When trying to drive change in a global research organization, the science is the easy part, according to Geoff Graham, Vice President for Plant Breeding at Corteva Agriscience, a new company that brings together DuPont Crop Protection, DuPont Pioneer, and Dow AgroSciences.
“The hard thing is to change organizational culture—getting people to stop remembering how they’ve always done things and to think instead about what needs to be done,” said Graham, speaking on the topic to more than 600 international scientists and support staff at the Mexico headquarters of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) on 25 June 2018.
“Innovation is a process that can be managed, but it takes time and must be prioritized,” he explained, in his keynote talk during the opening session of CIMMYT’s biennial Science Week, which brings together the center’s researchers from 15 offices in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and this year focused on next-generation science and partnerships for impact.
“Innovation may require creativity, but innovation and creativity are different things,” added Graham, whose family lived in Cali, Colombia, until he was 14 and then moved to Minnesota in the U.S.
Responsible for global breeding activities at Corteva, a name derived from a combination of words meaning “heart” and “nature,” Geoff previously worked at DuPont Pioneer. He has Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the University of Minnesota, and earned a Ph.D. in genetics and plant breeding from North Carolina State University.
Below, watch an interview with Graham regarding the role of research institutions in society, how change can occur in CIMMYT, and how Corteva will support the CIMMYT-led CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform.
Yellow spores of the fungus Puccinia striiformis f.sp. tritici, which causes stripe rust disease in wheat. Photo: CIMMYT/Mike Listman.
Rapidly emerging and evolving races of wheat stem rust and stripe rust disease—the crop’s deadliest scourges worldwide—drove large-scale seed replacement by Ethiopia’s farmers during 2009-14, as the genetic resistance of widely-grown wheat varieties no longer proved effective against the novel pathogen strains, according to a new study by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center(CIMMYT).
Based on two surveys conducted by CIMMYT and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research(EIAR) and involving more than 2,000 Ethiopian wheat farmers, the study shows that farmers need access to a range of genetically diverse wheat varieties whose resistance is based on multiple genes.
After a severe outbreak in 2010-11 of a previously unseen stripe rust strain, 40 percent of the affected farm households quickly replaced popular but susceptible wheat varieties, according to Moti Jaleta, agricultural economist at CIMMYT and co-author of the publication.
“That epidemic hit about 600,000 hectares of wheat—30 percent of Ethiopia’s wheat lands—and farmers said it cut their yields in half,” Jaleta said. “In general, the rapid appearance and mutation of wheat rust races in Ethiopia has convinced farmers about the need to adopt newer, resistant varieties.”
The fourth most widely grown cereal after tef, maize, and sorghum, wheat in Ethiopia is produced largely by smallholder farmers under rainfed conditions. Wheat production and area under cultivation have increased significantly in the last decade and Ethiopia is among Africa’s top three wheat producers, but the country still imports on average 1.4 million tons of wheat per year to meet domestic demand.
National and international organizations such as EIAR, CIMMYT, and the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) are working intensely to identify and incorporate new sources of disease resistance into improved wheat varieties and to support the multiplication of more seed to meet farmer demand.
New wheat varieties have provided bigger harvests and incomes for Ethiopia farmers in the last decade, but swiftly mutating and spreading disease strains are endangering wheat’s future, according to Dave Hodson, CIMMYT expert in geographic information and decision support systems, co-author of the new study.
Ethiopian wheat farmers like Abebe Abora, of Doyogena, have benefitted from adopting high-yielding wheat varieties but face threats from fast mutating races of wheat rust disease pathogens. Photo: CIMMYT/Apollo Habtamu.
“In addition to stripe rust, highly-virulent new races of stem rust are ruining wheat harvests in eastern Africa,” he explained. “These include the deadly Ug99 race group, which has spread beyond the region, and, more recently, the stem rust race TKTTF.”
As an example, he mentioned the case of the wheat variety Digalu, which is resistant to stripe rust and was quickly adopted by farmers after the 2010-11 epidemic. But Digalu has recently shown susceptibility to TKTTF stem rust and must now be replaced.
“In rust-prone Ethiopia, the risks of over-reliance on a widely-sown variety that is protected by a single, major resistance gene—Digalu, for example—are clearly apparent,” he added. “CIMMYT and partners are working hard to replace it with a new variety whose resistance is genetically more complex and durable.”
Hodson said as well that continuous monitoring of the rust populations in Ethiopia and the surrounding region is essential to detect and respond to emerging threats, as well as to ensure that the key pathogen races are used to screen for resistance in wheat breeding programs.
Hodson and partners at the John Innes Centre, UK, and EIAR are leading development of a handheld tool that allows rapid identification of disease strains in the field, instead of having to send them to a laboratory and lose precious time awaiting the results.
CIMMYT and partners are also applying molecular tools to study wheat varietal use in Ethiopia. “There are indications that yields reported by farmers were much lower than official statistics, and farmer recollections of varietal names and other information are not always exact,” Hodson explained. “We are analyzing results now of a follow-up study that uses DNA fingerprinting to better document varietal use and turnover.”
Martin Kropff, CIMMYT director general (left) and Mustapha El-Bouhssini, ICARDA entomologist, in that center’s lab at Rabat, Morocco.
In an excellent example of scientific collaboration spanning borders and generations, Mustapha El-Bouhssini, entomologist at the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), screened wheat breeding lines from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) under glasshouse infestations of Russian wheat aphid (Diuraphis noxia), a major global pest of wheat. At least one of the lines, which were developed through crosses of wheat with related crop and grass species, showed high levels of resistance.
“In our experiments, we did an initial screening with one replication and then a replicated test with a Pavon line and the check,” said El-Bouhssini.
Pavon is a semi-dwarf wheat variety developed by Sanjaya Rajaram, former CIMMYT wheat director and 2014 World Food Prize laureate. The version of Pavon referred to by El-Bouhssini had been crossed with rye by Lukaszewski and entered CIMMYT’s wheat genetic resource collections; the check was a popular high-yielding variety with no resistance to Russian wheat aphid.
The resistant wheat line (center) is green while all others have perished under heavy infestation of Russian wheat aphid, in the ICARDA entomology lab at Rabat, Morocco.
Pavon had been used by Lukaszewski and colleagues as a model variety for wide crosses to transfer pest and disease resistance to wheat from its distant relatives. More recently Leonardo Crespo-Herrera, CIMMYT wheat breeder, pursued this research for his doctoral studies. It was he who provided a selection of wide-cross lines to El-Bouhssini.
“Resistance to pests in wheat is a valuable trait for farmers and the environment,” said Crespo-Herrera. “It can protect yield for farmers who lack access to other control methods. For those with access to insecticides, it can minimize their use and cost, as well as negative impacts on the environment and human health.”
This blast-infected wheat spike contains no grain, only chaff. Photo: CIMMYT files.
A spatial mapping and ex ante studyregarding the risk and potential spread in South Asia of wheat blast, a mysterious and deadly disease from the Americas that unexpectedly infected wheat in southwestern Bangladesh in 2016, identified 7 million hectares of wheat cropping areas in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan whose agro-climatic conditions resemble those of the Bangladesh outbreak zone.
The study shows that, under a conservative scenario of 5-10% wheat blast production damage in a single season in those areas, wheat grain losses would amount to from 0.89 to 1.77 million tons worth, between $180 and $350 million. This would strain the region’s already fragile food security and forcing up wheat imports and prices, according to Khondoker Abdul Mottaleb, first author of the study.
“Climate change and related changes in weather patterns, together with continuing globalization, expose wheat crops to increased risks from pathogens that are sometimes transported over long distances,” said Mottaleb.
Foresight research at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) has focused on new diseases and pests that have emerged or spread in recent decades, threatening global food safety and security. For wheat these include Ug99 and other new strains of stem rust, the movement of stripe rust into new areas, and the sudden appearance in Bangladesh of wheat blast, which had previously been limited to South America.
“As early as 2011, CIMMYT researchers had warned that wheat blast could spread to new areas, including South Asia,” said Kai Sonder, who manages CIMMYT’s geographic information systems lab and was a co-author on the current study, referring to a 2011 notepublished by the American Pathological Society. “Now that forecast has come true.”
CIMMYT has played a pivotal role in global efforts to study and control blast, with funding from the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (WHEAT), the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
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Researchers take part in Wheat Blast screening and surveillance course in Bangladesh. (Photo: CIMMYT/Tim Krupnik)
Fourteen young wheat researchers from South Asia recently attended a screening and surveillance course to address wheat blast, the mysterious and deadly disease whose surprise 2016 outbreak in southwestern Bangladesh devastated that region’s wheat crop, diminished farmers’ food security and livelihoods, and augured blast’s inexorable spread in South Asia.
Held from 24 February to 4 March 2018 at the Regional Agricultural Research Station (RARS), Jessore, as part of that facility’s precision phenotyping platform to develop resistant wheat varieties, the course emphasized hands-on practice for crucial and challenging aspects of disease control and resistance breeding, including scoring infections on plants and achieving optimal development of the disease on experimental wheat plots.
Cutting-edge approaches tested for the first time in South Asia included use of smartphone-attachable field microscopes together with artificial intelligence processing of images, allowing researchers identify blast lesions not visible to the naked eye.
Workshop participants learned how to use the latest in technology to identify and keep track of the deadly Wheat Blast disease. Photo: CIMMYT archives.
“A disease like wheat blast, which respects no borders, can only be addressed through international collaboration and strengthening South Asia’s human and institutional capacities,” said Hans-Joachim Braun, director of the global wheat program of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), addressing participants and guests at the course opening ceremony. “Stable funding from CGIAR enabled CIMMYT and partners to react quickly to the 2016 outbreak, screening breeding lines in Bolivia and working with USDA-ARS, Fort Detrick, USA to identify resistance sources, resulting in the rapid release in 2017 of BARI Gom 33, Bangladesh’s first-ever blast resistant and zinc enriched wheat variety.”
Cooler and dryer weather during the 2017-18 wheat season has limited the incidence and severity of blast on Bangladesh’s latest wheat crop, but the disease remains a major threat for the country and its neighbors, according to P.K. Malaker, Chief Scientific Officer, Wheat Research Centre (WRC) of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI).
“We need to raise awareness of the danger and the need for effective management, through training courses, workshops, and mass media campaigns,” said Malaker, speaking during the course.
The course was organized by CIMMYT, a Mexico-based organization that has collaborated with Bangladeshi research organizations for decades, with support from the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (WHEAT), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Bangladesh Wheat and Maize Research Institute (BWMRI).
Speaking at the closing ceremony, N.C.D. Barma, WRC Director, thanked the participants and the management team and distributed certificates. “The training was very effective. BMWRI and CIMMYT have to work together to mitigate the threat of wheat blast in Bangladesh.”
The declining area sown to wheat worldwide, together with stockpiling by China, is masking significant risk in global wheat markets, experts at Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) in the UK caution.
“Less area sown means a higher dependence on yield to meet demand and thus a greater reliance on good weather, which is out of our control,” said Amandeep Kaur Purewal, a Senior Analyst in AHDB’s Market Intelligence Cereals and Oilseeds team, speaking in a recent interview with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center(CIMMYT).
“If there is a production issue—say, drought or a serious pest or disease outbreak in a key wheat growing country—then wheat stocks may not be as accessible as recent, bearish headlines suggest,” Kaur Purewal added. “Bear in mind that the world’s number-one wheat producer, China, is not exporting surplus wheat at the moment, so China’s wheat won’t really be available for the markets.”
Established in 2008 and funded by farmers , growers and others in the supply chain, AHDB provides independent information to improve decisions and performance in UK agriculture.
In “Global wheat: The risks behind the records,” a report published by AHDB in February 2018, Kaur Purewal and colleagues suggest that, despite an unprecedented run of surplus global wheat production in the last four years, there is a relatively small cushion for large-scale importers to fall back upon, if imports become harder to obtain.
“Likely linked to China’s efforts to become self-sufficient in wheat, since 2007/08 the country has increased its stockpile by 225 percent, giving it a 64 percent share of the 138 million ton increase in global wheat stocks over this period,” Kaur Purewal observed. “This and the recent, huge global harvests for maize have saturated grain markets and pressured prices, driving the price of wheat futures to historic lows.”
According to the AHDB report, prices for wheat futures have been relatively stable, but if yields fall and production declines, greater price volatility may return.
“It’s important to remain aware of the market forces and read the news,” she said, “but in the case of the wheat stocks-to-use ratio, which measures how much stock is left after demand has been accounted for, the headlines may not be providing a true reflection.”
Hans-Joachim Braun, director of CIMMYT’s global wheat program, called the AHDB report an “eye opener.”
“This resonates with the cautionary message ofthe landmark 2015 studyby Lloyd’s of London, which showed that the global food system is actually under significant pressure from potential, coinciding shocks, such as bad weather combined with crop disease outbreaks,” Braun said.
“Price spikes in basic food staples sorely affect the poor, who spend much of their income simply to eat each day,” Braun added. “CIMMYT and its partners cannot let up in our mission to develop and share high-yielding and nutritious maize and wheat varieties, supported by climate-smart farming practices. In an uncertain world, these help foster resilience and stability for food systems and consumers.”
CIUDAD OBREGÓN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – As more than 200 wheat science and food specialists from 34 countries gathered in northwestern Mexico to address threats to global nutrition and food security, 9 outstanding young women wheat scientists among them showed that this effort will be strengthened by diversity.
Winners of the Jeanie Borlaug Laube Women in Triticum (WIT) Early Career Award pose in front of the statue of the late Nobel Peace laureate, Dr. Norman E. Borlaug. Included in the photo are Amor Yahyaoui, CIMMYT wheat training coordinator (far left), Jeanie Borlaug Laube (center, blue blouse), and Maricelis Acevedo, Associate Director for Science, the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat Project (to the right of Jeanie Borlaug Laube). Photo: CIMMYT/Mike Listman
“As my father used to say, you are the future,” said Jeanie Borlaug Laube, daughter of the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Dr. Norman E. Borlaug, and mentor of many young agricultural scientists. Speaking to the WIT recipients, she said, “You are ahead of the game compared to other scientists your age.”
Established in 2010 as part of the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) project led by Cornell University, the WIT program has provided professional development opportunities for 44 young women researchers in wheat from more than 20 countries.
The award is given annually to as many as five early science-career women, ranging from advanced undergraduates to recent doctoral graduates and postdoctoral fellows. Selection is based on a scientific abstract and statement of intent, along with evidence of commitment to agricultural development and leadership potential.
Women who will change their professions and the world
Weizhen Liu. Photo: WIT archives
Weizhen Liu, a 2017 WIT recipient and postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, is applying genome-wide association mapping and DNA marker technology to enhance genetic resistance in tetraploid and bread wheat to stripe rust, a major global disease of wheat that is spreading quickly and becoming more virulent.
“I am eager to join and devote myself to improving wheat yields by fighting wheat rusts,” said Liu, who received her bachelors in biotechnology from Nanjing Agricultural University, China, in 2011, and a doctorate from Washington State University in 2016. “Through WIT, I can share my research with other scientists, receive professional feedback, and build international collaboration.”
Mitaly Bansal. Photo: WIT archives
Mitaly Bansal, a 2016 WIT award winner, currently works as a Research Associate at Punjab Agricultural University, India. She did her PhD research in a collaborative project involving Punjab Agricultural University and the John Innes Centre, UK, to deploy stripe and leaf rust resistance genes from non-progenitor wild wheat in commercial cultivars.
“I would like to work someday in a position of public policy in India,” said Bansal, who received the Monsanto Beachell-Borlaug scholarship in 2013. “That is where I could have the influence to change things that needed changing.”
Networking in the cradle of wheat’s “Green Revolution”
In addition to joining CIMMYT training for a week, WIT recipients will attend the annual Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI) technical workshop, to be held this year in Marrakech, Morocco, from 14 to 17 April, and where the 2018 WIT winners will be announced.
The CIMMYT training sessions took place at the Norman Borlaug Experiment Station (CENEB), an irrigated desert location in Sonora State, northwestern Mexico, and coincided with CIMMYT’s 2018 “Visitors’ Week,” which took place from 19 to 23 March.
An annual gathering organized by the CIMMYT global wheat program at CENEB, Visitors’ Week typically draws hundreds of experts from the worldwide wheat research and development community. Participants share innovations and news on critical issues, such as the rising threat of the rust diseases or changing climates in key wheat farmlands.
Through her interaction with Visitors’ Week peers, Liu said she was impressed by the extensive partnering among experts from so many countries. “I realized that one of the most important things to fight world hunger is collaboration; no one can solve food insecurity, malnutrition, and climate change issues all by himself.”
A strong proponent and practitioner of collaboration, Norman E. Borlaug worked with Sonora farmers in the 1940-50s as part of a joint Rockefeller Foundation-Mexican government program that, among other outputs, generated high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat varieties. After bringing wheat self-sufficiency to Mexico, the varieties were adopted in South Asia and beyond in the 1960-70s, dramatically boosting yields and allowing famine-prone countries to feed their rapidly-expanding populations.
This became known as the Green Revolution and, in 1970, Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his contributions. Borlaug subsequently led CIMMYT wheat research until his retirement in 1979 and served afterwards as a special consultant to the Center.
When a new, highly virulent race of wheat stem rust, Ug99, emerged in eastern Africa in the early 2000s, Borlaug sounded the alarm and championed a global response that grew into the BGRI and associated initiatives such as DGGW.
“This is just a beginning for you, but it doesn’t end here,” said Maricelis Acevedo, a former WIT recipient who went on to become the leader of DGGW. Speaking during the training course, she observed that many WIT awardees come from settings where women often lack access to higher education or the freedom to pursue a career.
“Through WIT activities, including training courses like this and events such as Visitors’ Week and the BGRI workshop,” Acevedo added, “you’ll gain essential knowledge and skills but you’ll also learn leadership and the personal confidence to speak out, as well as the ability to interact one-on-one with leaders in your fields and to ask the right questions.”
CIMMYT is a global leader in publicly-funded maize and wheat research and related farming systems. Headquartered near Mexico City, CIMMYT works with hundreds of partners throughout the developing world to sustainably increase the productivity of maize and wheat cropping systems, thus improving global food security and reducing poverty. CIMMYT is a member of the CGIAR System and leads the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize and Wheat and the Excellence in Breeding Platform. The Center receives generous support from national governments, foundations, development banks and other public and private agencies.
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) under UK aid, the DGGW project aims to strengthen the delivery pipeline for new, disease resistant, climate-resilient wheat varieties and to increase the yields of smallholder wheat farmers.
Wheat fields at the Campo Experimental Norman E. Borlaug (CENEB) near Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, Mexico. Photo: M. Ellis/CIMMYT.
MEXICO CITY (CIMMYT) — Malnutrition is rising again and becoming more complex, according to the head of the world’s leading public maize and wheat research center.
“Those people suffer from calorie malnutrition and go to bed hungry at night, which is a terrible thing,” Kropff added. “But the diets of 2 billion persons worldwide lack essential micronutrients — Vitamin A, iron, or zinc — and this especially affects the health and development of children under 5 years old.”
Kropff noted that some 650 million people are obese, and the number is increasing. “All these nutrition issues are interconnected, and are driven by rising population, global conflicts, and — for obesity — increasing prosperity, in developed and emerging economies.”
“The solution? Good, healthy diets,” said Kropff, “which in turn depend on having enough food available, but also diverse crops and food types and consumer education on healthy eating.”
The world’s quickly-rising population needs not only more food but healthier, more nutritious food, according to Julie Miller Jones, Professor Emerita at St. Catherine University, and Carlos Guzmán, who leads wheat quality research at CIMMYT.
Held in Mexico City during 11-14 March and co-organized by CIMMYT and the International Association for Cereal Science and Technology (ICC), the 4th Latin American Cereals Conference has drawn more than 220 participants from 46 countries, including professionals in agricultural science and production, the food industry, regulatory agencies, and trade associations.
“We are dedicated to spreading information about cereal science and technology, processing, and the health benefits of cereals,” said Hamit Köksel, president of the ICC and professor at Hacettepe University, Turkey, to open the event. “Regarding the latter, we should increase our whole grain consumption.”
Köksel added that ICC has more than 10,000 subscribers in 85 countries.
Breeding micronutrient-dense cereals
One way to improve the nutrition and health of the poor who cannot afford dietary supplements or diverse foods is through “biofortification” of the staple crops that comprise much of their diets.
Drawing upon landraces and diverse other sources in maize and wheat’s genetic pools and applying innovative breeding, CIMMYT has developed high-yielding maize and wheat lines and varieties that feature enhanced levels of grain zinc and are being used in breeding programs worldwide.
“In the last four years, the national research programs of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan have released six zinc-biofortified wheat varieties derived from CIMMYT research,” said Hans Braun, director of the center’s global wheat program. “Zinc-Shakthi, an early-maturing wheat variety released in India in 2014 whose grain features 40 percent more zinc than conventional varieties, is already grown by more than 50,000 smallholder farmers in the Northeastern Gangetic Plains of India.”
New zinc biofortified maize variety BIO-MZN01, recently released in Colombia. Photo: CIMMYT archives
CIMMYT is focusing on enhancing the levels of provitamin A and zinc in the maize germplasm adapted to sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Improved quality protein maize (QPM) varieties, whose grain features enhanced levels of two essential amino acids, lysine and tryptophan, is another major biofortified maize that is grown worldwide, according to Prasanna Boddupalli, director of CIMMYT’s global maize program.
“Quality protein maize varieties are grown by farmers on 1.2 million hectares in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” said Prasanna, in his presentation, adding that provitamin-A-enriched maize varieties have also been released in several countries in Africa, besides Asia.
“Biofortified crops have been released in 60 countries,” said Wolfgang Pfeiffer, HarvestPlus global director for product development and commercialization, speaking at the conference. “The pressing need now is to ‘mainstream’ biofortification, making it a standard component of breeding programs and food systems.”
Whole grains are good for you
A central issue on the conference agenda is promoting awareness about the importance of healthy diets and the role of whole grains.
“Participants will discuss the large body of published studies showing that whole grain foods, including processed ones, are associated with a significantly reduced risk of chronic diseases and obesity,” said Carlos Guzmán, who leads wheat quality research at CIMMYT and helped organize the conference. “There is a global movement to promote the consumption of whole grains and the food industry worldwide is responding to rising consumer demand for whole grain products.”
Guzmán also thanked the conference sponsors: Bimbo, Bastak Instruments, Brabender, Foss, Chopin Technologies, Perten, Stable Micro Systems Scientific Instruments, Cereal Partners Worldwide Nestlé and General Mills, Stern Ingredients-Mexico, World Grain, the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat, and Megazyme.
To learn more about the Latin American Cereals Conference and the International Gluten Workshop, click here.
A women dries maize grain after shelling. Photo: CIMMYT/ Wasim Iftikar
Unforeseen market effects, particularly rising land values and falling maize prices, have blocked the headway of women’s groups in eastern India who had begun profiting from maize farming on fallow land.
Leveraging the region’s favorable rainfall and soils and leasing fallow land from mostly male landholders, women’s groups had been growing improved maize, including hybrids, in Badbil Village, Mayurbhanj District, on the north-central plateau of Odisha State, a populous area on India’s East Coast.
In conjunction with the Odisha State Department of Agriculture in 2016, the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), provided technical training on improved maize production practices including mechanized line sowing using a seed drill, the safe application of pre-emergence herbicides, weed control using a power weeder, precision fertilizer management, and the marketing of dry grain.
Across Mayurbhanj, CSISA supported the cultivation of more than 1,800 hectares of hybrid maize. The women’s groups in Badbil grew more than 32 hectares and obtained an average yield of 5.6 tons per hectare. CSISA facilitated the purchase by poultry feed mills from neighboring districts of around 100 tons of dry grain at $240 per ton, generating net gains of from $700 to $783 per hectare. The farmers also harvested surplus green cobs for family consumption.
Women farmers ready to bag up maize grain for storage. Photo: CIMMYT/ Wasim Iftikar
The success of maize cultivation in Badbil received attention in leading Odia-language newspapers, became a regional example for turning fallows into cash, and even featured in a report of the CGIAR Research Program on Maize.
But seeing that maize cultivation could yield profits, landowners declined to lease their fields in 2017. Fewer women farmers were able to grow maize and difficulties in sustaining linkages with millers due to the low output led many of the women to sell their crop as green cob at a lower price.
Worse yet, maize market prices plunged in Odisha in 2017. Farmers in Nuapada and Bolangir districts ended up selling at $167 per ton, against a declared minimum support price of $226 and as compared to $190 in 2016, demonstrating farmers’ vulnerability to price volatility.
Women farmers in Badbil wish to continue growing maize, despite the obstacles, and are encouraging male farmers to produce hybrid maize to keep supplying millers and thus maintain that market connection.
Anita Lohar, a progressive woman farmer, said, “The introduction of mechanization has helped the self-help groups to come forward to adopt maize and earn money from fallow land. We had one acre of maize in 2014 and now we cultivate maize on more than 80 acres. Maize farming has changed a lot from traditional practices, which were time consuming, labor intensive and less profitable, and now has asserted women’s fundamental role in agriculture.”
CSISA is working with the Odisha State Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange Limited to convene a maize marketing forum. On the agenda are improved infrastructure and aggregation and connectivity with nearby markets, such as poultry mills. CSISA also believes that better coordination among agencies involved in production, post-harvest management, storage, warehousing, and e-trading can unlock the potential for maize to generate significant incomes for smallholders, especially women, in the Odisha plateau.
Women are adopting mechanization and using seed drills. Photo: CIMMYT/ Wasim Iftikar
CIMMYT research in Ethiopia and other countries has shown that, in communities where women and men work together and women have access to knowledge and resources and share in decision making, everyone benefits. Photo: CIMMYT/Apollo Habtamu
Gender awareness and gender-sensitive approaches are slowly spreading into agricultural research, extension, and policy in Ethiopia, based on recent statements from a cross section of professionals and practitioners in the country.
Moges Bizuneh, deputy head of the agricultural office of Basona District, attended a CIMMYT-organized workshop in which Ethiopia-specific results were presented from GENNOVATE, a large-scale qualitative study involving focus groups and interviews with more than 7,500 rural men and women in 26 developing countries. “I have learned a lot about gender and it’s not just about women, but about both women and men,” said Bizuneh.
The District of Basona has nearly 30,000 households, 98 percent of which depend on agriculture for food and livelihoods but have access to an average of only 1.5 hectares of land. More than 10,000 of those households are headed by females, because many males and youth have left Basona to seek opportunities in large cities or other countries.
Bizuneh and his colleagues are working with a district gender specialist and a women and gender unit to make gender sensitive approaches a regular part of their activities. In this, he concedes that he and other professionals are contending with “deep-rooted social and cultural norms around divisions of labor and a lack of awareness regarding gender issues.”
One surprise for Bizuneh, from group discussions regarding innovation and involvement in CIMMYT’s gender research, was that women said it was important to share experiences with other farmers and obtain new knowledge.
“No men mentioned that,” he remarked. “This shows that, if provided with information and support, women can innovate.”
Kristie Drucza, CIMMYT gender and development specialist, has been studying, publishing on, and presenting widely about people-centered, evidence-based approaches for gender equality that are being taken up by agriculture-for-development professionals. Photo: CIMMYT/Apollo Habtamu
Women and men plan and change together
Another product from the project is a 2017 review of gender-transformative methodologies for Ethiopia’s agriculture sector, co-authored by Kristie Drucza, project lead, and Wondimu Abebe, a research assistant, both from CIMMYT.
Drucza presented on the people-centered methodologies described in the publication at a recent workshop in Addis Ababa, offering diverse lessons of use for research and development professionals.
“The methodologies involve participatory research to help households and communities assess their situation and develop solutions to problems,” said Drucza. “By working with men and boys and allowing communities to set the pace of change, these approaches reduce the likelihood of a backlash against women—something that too frequently accompanies gender-focused programs.”
Annet Abenakyo Mulema, social scientist in gender at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), intends to apply some of the same methods to help rural families understand household and community gender dynamics and their role in managing the families’ goats, sheep, and other livestock.
Annet Abenakyo Mulema, social scientist in gender at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), is applying participatory research and gender-sensitive methods to help households and communities assess their situation and develop solutions to problems. Photo: ILRI archives
“A 2015 study we did uncovered gender relationships associated with disease transmission,” Mulema explained. “Women and girls normally clean the animal pens and so are exposed to infections. Social conventions in the community make women feel inferior and not empowered to speak out about animal health, which is considered a man’s domain. We encouraged men and women to share roles and work together, and this made it easier for both to quickly identify disease outbreaks at early stages and prevent infections from spreading throughout the herd or to humans.”
Mulema said Drucza’s workshop helped her to understand and appreciate methodologies such as social analysis and action, community conversations, and gender action learning systems to support a shared, local response to the problem. “As another outcome, we spoke to service providers, such as veterinarians and extension agents, who needed to understand how gender related to animal health and the fact that the relationships between women and men in a community can change.”
Meskerem Mulatu, gender and nutrition specialist in Ethiopia’s Agricultural Growth Program II (AGP II) Capacity Development Support Facility (CDSF), said her group invited Drucza to speak on gender and social norms at a national workshop organized by AGP II CDSF in October 2017.
“Our event was on gender, nutrition, and climate-smart agriculture,” according to Meskerem. “Many technologies are gender-sensitive but research and extension are not giving this adequate attention because there is no common operational definition. Their preconception is ‘technology is technology; it’s the same for men and women.’ Drucza’s evidence-based presentation showed that men and women may have different technology demands.”
Meskerem is going to train district agricultural officers to use a transformative methodology identified by Drucza. “Kristie’s report is really good timing,” she said. “We were thinking of doing something in terms of gender and these methodologies make sense.”
Recording data on changes in social norms
In June 2017, Drucza presented the findings of her meta-analysis of evaluations of gender in Ethiopian agricultural development at a senior staff meeting of the Ethiopia office of CARE, the global humanitarian organization. Among the 26 agricultural program evaluations considered, explained Drucza, only three had strong findings, a heavy inclusion of gender, and evidence of changes in social norms—and all three were CARE projects.
Moges Bizuneh helps lead an agricultural office in Basona District, home to more than 10,000 female-headed households, and is working to support innovation by women. Photo: CIMMYT/Mike Listman
One was the Graduation with Resilience to Achieve Sustainable Development (GRAD) initiative. As an outcome of Drucza’s presentation, CARE is refining the way it records certain social data, according to Elisabeth Farmer, Deputy Chief of Party for the CARE’s Feed the Future Ethiopia–Livelihoods for Resilience Activity project, which emerged from GRAD.
“Our baseline study protocol and questionnaire for the new project hadn’t been finalized yet,” Farmer said. “We were thinking through the difference between using a scale that scores responses along a range, such as a Likert scale, versus asking respondents “yes or no”-type questions, for instance regarding women’s access to information or equitable decision-making in the household.
“As Drucza explained, when it comes to gender norms, you may not get all the way from a “no” to a “yes”, but only from a “2” to “3”, and we want to make sure that we are capturing these smaller shifts, so we incorporated scales with ranges into our baseline and will ensure that these are used in future assessments to track transformations in social norms.”
According to Drucza, who leads the CIMMYT project “Understanding gender in wheat-based livelihoods for enhanced WHEAT R4D impact in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Ethiopia,” funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, research must be relevant and useful.
“I’m happy to learn that our results are useful to a diverse range of actors, from development partners to policy makers and local agricultural officers,” she said.
Julio Huerta stands in a wheat field in northern Mexico. Photo: Xochiquetzal Fonseca/CIMMYT.
Based on publication records, CIMMYT scientists produce a lot more than just improved maize and wheat varieties, as important as that work has been for farmers, partners, and consumers.
In 2017, CIMMYT researchers contributed to nearly 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, many published in high-impact journals including Nature and Science. The articles emerged from partnerships with a broad range of international universities and research institutes and have been cited frequently by peers in recent years.
“CIMMYT is the world’s largest distributor of publicly-available maize and wheat ‘germplasm,’ which includes breeding lines and other genetic resources in the form of seed,” said Marianne Bänziger, CIMMYT deputy director general for research and partnerships. “But the center’s researchers also publish high-quality, cutting-edge science articles, not to mention mentoring and training several hundred students and professionals mostly from national research systems every year and interacting with thousands of farmers.”
Multiple CIMMYT authors led by José Crossa, CIMMYT biometrician and distinguished scientist, published two papers in Heredity on genomic selection in maize and wheat that have been among those most often cited for that journal since 2013, having been mentioned in other papers 124 times.
Ravi Singh and Julio Huerta, CIMMYT wheat scientists, were recognized in 2017 among the top one percent of researchers for the frequency of citation of their articles by other science authors.
Among the many reports to which they contributed, Huerta and Singh were participants and co-authors in a study published in the eminent journal Science in 2009 and since cited by other researchers 441 times. The study described the molecular basis of a “wonder” gene that, in tandem with other resistance genes, has helped protect wheat from three deadly fungal diseases for more than 50 years, providing farmers benefits in excess of $5 billion in harvests saved, according to a CIMMYT report on the findings.
The two scientists share authorship on at least a half-dozen other articles on wheat disease breeding and genetics that have been cited over 100 times.
“These examples show that CIMMYT research substantially contributes to global science, in addition to the impact achieved in farmers’ fields,” said Bänziger. “It all builds on high-value partnerships with hundreds of researchers and professionals worldwide.”
Worker rogueing a wheat seed production plot. Photo: CIMMYT/A.Habtamu.
In response to Ethiopia’s worst drought in 50 years and the country’s critical shortage of maize and wheat seed for sowing in 2016, Ethiopian organizations, seed producers, and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) partnered to deliver to farmers over 3,400 tons of high quality seed that was sown on more than 100,300 hectares.
“We went three years without rain,” says farmer Usman Kadir, whose 1.5-hectare homestead in Wanjo Bebele village, Halaba Special Woreda, supports a household of 11 persons. “We were able to eat thanks to emergency food programs.” In 2017, Kadir used emergency maize seed to sow half a hectare and harvested 3 tons, getting his farm back on its feet. “If more new improved varieties come, we want to work with you and expand our farming operation.”
Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) of the U.S. Ethiopia mission, seed relief complemented international and national food aid, helping farm families to quickly grow crops after several seasons of erratic or failed rains in Ethiopia and the catastrophic 2015-16 El Niño droughts. At that time, more than 10 million people struggled to find food, as eastern Ethiopia faced crop losses from 50 to 90 percent of expected yields.
“This effort helped rescue the food security and livelihoods of more than 271,000 rural households and 1.6 million individuals in Ethiopia’s Amhara, Oromia, Tigray, and SNNP regions, and strengthened seed systems to address future climate, disease, and pest crises,” said Bekele Abeyo, CIMMYT wheat scientist who led the seed relief initiative.
Farmers are growing maize and wheat varieties suitable for drought- and disease-affected areas. Photo: CIMMYT/ A. Habtamu
Wheat and maize: Mainstays of food security
Agriculture provides 42 percent of Ethiopia’s GDP, 77 percent of employment, and 84 percent of exports. Subsistence, smallholder farmers predominate, making their living from less than two hectares of land. Wheat and maize are the most important crops for food security; they are also at the center of Ethiopia’s increasingly vibrant agricultural output markets and have been the focus in recent years of public investment to raise national production.
Maize and wheat production in Ethiopia depends on rainfall, making the unpredictable weather patterns caused by climate change exceptionally detrimental here. Various studies predict an average 30 percent reduction in farm incomes due to climate change impacts, including greater extremes in temperatures and rainfall (floods, droughts) and the emergence of new pest and disease strains. Research shows that reduced precipitation is already holding back wheat yields.
To address this, experts identified maize and wheat varieties suitable for drought-affected areas and highly resistant to prevalent crop diseases. Of the maize varieties, some 10 percent were quality protein maize, which carries enhanced levels of key amino acids for protein synthesis in humans.
“This effort also provided training for district and zonal development agents in crop protection, agronomy, drought mitigation practices, and seed systems,” said Abeyo. “Finally, five women seed producer associations received wheat seed threshers and a large union of farmer seed producer cooperatives received a maize sheller through the initiative. This equipment will greatly expedite their operations and contribute to the expanded and more reliable access of farmers to affordable, quality seed in the future.”
Partners and contributors
Emergency relief seed was sourced through diverse CIMMYT partnerships, including producers in the USAID-funded “Drought Tolerant Maize for Seed Scaling Project” (DTMASS) and “Wheat Seed Scaling Initiative.” Stakeholders included the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources (MoANR), the Bureau of Agriculture and Natural Resources (BoANR), public and private seed companies/enterprises, farmer cooperative unions, federal and regional research institutes, and non-government organizations working in target areas. With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) helped deliver seed to drought-affected districts and jointly organized training and workshops.
Click here to read a full report on the emergency seed relief initiative.
A sunny November day brings hundreds of farmer seed producers to Doyogena, a scenic highland village in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNP). The visitors form a bustling line to collect more than $90 each – on average – in profits from representatives of the Zereta Kembata Seed Multiplication and Marketing Union.
Ethiopian farmer seed producers collect payment at the Zereta Kembata Seed Multiplication and Marketing Union facility, in Doyogena. Photo: CIMMYT/A. Habtamu
“The union receives seed grown by more than 1,100 farmers, several hundred of whom are women, belonging to 8 farmer cooperatives,” said Yosief Balewold, general manager of the union.
With help from Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency, Zereta Kembata began in 2016 to collect, clean, pack, and sell seed of wheat, potato, sorghum, and faba bean. “This year we marketed nearly 27 tons of the new, disease resistant wheat seed; that’s enough to sow around 270 hectares of the crop.”
Pitted against a yearly onslaught of fast-evolving fungal diseases that can infect as much as $200 million worth of the crops they are growing, more than 75,000 small-scale wheat farmers in Ethiopia’s 4 major wheat-growing regions will have gained access by late 2017 to a vital asset—over 400 tons of new, disease resistant wheat varieties of wheat seed, much of it produced by other farmers.
Marketed in tandem with science-based recommendations for growing wheat, the annual seed supply has steadily increased since 2014 through the Wheat Seed Scaling Initiative, led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“We’re energizing and diversifying Ethiopia’s wheat seed sector, partly by involving and benefitting both formal and farmer seed producers, including women and men,” said Bekele Abeyo, a CIMMYT scientist who leads the project.
With money from union shares purchased by farmer cooperatives and a regulatory 30 percent reinvestment of earnings, the union is building a large warehouse to store seed. In a smaller shack nearby sits a 0.75 ton steel seed cleaner donated by the Wheat Seed Scaling Initiative, which has been working with Zereta Kembata and other seed producers identified as outstanding by SNNP policymakers.
Abebe Abora, farmer in the Doyogena District of Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNP), has been a member of a seed production cooperative for four years. “Modern technology such as improved wheat varieties has made farming better for me than it was for my father,” he said. Photo: CIMMYT/A. Habtamu
“Ethiopia has seen a rapid rise in recent years of new and deadly strains of stem rust and yellow rust, wheat adversaries since biblical times that have lately mutated to overcome resistance genes bred into many modern wheat varieties,” said Ayele Badebo, a CIMMYT wheat pathologist based in Ethiopia. “Farmers must swiftly begin to sow a range of varieties bearing new resistance genes, but limited access to the seed has been a bottleneck.”
In addition to assisting government-managed seed producers and 4 seed companies, through the initiative CIMMYT supports 10 farmer unions that purchase, pack, and sell the seed grown by numerous farmer cooperatives, as well as 12 farmer seed production associations, including 5 women’s groups, who profit from growing and selling quality seed of the new varieties.
“The Seed Scaling Initiative gives wheat farmers 25-50 kilograms of wheat seed, based on land availability, to kick-start their seed production operation,” explained Terefe Fitta, manager of the Seed Scaling Initiative. “The farmers pay back the ‘loan’ at harvest with the same amount of seed, which is given to other prospective farmer seed producers, and so on.”
A critical innovation of the initiative has been to link farmer seed producers directly with sources of “early-generation” seed, principally state and federal researchers. “The project has also brought on board laboratories that monitor seed production and test harvested seed, certifying it for marketing,” said Badebo, citing those accomplishments as lasting legacies of the Initiative.
Women seize chance to advance
Recognizing the critical role of women in Ethiopian agriculture and rural communities, the Seed Scaling Initiative is supporting several women’s seed producer groups. An example is the Tembo Awtena Women’s Seed Producers Association, in Angacha District, SNNP.
Established in 2014, Tembo Awtena is the first women’s cooperative in the district. The group first tried to bake and sell bread but reformed in 2015 to produce seed, having heard that it was profitable from other farmer cooperatives.
Through the Seed Scaling Initiative, CIMMYT gave the association around two tons of seed to start and Ethiopia’s Southern Seed Enterprise purchased the entire first year of seed production at a 20 percent premium over market price because the quality was so good, according to Amarech Desta, Tembo Awtena chairwoman.
Amarech Desta (left), Tembo Awtena chairwoman, with fellow farmer and association member Desalech Ashamo. Photo: CIMMYT/A. Habtamu
“In 2016, with support from CIMMYT, we sold more than $7,400 worth of seed,” said Desta, adding that word of the association’s success had attracted 30 additional women farmers in 2017, bringing the total membership to 133.
Desalech Ashamo, an association member who is a single head of household, received nearly $300 for the seed she grew in 2017 and used the earnings to paint her house. “A big advantage is that all our seed is sold in one lot, rather than piecemeal, so we receive a lump sum that can be used for a significant household project.”
Desta explained that, despite Angacha being a very traditional community, men support women’s seed production activities. “My husband knows the benefits are for all and the men even help us with field activities.”
Tembo Awtena members are especially pleased at being one of the three women’s seed production groups in the Oromia and SNNP regions to receive seed threshers recently through the Seed Scaling Initiative. Association members had been threshing the wheat seed manually, a long and laborious process, according to Desta. “With the new machine we will be able thresh in one hour what would take us three days by hand,” she said.
The chairwoman also has plans for an office, a storage area, a milling machine, opening a shop to sell farm supplies, and gaining recognition and publicity to share their story with others who may benefit.
Power from valued partnerships
The success of the Wheat Seed Scaling Initiative depends on the commitment and contributions of diverse national and global partners, among them the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) and state and district level officials in the Amhara, Oromia, SNNP, and Tigray regions, which are home to 90 percent of Ethiopia’s nearly 5 million wheat farmers. Most of the varieties come from breeding lines of CIMMYT and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA); a number were developed through the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (formerly Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat) project, led by Cornell University and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) under their UKAid project.
Global climate change negotiators meet this week to tackle myriad issues, including how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and protect food and farming from worsening climate impacts.
But unheralded and behind COP23 headlines, governments, private companies, and scientists led by CGIAR are already developing and sharing life-saving innovations for farmers, particularly smallholders, who fight daily at the climate change frontlines.
Technology such as drought- and heat-tolerant maize, resistant crops and control practices to combat newly-emerging pests, insurance to recover from extreme or erratic weather, and more targeted use of nitrogen fertilizers are already being adopted in Africa and Asia to reduce agriculture’s footprint while improving farm resilience and productivity.
Click here to read a message by Elwyn Grainger-Jones, Executive Director, CGIAR System Organization, and Martin Kropff, Director General, CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) describing these efforts and issuing a wake-up call for world leaders.
CIMMYT wheat physiologist Matthew Reynolds presents a new proposal for expanding the wheat network to include other major food crops and speed farmers’ adoption of vital technologies. Photo: CIMMYT archives.
A little-known global research network founded 50 years ago and supported by diverse funders — including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia — has helped keep the daily bread of over 2.5 billion resource-poor consumers from disappearing under the onslaught of rising temperatures and virulent new crop disease strains, to mention a few threats. Nowadays, the International Wheat Improvement Network (IWIN) shares and tests as many as 1,000 breeding lines yearly at 700 field stations representing the world’s 12 major wheat-growing environments.
Now, a Financial Times editorial by CIMMYT wheat physiologist Matthew Reynolds presents a new proposal for expanding the wheat network to include other major food crops and speed farmers’ adoption of vital technologies that can end hunger and address climate change. The idea has the support of experts from leading funding and development agencies.
“If there is a production issue—say, drought or a serious pest or disease outbreak in a key wheat growing country—then wheat stocks may not be as accessible as recent, bearish headlines suggest,” Kaur Purewal added. “Bear in mind that the world’s number-one wheat producer, China, is not exporting surplus wheat at the moment, so China’s wheat won’t really be available for the markets.”
