple and highly dependable technology that protects potato seed tubers between harvest and the next planting season. The technology builds on traditional knowledge systems of indigenous communities. Seed tubers stored in diffused light produce more uniform and vigorous crop stands than tubers stored in more traditional systems. The stores also play an important role in controlling insect pests. When used as part of an IPM package, diffused light storage greatly reduces the need for dangerous and costly insecticides. Use of the stores – in combination with other IPM techniques – is spreading rapidly to thousands of farm families in the main potato-producing areas of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

Diffused light stores have proven particularly effective in protecting seed from the damage caused by the Andean potato weevil. When weevil-infested potatoes are placed in the stores, the larvae exit the tubers in an attempt to return to the soil. Once exposed, they are easy prey for the farmer’s chickens or can be eliminated with biologically-friendly pesticides.

Strengthening National Agricultural Research Systems

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is committed to strengthening agricultural research in developing countries by working with researchers in national programmes, strengthening skills in research administration and management, and conducting training programmes for national scientists.

The Global Forum for Agricultural Research

The first Global Forum for Agricultural Research was held in October 1996 in Washington, D.C., under the chairmanship of the President of IFAD. The forum was a historic occasion representing the culmination of a consultative process involving the entire spectrum of actors in the global agricultural research system. Conceived in December 1994 at the IFAD-convened, Rome International Consultation on NARS' Vision of International Agricultural Research, the initiative was cosponsored by a core facilitating group composed of EU, FAO, IFAD, the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR), the World Bank and the Swiss Development Cooperation, with financial contributions from Denmark, Japan and The Netherlands.

The Global Forum brought together for the first time around the same table the international agricultural research community, national agricultural research systems (NARS), NGOs, farmer organizations, the private sector and agricultural universities in the developing countries, and the advanced research institutions in the developed world. ISNAR, a CGIAR centre, and FAO have been closely involved with IFAD in developing mechanisms to foster strategic research partnerships and support a concrete action plan for the global agricultural research community through to the year 2000.