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Rain can’t stop Obregón sports day!

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A ‘Sports Day’ organized by Ciudad ObregĂłn staff originally for 24 November got rained out, but the re-scheduled 26 November event involved 150 people and was a huge success! Starting at 2 pm, there was a rapid, round-robin volleyball tournament in which the AgronomĂ­a team came out on top, over three other worthy competitors (CientĂ­ficos, Nutrientes, and Combinados). In the play-offs for baseball, an extremely popular sport in northern Mexico, the Yaquis team dominated its opponent, winning 6-0. In a novelty event, station staff members Colin Warner and JesĂșs MacĂ­as tried to see who could ride longest and best on a mechanical bull; Colin had the best time, and JesĂșs was awarded special recognition for his four brave attempts to mount. The dinner following the competitions brought together in celebratory mode staff of all levels and programs. I would like to congratulate and thank all participants, and especially the organizers, without whose support the event would not have been so enjoyable or exciting.

Reaching maize farmers with improved varieties better through the value chain approach

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Jonathan Hellin, poverty specialist in the Impacts Targeting and Assessment Unit, was in Kenya over the past two weeks catching up with CIMMYT-Kenya colleagues and meeting senior economists and students from the University of Nairobi. This was in preparation for next year’s activities on his collaborative maize value chain research work. Funded by BMZ, the work builds on previous contributions by CIMMYT and its partners in meeting the needs of resource-poor farmers in stress-prone environments by making improved maize varieties more widely available.

A review mission concluded that work by CIMMYT and partners can serve as “
a model for multi-stakeholder regional R&D collaboration and enhanced researcher-extension-farmer-market linkages”. The mission suggested a continuation of the research but recommended that more emphasis be given to the availability and dissemination of varieties and technologies to the smallholder farmers in eastern and Central Africa. The current phase includes a value chain analysis of the seed input chains.

Learning from the wise: Jonathan Hellin in a work planning session with Alpha Diallo, maize breeder, in Nairobi, Kenya

2007 CGIAR awards for CIMMYT and partners

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The CGIAR honored the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS) and the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Science with the 2007 Award for Outstanding Agricultural Technology in the Asia-Pacific Region, for their work with CIMMYT to develop high-yielding wheat varieties with high-quality grain for Chinese food products.

Three wheat cultivars from this work were sown on more than eight million hectares in China from 2002 to 2006, adding 2.4 million tons of grain to Chinese wheat production. China and CIMMYT partnerships go back three decades and around four million hectares in China are sown to varieties that carry CIMMYT wheat in their pedigrees.

CIMMYT Maize Nutrition Quality Specialist, Natalia Palacios, was also honored by the CGIAR, receiving the 2007 Promising Young Scientist Award. The award cites Palacios’ contributions to the development of nutritious and micronutrientdense maize for farmers in tropical areas. Among other things, Palacios was influential in developing and implementing new approaches to test for grain quality traits, such as provitamins A and protein quality, that will ultimately speed breeding for those and other characteristics. Both awards were given at the 2007 CGIAR annual general meetings in Beijing, China, where during 3-7 December more than 1,000 participants, including several CIMMYT directing staff and scientists, discussed how agricultural research and technology and food policy initiatives can more effectively address critical global agricultural challenges, bringing the benefits of agricultural research more quickly to poor farmers in developing countries.

CAAS-China and CIMMYT renew and strengthen partnership

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Building on a long, fruitful partnership, on 04 December 2007 in Beijing the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS) and CIMMYT signed an agreement for a new, three-year, collaborative wheat breeding program. The chief aim is to develop new cultivars with resistance to stem rust and other diseases, as well as adaptation to climate change, particularly tolerance to heat and drought. According to the agreement, participants will draw upon modern methods such as genomics, marker-assisted selection, and informatics systems. Efforts will focus in part on developing varieties that resist Ug99, a deadly new strain of stem rust that is virulent for most current wheat cultivars and appears to be moving steadily from its point of original sighting, in eastern Africa, toward the major wheat farming areas of the Middle East and South Asia.

 

TlaltizapĂĄn Superintendent named

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Global Wheat Program agronomist Oscar Bañuelos Tavårez has accepted an appointment as Superintendent of CIMMYT research station at Tlaltizapån, Mexico, effective as of January 2008. Mexican native Bañuelos has worked in CIMMYT since 1994. Congratulations and best of luck, Oscar!

CIMMYT-Zimbabwe celebrated its year end party – and still going strong!

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The team also elected CIMMYT’s tallest and smallest staff while Martin Van Weerdenburg, Director for Corporate Services, was visiting the CIMMYT-Zimbabwe station. The party included staff from CIMMYT, CIAT and CIFOR and everybody enjoyed an excellent meal, great mood and a torrential rain – mostly above the leaking roof. In spite of the trying circumstances in Zimbabwe, the entire team proved their continued commitment and imagination to cope and succeed under the circumstances. Four NRS were recognized for their long years of service and dedication and received certificates.

Is time on our side?

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During 20-21 November, 16 CIMMYT staff from diverse areas took time out from their busy year-end schedules to attend the workshop “Time Management and Organizing Skills,” offered by the company Performance Training Solutions. Comprising lectures, interactive discussions, and hands-on exercises, the workshop provided strategies, tools, and tips to help the participants get time on their side to improve the way they work and live. “You can’t manage or control time,” explained instructor Harry Peasley, “but you can manage yourself in relation to time, and control how you use it.” One key approach Peasley promotes is using a weekly calendar to order one’s work life. “A lot of effective time management consists of changing bad habits, which tend to be like a comfortable bed: easy to get into, but hard to get out of!”

The magic of CIMMYT: its people…live from Zimbabwe!

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Anne Wangalachi conveys heartfelt thanks to the CIMMYT-Zimbabwe team for sharing their time, experience, and expertise with her during her three-day visit this week. Wangalachi, a science writer and editor, was on a mission to orient herself about Zimbabwe operations in the region.

She said the team shows enthusiasm, dedication, competence and professionalism for both simple and complex aspects of their work. From variety development to seed shipment; leaf hopper multiplication; conservation agriculture and soil fertility management, to coordinating operations—all components seem to run like clockwork. “One feels right at home, regardless of where one is based within CIMMYT,” says Wangalachi.

A hearty Asanteni sana (thank you very much) goes to you all at CIMMYT-Zimbabwe!

Communicating agricultural biotechnology—back to basics

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This Wednesday, CIMMYT was represented at a Monsanto-sponsored informal media exchange dinner at Nairobi’s Norfolk Hotel for Kenyan and visiting South African journalists. The participants shared their respective experiences, challenges, and opportunities in reporting on developments in agricultural biotechnology over the years. While appreciating that much more needs to be done in Kenya, it emerged that fostering farmer-to-farmer technology transfers; working with agricultural biotechnology experts, and rewarding agricultural science journalists would greatly enhance developments in this area.

Other noteworthy recommendations were devising indigenous, low cost, and home-grown strategies for communicating developments to key end-users—the farmers themselves; likened to the age-old African custom of having discussions “around the fire.” The power of effective communication about innovations in science and technology, including agricultural biotechnology, is crucial to socioeconomic development for food and livelihood security and should be applied effectively in Africa.

Raun named OSU Sarkeys Distinguished Professor

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Former CIMMYT wheat agronomist (1986-91) Bill Raun has been named the 2007 recipient of the Sarkeys Distinguished Professor Award by the Oklahoma State University (OSU) Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources. The Sarkeys award is based on outstanding contributions to agriculture through teaching, research or extension efforts. The award was established by the Sarkeys Foundation in 1980 to honor Elmo Baumann, an agronomist who worked with the foundation after his retirement from OSU. Raun was named a Fellow of the Soil Science of America and American Society of Agronomy and has received many prestigious honors, including the ASA Werner L. Nelson Award, the Robert E. Wagner Award, the OSU Regents Distinguished Research Award and the OSU James A. Whatley Award for Meritorious Service in Agricultural Sciences.

Call of duty from CG Alliance for Rodomiro Ortiz

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CIMMYT’s Director of Resource Mobilization, Rodomiro Ortiz, has been elected by peers as Chair of the CGIAR Alliance Deputy Executive (ADE). The ADE deals with common, cross-center issues of research strategy, implementation and quality, as well as financial, audit and administrative compliance with the CGIAR system demands. Ortiz will serve for one year, beginning in January 2.

Work on transgenic drought tolerance

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Takashi Kumashiro (Director, Biological Resources Division) and Kazuo Nakashima (Senior Scientist, Biotechnology Lab of Dr. Yamaguchi-Shinozaki) from the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS) visited CIMMYT during 29-30th November for the first mid-year year review meeting of a new five year project funded by the Japanese Ministry of Fisheries and Food (MAFF).

The project is the second phase of a JIRCAS-CGIAR collaborative initiative to develop transgenic drought tolerance in a range of tropical staple crops—an initiative launched by Masa Iwanaga when he was Director of the Biological Resources Division of JIRCAS. The current project involves the use of a second generation of drought responsive elements (DREB genes) generated by JIRCAS scientists and other transgenes (especially transcription factors) generated by the Gene Discovery Research Team of the Plant Science Center of the RIKEN Yokohama Institute. Led by GREU director Jonathan Crouch, the current project is a joint wheat and rice initiative through collaborations between CIMMYT, CIAT and IRRI.

Wheat phenome atlas meetings at CIMMYT

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Wheat scientists met at CIMMYT El Batán to discuss the wheat phenome pilot project on 12 and 13 November 2007. CIMMYT and the University of Queensland have been working together to develop a “wheat phenome atlas” (WPA) since 2006.

“The WPA will be a freely-available online tool for wheat scientists. It will describe which parts of the genome influence the inheritance of all economically-important traits,” says Ian Godwin, molecular geneticist from the University of Queensland. Breeders will be able to go online for detailed information on a small piece of DNA sequence that affects resistance to leaf rust, for example. “This technology could also be applied to other crops such as maize and rice,” adds Godwin. Information for the WPA is obtained through advanced statistical analyses of decades of yield trials and recent data from molecular markers. CIMMYT has 40 years of data from field experiments, and has stored the seeds from these trials in the germplasm bank. Scientists can thus link data from yield trials with genetic analysis of seeds from the trials.

“The WPA will be accessible to anyone in the international wheat community, making the process of developing cultivars faster, cheaper, and more efficient,” says Hans-Joachim Braun, Head of the Global Wheat Program. A basic version of the WPA should be up and running by late 2008, says Godwin.

Left to right: Ian Godwin, Ian de Lacy, Christopher Lambrides (back), and Kaye Basford (all from the Universify of Queensland, Australia).

Visit of Slovakian Minister

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Miroslav Jurena, Minister of Agriculture of the Slovak Republic, spent the day at El Batán on 15 November 2007 to learn about wheat research and related work in crop genetic resources and biotechnology. There will be follow-up communication with the Ministry to establish stronger links with CIMMYT, through the center’s office in Turkey.

Ohio State University honors Kevin Pixley

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On 16 October 2007, CIMMYT maize breeder and assistant director of the center’s global maize program, Kevin Pixley, was given the G.H. Stringfield Award from Ohio State University, USA, in recognition of “his outstanding contributions to the science of maize breeding and genetics.” The award was made on behalf of the OSU Department of Horticulture and Crop Science and the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center. “Stringfield was arguably the most important maize breeder in Ohio history,” says Pixley, who is only the second person to receive the award. “He was instrumental in early hybrid research and in leading the transition from OPVs to hybrids in Ohio.”