Big Issues For Small Farmers
Dennis Normile
A casual conversation at a coffee break in South Africa is shaking up
agricultural research throughout the developing world.
Three years ago, Ronald Cantrell and Alexander McCalla shared fears about the
future of agricultural research during a gap in a meeting in Durban. Both were
acutely aware that new high-yield crop varieties are desperately needed to
alleviate hunger among the poor. But their organisations - the International
Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat
Improvement Center in Mexico - were lagging behind private companies and
academia in exploiting genetic techniques. So they agreed to explore closer
ties, according to a Science magazine article posted on the Science and
Development Network website www.scidev.net
.
The two groups are the crown jewels of a little-known powerhouse, the
$379-million-a-year Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR),
an association of 16 research centers affiliated with the World Bank. That chat
has started a trend: other centers that work on cereals have asked to join the
talks. The four CGIAR institutes that focus on legumes are exploring their own
collaboration. A task force is studying the possible consolidation of four
centers in Africa.
The goal is "all the centers working in common on the big issues for the
small farmers of the world," says William Dar, director of the
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in
Hyderabad, India.
Cantrell, a plant breeder, and McCalla, an agricultural economist, can
remember when their two institutions ignited a Green Revolution that led to a
quantum jump in agricultural productivity for the developing world. CGIAR was
formed in 1971 to build on that progress. But Michael Lipton, an economist at
the University of Sussex in the UK, says that the 1980s witnessed increasing
pressure from donors to divert money from basic germ-plasm research - the
expensive business of collecting, preserving and researching the genetic
diversity of plants as well as cataloguing their enemies, pathogens and pests.
Donors lost interest in the ongoing expense, equivalent to the running of an
expensive if not very glamorous zoo or a library, and moved on "to a whole
range of other goals, from improving the participation of women to natural
resource management."
The result was a shift in priorities. A recent World Bank evaluation of some
700 previous reports and studies notes that CGIAR spending on improving crop
productivity declined by 6.5% annually in real terms through the 1990s and that
training programmes for the developing world decreased by nearly 1% a year.
Research into environmental protection and biodiversity were receiving larger
shares of a shrinking pie.
The resulting fierce competition among centers for funding then isolated
research programs at a time when research into the DNA of seeds could have
benefited from greater collaboration, especially in biotechnology. While private
companies and universities in advanced countries invested $8 billion to $10
billion in agricultural biotechnology in the 1990s, says Uma Lele, an
agricultural economist who led the World Bank review, the CGIAR system spent
just $25 million. "For a billion poor people in the world, that is just
minuscule," she says.
CGIAR already has adopted many of the reforms recommended by the various
reports and donors are gradually recognizing the need to give officials greater
leeway in spending their money.
The thorniest issue has been determining the appropriate number of centers
and their mandates and avoiding top-down restructuring. New research in genetics
is helping.
"We know now that the major cereals have a majority of their genes in
common," says Ronald Cantrell from the International Rice Research
Institute. Taking advantage of the similarities among the cereals might lead to
a shared genomics laboratory, jointly appointed researchers, and possibly even a
common board.
After Cantrell and McCalla left Durban, they turned to the Rockefeller
Foundation, which had helped establish both institutions in the 1960s, and the
revamping process may be completed before the end of the year. Most scientists
expect a heightened and more centralised effort to use genetic research, with a
new lab in India or China. Such labs could identify genetic markers used in more
traditional breeding programs and develop gene chips to be distributed to
regional and national labs. Similar efficiencies could come from centralizing
bioinformatics efforts, intellectual-property management, and training programs.
But restructuring also poses a host of challenges. Genetic research might be
universal, but downstream work has to be local. The World Bank meta-evaluation
notes that most successful introductions of new crop varieties in Latin America
and Asia relied on local research capabilities. Now some of the strongest
national agricultural research efforts are ahead of CGIAR in selected areas,
says the World Bank's Lele. She points to the development of no-till planting
techniques for soil conservation in Brazil, watershed management in India, and
hybrid rice breeding in China.
At the same time, the Green Revolution never took hold in Africa, and the
continent's agricultural research capabilities are generally weaker than they
were a generation ago due to continuing political and funding instability.
Yujiro Hayami, a development specialist at the Foundation for Advanced Studies
on International Development in Tokyo, thinks that it might be best to shift
research staff and resources "to a new food-staple research institute in
Africa." But ICRISAT's William Dar disagrees. "There are still more
hungry people in Asia than Africa," he counters.
More information:
Source: www.scidev.net
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