CIMMYT’s Balwinder Singh, who is with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in New Delhi and who recently co-authored a study on crop burning in Punjab and Haryana, told The Wire that the air pollution problem could be much more severe towards the end of October.
“Harvesting is getting late this year and burning will move into the cooler days of November, which will be more harmful as particulate matter will not disperse in cooler days. Another risk in delayed harvesting is that many farmers will harvest and burn the residue within a short time span towards the time between the end of October and early November, which will increase the intensity of fire events and also particulate matter,” he said. Read more here.
A study by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), carried out in collaboration with Stanford and Cornell Universities, has shown that there is a sustainable way to increase food production already in the fields: microsatellites. Read more here (in Italian).
“We are talking about testing whether it is possible to use information available in the genome to predict how productive a variety of wheat will be, if it will be drought- or heat-resistant and what quality its grain will have,” explains Carlos Guzmán from the University of Cordoba who participated in the study via his work as head of the Chemistry and Wheat Quality Laboratory at CIMMYT in Mexico.
“The fields being currently burned mostly belong to farmers who harvested short-duration rice varieties. The slight rise in crop fire instances could be misleading as a much higher area than last year has been harvested so far, according to reports we are getting,” said M.L.Jat, principle scientist at CIMMYT, who is tracking farm fires. Read more here.
The Punjab government is working on war footing to curb farm fires ahead of the celebrations of 550 birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, but rising incidents of stubble burning in Pakistan, particularly near border areas of Punjab, have raised concern among scientists at Punjab remote sensing center (PRSC) and Punjab agricultural university (PAU).
Experts from Cornell and International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in a recent study ‘Tradeoffs Between Groundwater Conservation and Air Pollution From Agricultural Fires in Northwest India’ stated that pollution, particularly caused by stubble burning, leads to an estimated 16,000 premature deaths caused every year in New Delhi capital region, with an aggregate reduction in life expectancy of 6 years.
Droughts affect crop production across the world. A central challenge for researchers and policymakers is to devise technologies that lend greater resilience to agricultural production under this particular environmental stress.
Interdrought 2020 aims to facilitate the development of concepts, methods and technologies associated with plant production in water-limited environments.
The congress will take place from March 9 to 13, 2020, in Mexico City. Early-bird registration is open until October 31, 2019 and abstract submissions will be accepted until November 15, 2019.
The conference will focus on:
Optimizing dryland crop production – crop design
Water capture, transpiration, transpiration efficiency
Vegetative and reproductive growth
Breeding for water-limited environments
Managing cropping systems for adaptation to water-limited environments
This will be the 6th edition of Interdrought, which builds on the successful series of conferences in Montpellier (1995), Rome (2005), Shanghai (2009), Perth (2013) and Hyderabad (2017).
It will continue the philosophy of presenting, discussing and integrating results of both applied and basic research towards the development of solutions for improving crop production under drought-prone conditions.
If you encounter any difficulties in registration, or are interested in sponsoring the conference, please send an email to cimmyt-interdrought2020@cgiar.org.
The meeting on the future of agriculture in Somalia, was attended by donors EU, USAID, JICA, UN agency FAO and CG centers CIFOR, ICRAF, CIAT, CIP, CIMMYT, ICRISAT, IITA, ILRI, IRRI, ICARDA and IFPRI.
William Penn University’s Health & Life Sciences Division welcomed students, staff, faculty, and community members at the annual World Food Prize lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 16.
This year’s speaker was Bram Govaerts, the global Director Innovative Business Strategies with CIMMYT. Read more here.
An international team of scientists, including some from India, has found a way to breed wheat varieties that are of better quality and have a higher yield while also resisting diseases and the adverse effects of climate change. Read more here.
In July 2019 ICIMOD, along with its partners and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico, launched a web-based Regional Drought Monitoring and Outlook System for South Asia – an integrated information platform linking weather and climate data with agriculture practices in South Asia. The system provides multiple indices for droughts and seasonal weather outlooks, besides maps and baseline. Read more here.
Around 10 years ago, CIMMYT began work on developing wheat with higher zinc and iron, under an initiative called HarvestPlus. CIMMYT has released eleven varieties of zinc wheat in India, which are also high-yielding and disease-resistant. Read more here.
Anne Wambui has been growing maize in her farm located in the upper eastern Kenyan county of Embu for three decades to cater for domestic consumption and sale in the nearby market.
During this period, she has relied on buying varieties from seed stockists that are either recommended by the agricultural extension officials or not necessarily varieties that she prefers to plant.
However, scientists at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) emphasized that farmers should be availed varieties that meet their varied needs.
Starting machinery to husk maize cobs at Green Farm near Kitale, Trans-Nzoia. (Photo: Peter Lowe/CIMMYT)
The development community is introducing increasingly complex and systemic technological designs for sustainable improvements to agriculture. Yet, a systemic perspective is hard to find in “adoption-outcome” focused analyses of technological change processes. In order to improve development interventions, it is necessary not only to analyze both successes and failures, but also the process and impacts of technological change.
Researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) recently published a paper on rethinking technological change in smallholder agriculture, arguing against the conventional approach to studying technology adoption.
The problem with the concept of technology adoption
While the adoption rate of newly introduced technologies is still used in the evaluation of agricultural research and development, the theory of technology adoption is an insufficient framework for understanding technological change. It is too linear, too binary, too focused on individual decisions and gives an inaccurate and misleading picture to researchers.
The theory of adoption treats technology like a “black box” that is transferred smoothly from one setting to another, following a linear progression of old and inferior tools and methods to new improved ones. This theory is too simplistic to align with the complex realities of the capabilities and agency of multiple actors. In addition, in cases of participatory technology development, where intended users are involved in the creation of innovations, adoption rates are often limited due to the relatively small scale of the project.
Using adoption rate as the only indicator of success or failure can lead researchers to ignore wider impacts of the introduction of a new technology. Adoption rates could go up, but use of a new technology could cause harm to social relations, the local environment, or its resilience. Low adoption rates could classify a program as a failure, while farmers benefited substantially in undetected ways, for example forming networks or acquiring new skills and knowledge. A singular focus on adoption rates thus limits our understanding of what happens in processes of technological change.
Farmer Kausila Chanara direct dry seeding rice in Ramghat, Surkhet, Nepal. (Photo: Peter Lowe/CIMMYT)
An alternative conceptual framework
In addition to the introduction of a new technology to small-scale farming systems, technological change involves the agency of many social actors. The agency of farmers, scientists, project managers and extension officers is key to understand whether a new technology is perceived to be useful, accessible or realistic, as well as how it is adjusted and changing social relations.
A new framework is needed to capture this reconfiguration of social and technological components that result from the introduction of a new technology to a community.
The authors of this paper propose an alternative conceptual framework with an agent-, practice- and process-oriented approach to better understand technological change. The framework is composed of four key components: propositions, encounters, dispositions and responses.
Propositions are composed of artefacts, methods, techniques and practices and a proposed mode of engagement in agricultural production. Encounters can be deliberately organized, for example a field day, or spontaneous, when a farmer sees a neighbor using a new tool. Intended users of technology may be disposed to respond in a variety of different ways, and dispositions may change over time. Finally, responses are a process or pathway that is likely to involve adjustment or recalibration to make the new technology work for the farmer.
Further work to operationalize this framework is needed. The authors suggest a next step of developing indicators to measure learning, experimentation and behavioral change as part of analyzing technological change processes.
