With a widening gap between food requirements and production levels in Africa and other developing regions, agricultural researchers are seeking to intensify their efforts. "The agricultural research community needs to work to give small farmers in low-income developing countries the technologies they need to produce more food, earn more income and generate more jobs," says Mr. Ismail Serageldin, Chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and World Bank Vice-President for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development.
Photo: ICRISAT
Just before a meeting of the CGIAR at World Bank headquarters over the week of 27-31 October, one of its affiliated centres, the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, estimated that if current trends continue, the gap between food production and demand in developing countries will more than double by the year 2020, leaving the poorest countries especially vulnerable. In sub-Saharan Africa the percentage of malnourished children will jump by 45 per cent, to some 40 million children. "This is completely unacceptable by any standards of human decency," commented Mr. Serageldin. "We must do something right now to avoid this silent holocaust."
Spurred by such a sense of urgency, the scientists and researchers who gathered in Washington shared promising approaches and discussed how -- in an era of scarce financing -- to pursue their research and effectively get their results into farmers' fields. Some of the CGIAR's 16 research centres had been instrumental in launching the "Green Revolution" in Asia several decades ago, bringing dramatic increases in yields of rice and wheat, and one of the Consultative Group's central goals is now to achieve breakthroughs in other crops and regions. The largest share of its research funding -- around 38 per cent of an annual average of $280 mn over the past five years -- is for crops in sub-Saharan Africa.
While often optimistic about the potential for raising food yields, the CGIAR's researchers do not believe the approach adopted in Asia -- high-yielding varieties dependent on irrigation and fertilizer -- will work in Africa. The continent has more fragile and variable soils, the rains are highly unpredictable, irrigation is very scarce and most food farmers are simply too poor to afford much fertilizer. The solution, says Dr. Kanayo Nwanze, Director-General of the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA), is "developing technologies that are adapted to the sub-Saharan environment, rather than adapting the environment to the [crop] varieties."
For WARDA, which is headquartered in Côte d'Ivoire and is one of the four CGIAR centres in Africa, this means concentrating on rice varieties that are more resistant to drought, take less time to produce, and perform reasonably well even with low inputs. Beginning in 1991, WARDA scientists began crossing a high-yielding Asian rice variety with a traditional, very hardy African species. The cross has "incredible qualities," says Dr. Nwanze, with "resistance or tolerance to almost every production constraint in West Africa," including drought, nutrient-poor soils, pests, diseases, and weeds. This holds particular advantages for women farmers, since they grow 80 per cent of West African rice and 40-60 per cent of their labour time is spent weeding. Given strong farmer acceptance in Guinea, Togo, and Côte d'Ivoire, WARDA expects to extend the variety across West Africa by the end of the decade.
Dr. Lukas Brader, Director-General of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria, cites examples in which "good research, working together with the development agencies, getting the materials to the farmers, can really make a difference."
The IITA has developed disease-resistant maize varieties that have been widely adopted in West and Central Africa, he told Africa Recovery. While maize production and yields scarcely increased the decade before, from 1982 to 1996 annual regional production climbed from 3.7 mn tonnes to more than 11 mn tonnes, with about 40 per cent of that increase from higher yields. In Nigeria, cowpea production tripled over the past 30 years, with most of the increase due to the IITA's high-yielding varieties.
Such successes are partly a result of greater farmer involvement, explains Dr. Brader. Previously, research was conducted mainly in laboratories and research stations, but now most is done directly with farmers, helping ensure the technologies better meet their needs.
Dr. Brader worries, however, that both national and donor funding for agricultural research is becoming increasingly tight. While developed countries spend around 2 per cent of their agricultural gross domestic product on research, the average for developing countries is just 0.5 per cent. In Nigeria, it fell from 1 per cent to 0.2 per cent over the past 10 years. "Everybody recognizes the importance of agriculture," Dr. Brader says. "But if that's not translated into putting the resources in, then it's not going to help much. It's essential that the countries themselves make the proper decisions."
One problem is cuts in government expenditures more generally, notes Mr. Jeanot Minla Mfou'ou, Executive Secretary of the International Agriculture, Peasant and Modernization Network, a regional non-governmental organization (NGO) headquartered in Cameroon. By pushing structural adjustment programmes, Mr. Minla Mfou'ou maintains, donors "are asking governments not to finance research," forcing national institutes to close down or reduce research staff.
The IITA and other international centres have also faced constraints, a concern they raised at the CGIAR meeting. Coordinating funding for the centres' research was one of the original motivations for the Consultative Group's establishment in 1971, and donor agencies play a central role in its deliberations and activities. After a fall in CGIAR research funding in the early 1990s, it has climbed back up in recent years, from a low of $235 mn in 1993 to $329 mn in 1997.
With the aim of proposing ways to make the CGIAR's role more effective, a review of the entire CGIAR system is currently under way, conducted by a panel chaired by UN Under-Secretary-General Maurice Strong. According to Mr. Mahendra Shah, Executive Secretary of the CGIAR review secretariat, "the review is going to be a consultative partnership with all the actors," including donor agencies, national governments, local research institutes and others operating along the "continuum" from research to implementation.
The CGIAR already has been expanding collaboration with a range of partners in recent years, including large and small agricultural businesses, NGOs, farmers organizations, governments and national research centres.
Some NGOs have expressed concern about greater participation in the CGIAR by current or former officials of such multinational agri-businesses as Cargill, the world's largest grain trader, and Novartis, the largest pesticide marketing company, worrying that it might influence the CGIAR's commitment to environmental sustainability or food security for the poor.
Mr. Serageldin responded that the CGIAR's scientists remain committed to their mission and will deal with the private sector with "eyes open." Biotechnology companies, he noted, spend billions of dollars annually on research. "It is not an insignificant force in the area of science," he said, stressing the need to find areas of potential collaboration. "We might find some technologies that they are applying to cash crops like cotton or tomatoes, that we could apply to sorghum or millet," which are not major market crops but are important to many poor farmers in Africa. Already, the US-based Monsanto company is planning to give a virus resistance gene for sweet potatoes to the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI).
Closer ties with national institutes also are being encouraged, and Mr. Shah stressed that finding ways to support Africa's under-financed national agricultural research systems will be a particular concern of the CGIAR review. During the CGIAR meeting in Washington, a special prize for "scientific partnership" was awarded to KARI and the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute. Between 1988 and 1994, the two institutes conducted joint research on improving smallholder dairy production and marketing in Kenya's coastal region.
Greater collaboration among national research centres and with farmers' organizations is likewise increasing. Ms. Ntombana Regina Gata, research director in Zimbabwe's Ministry of Lands, Agriculture and Water, told Africa Recovery that the Southern Africa Centre for the Coordination of Agricultural Research develops coordinated research strategies for all countries of the Southern African Development Community, with the participation of farmers' organizations, extension services, the private sector and university research centres. Similarly, says Ms. Gata, the Agricultural Research Council of Zimbabwe operates at the district level, "to make sure the priorities and assessments of the communities are taken on board."
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To produce much more food without destroying the environment, scientists of the CGIAR are looking beyond standard techniques of plant cross-breeding. In one direction, they are tapping into farmers' traditional knowledge of plant diversity and characteristics to enrich their own laboratory and field station findings. In another direction, they are taking advantage of recent scientific breakthroughs in the ability to extract and manipulate plant DNA. A special scientific panel sponsored by the CGIAR argued in early October that genetic engineering has the potential to improve food yields by up to 25 per cent.
"All possible tools that can help promote sustainable agriculture for food security must be marshaled," argues CGIAR Chairman Ismail Serageldin, "and biotechnology, safely deployed, could be a tremendous help in that fight." Acknowledging the controversial nature of some of this research, Mr. Serageldin stresses the CGIAR's commitment to testing new technologies for human and environmental safety. And pointing to the highly competitive drive by private companies to patent genetic outputs, he reaffirms CGIAR's principle of keeping as much research as possible within the public domain, where it can be made available to poor farmers without charge. Much of the biotechnological work of the CGIAR's scientists involves inserting genes to make crops more resistant to pests and diseases or to help them withstand drought, heat and other hostile conditions. Inserted genes may also increase crops' nutritional value.
Biotechnology, Mr. Serageldin adds, "is one part of the solution, it is not a magic bullet solution by itself." Farmers also possess considerable knowledge. They can, for example, identify wild crop varieties with features that can be used to improve the performance of the cultivated varieties. "There are enormous complements," he says. "It is two types of knowledge that come together, for the benefit of people, of nature, of the poor."
