During 01-05 March 2010, several board members of the new Consortium of the CGIAR Centers traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, for their inaugural board meeting. Those in attendance included Carlos Perez del Castillo, Lynn Haight, Ganesan Balachander, Tom Arnold, and Mohamad Ait Kadi. After the main meeting on 01 March, members had the chance to visit and interact with several CGIAR partners and programs and to see first-hand how they are collaborating for positive change in Africa and other developing areas.

On 02 March, Carlos Perez del Castillo, chair of the Consortium Board of the CGIAR, thanked the Kenyan government for its interest in hosting the Consortium. The board is planning to relocate to a new home base, and Nairobi is one of five cities in consideration (the others being Addis Ababa, Montpellier, New Delhi, and Rome). That night also included a cocktail hosted by the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), during which del Castillo met with Mwangi Thuita and Romano Kiome, Kenya’s permanent secretaries of Foreign Affairs and Agriculture, respectively.

For the next three days, members traveled to various CGIAR facilities. On 03 March, del Castillo and Haight toured the ICRAF and then met with representatives from ICRAF and hosted institutions. Meanwhile, Balachander and Arnold toured the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) Biotechnology Center in Nairobi. Then, on 05 March, del Castillo and Balachander visited KARI’s Kiboko center. There they saw some of CIMMYT and KARI’s collaborative maize research on drought, insect resistance, and low soil fertility. The team also visited the tropical legume trial sites that are jointly run by KARI and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).

“What has impressed me most is the spirit of partnership that I have experienced – partnerships with farmers, national agricultural research systems, financial institutions, and CGIAR centers,” del Castillo said. “The new CGIAR will be about collective action, innovation, synergies, and impacts on the ground to tackle the problems of food insecurity, poverty, and climate change.”

At Kiboko, the consortium team interacted with the director of KARI, Ephraim Mukisira, and several CIMMYT members. Joint work on conventional and transgenic maize trials were highlighted during the visit. Other important conversations included private-public partnerships, impacts in sub-Saharan Africa, intellectual property, climate change, and information and seed dissemination.

“The facility development and research activities at this Kiboko center have been possible because of KARI’s partnerships and collaboration with the CGIAR, especially CIMMYT,” Mukisira said. “We have also benefited by jointly generating many maize varieties and developing our scientists’ capacity through CIMMYT’s training programs.”

Special thanks to our CIMMYT team members for making the visit a success: Wilfred Mwangi, Stephen Mugo, Yoseph Beyene, Dan Makumbi, Tadele Tefera, and Anne Wangalachi.

Monday 08 March is International Women’s Day (IWD). On this date, the global community takes a moment to celebrate the economic, political, and social advances women have made worldwide. It also provides an opportunity to address gender issues that are not yet fully resolved.

IWD is an official holiday in more than 15 countries and is informally celebrated in many more.  Various organizations take the day as an opportunity to increase awareness of human rights issues. This year, for example, the International Committee of the Red Cross is focusing on women who have been displaced by armed conflicts; while the United Nations’ theme is “Equal rights, equal opportunities: Progress for all.”

CIMMYT is proud of its numerous women scientists—a profession in which women are still often underrepresented—as well as its female staff and colleagues. We invite you to read our article on women in the CGIAR and to investigate what IWD events are happening near you.

They infiltrate our food supply through staple crops and lay waste to unsuspecting consumers. Dubbed the invisible enemy, aflatoxin is one of the most potent naturally-occurring toxins. It is produced by fungi belonging to the genus Aspergillus, and is a damaging type of mycotoxin. To better protect the food supply from this threat, during 01-13 February 2010, CIMMYT-El Batán hosted a workshop on mycotoxin detection in maize for members of its maize and wheat pathology teams.

The course, led by Veera Reddy of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), focused on implementing the ELISA technique to identify resistant genotypes that result in reduced mycotoxins in grain. Though several tools for assaying mycotoxins in grain exist, the ELISA technique is cheaper than other options and allows large samples to be tested.

Breeding maize resistant to mycotoxins, specifically aflatoxins and fumonisins, is vital for ensuring a safe food supply. Both are wide-spread in nature, thrive in humid conditions, and frequently inhabit fields of cereal crops, such as maize. Mycotoxins in general are extremely resilient and once grain is contaminated, which can happen in the field and during storage, they prevail through digestion, cooking, and freezing. In this way, mycotoxins can reach humans not only through grain, but also through milk or meat from livestock raised on infected feed. And once consumed by humans, mycotoxins can cause cancer, liver disorder, birth defects, weakened immune systems, and even death.

The objective of the course was to implement at CIMMYT the ELISA assay for routine screening of maize in order to detect sources of resistance and make progress in the management of mycotoxin contamination. Participants agreed that the course presented valuable information and that they are now ready to apply the ELISA technique.

“We needed a cheap, simple, and robust assay that could be used to test large numbers of samples and could easily be implemented in our breeding program,” said George Mahuku, senior maize scientist/ pathologist. “We are very happy that through this course we were able to achieve our objectives and now the pathology group is motivated and ready to go.”

Peter Walker, who worked at CIMMYT from 1975 to 1980, died at his home in Mexico City on 17 November 2009 after a short illness. He was 77.

During his time at CIMMYT, Walker set up and managed the Statistical Services Unit, using a DG Nova 3 computer to analyze the results of large sets of international cooperative breeders’ trials, initially for maize and later for wheat, durum, barley, and triticale. In addition to managing the unit, he also worked with programming and statistics.

Walker was born in Leeds, England, in 1932. He studied mathematics and statistics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and began a long and varied career in tropical biometrics in 1960 in Nigeria. He came to CIMMYT following work as an overseas liaison officer at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in the UK. After leaving CIMMYT, his subsequent career took him to Syria, Zimbabwe, back to Nigeria, and finally to Sri Lanka.

He retired in 1994 to live in Mexico. Walker is survived by his wife Nydia, as well as by two sons, two daughters, and five grandchildren.

The CIMMYT community welcomes its new Global Maize Program Director, Boddupalli M. Prasanna, who will join us on 10 March and will be based in Nairobi, Kenya. A native of India, Prasanna holds a M.Sc. (1987) and Ph.D. (1991) in genetics from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI). In 1991 he took up a scientist appointment at IARI and, since 2005, has worked there as a National Fellow & Principal Scientist of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). During 1998-2005, Prasanna served as the India team leader for the Asian Maize Biotechnology Network (AMBIONET), a CIMMYT-facilitated project to foster the use of molecular markers for maize improvement.

A diverse group of farmers, researchers, farm machinery experts, and private and public sector representatives gathered in the Yaqui Valley of Sonora, Mexico, on 18 January 2010 to discuss conservation agriculture (CA), with a focus on CA hub activities for irrigated systems in the Pacific zone of Mexico.

“To be able to implement CA, you have to be a real farmer and be totally immersed in the system,” said Mayo Félix, a local farmer who hosts a CA plot on his land. Félix, who has extensive experience with CA, spoke to farmers from the states of Sonora and Sinaloa about the advantages of the system, and also about the problems that may arise and how to solve them.

Another innovative CA leader, Mexican farmer Román Portela, spoke of the relevance of CA for improving sustainability and crop competitiveness, as well as the importance of incorporating other new technologies, such as the GreenSeeker sensor. GreenSeeker allows farmers to apply just the right amount of nitrogen to the crop, a process that was further explained Iván Ortiz-Monasterio, fertilization expert.

In addition to Mexican-based CA users—and those interested in adopting CA practices—the event included several agronomy experts from other countries. Enamul Haque, an agronomist based in Bangladesh, talked about the good results they’ve had with bed planting in different Asian countries and expressed his appreciation for Mexico’s support, which has enabled him to bring CA to farmers in his country. Ravi Gopal, Indian hub manager for the Cereal System Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), gave a presentation on weed control in the CA system.

Bram Govaerts, a CA specialist who has extensive experience with CA in Mexico and in other parts of the world, also shared his experiences. “To get the system off to a good start, beds must be evenly spaced, you must have good furrows and effective land leveling, because, once formed, the beds will never be moved. All this will avoid problems later on.”

The event was proof that CA is a platform for achieving sustainable agriculture that can be combined with other technologies and agronomic practices, and that together they can produce an efficient and functional system.