Forging major change is never simple, but one of my top priorities upon taking the helm at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) as director general last year was to develop a new five-year institutional strategy. CIMMYT must continuously change in order to adapt to an increasingly complex world and address urgent agricultural challenges. Not only do almost 800 million go to bed hungry each night, but to cite just a few examples, this year severe drought in southern Africa exacerbated by an El Niño weather system took its toll on crops, deadly wheat blast disease emerged in South Asia for the first time and scientists ratcheted up the fight against virulent maize lethal necrosis disease.

To learn more about the CIMMYT work environment, I sent an email to our key donors and partners seeking answers to some simple questions: What is CIMMYT doing well? What can CIMMYT do better? What new areas of research or collaboration should we explore? I met with staff at headquarters near Mexico City and visited regional offices to get a well-rounded set of responses. The answers I received have become the basis for the new CIMMYT Strategic Plan 2017-2022: “Improving Livelihoods through Maize and Wheat Science.”

From crops to agri-food systems

The new strategy marks a shift in thinking of maize and wheat simply as crops, recognizing that they play a major role in agri-food systems in which they operate. Modern agriculture is increasingly diverse, complex and unpredictable and we need to look beyond science alone to understand the ecological, economic and social forces that are driving change in farming systems. The shift from commodity-based research to an integrated approach centering on agri-food systems is a critical change allowing our community to work more effectively to strengthen food security, reduce poverty and enhance human nutrition.

Contributing to international development goals

Simultaneously, as CIMMYT has been undergoing changes, the CGIAR system of agricultural research centers is also going through a transition. The aim is to improve efficiency, benefiting relationships with our global network of donors and partners. These changes build on past successes, articulating  an ambitious new direction known as the “CGIAR Strategy and Results Framework 2016-2030” We have gone through a process of refining our strategy to ensure alignment with the CGIAR strategy and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. The strategies emphasize the need to assign higher priority to reducing malnutrition, empowering female farmers, developing new public-private partnerships and sharing knowledge with partners and farmers.

A new strategic direction

The new strategy identifies four interlinked areas of work, each highlighting CIMMYT’s strengths: scientific excellence; impact through partnerships; capacity building and the “ONE CIMMYT” concept, which reflects efforts to synthesize both internal and external activities. To achieve scientific excellence we will further develop our practice of conducting research of the highest quality and create innovations that farmers can readily put to use. CIMMYT will steadily improve the scope and quality of partnerships to accelerate the adoption of technology. CIMMYT’s leadership of the CGIAR Research Programs on MAIZE and WHEAT and the Excellence in Breeding Platform, which will help modernize breeding programs in the developing world by providing access to cutting-edge tools, services, best practices, application-oriented training and practical advice.

These initiatives will form a key part of a new partnership strategy. By creating agricultural knowledge communities, CIMMYT develops capacity and empowers collaborators to help farmers advance to a more food-secure, sustainable future. Finally, “ONE CIMMYT” values have far reaching implications on the way we work, unifying teams and building a common understanding across regions.

Launching this strategy marks the beginning of an evolutionary way of working, which will continue over the next five years to 2022. Its successful implementation requires collaboration across disciplines and the involvement of our vast network of partners. As we move forward, I will continue to consult with key stakeholders to gather insights and assessments about how we can continue to create even more impact in farmers’ fields.

I hope that you will join us.

Martin Kropff is CIMMYT director general and Juergen Voegele is senior director World Bank’s Agriculture Global Practice.

What do a chapati, a matza, or couscous have in common? The answer is wheat, which is a source for one-fifth of the calories and protein consumed globally.

Yet, stable, assured funding for public research for this important food grain remains elusive.

For 45 years, world-class scientists from two research centers of CGIAR – the world’s only global research system that focuses on the crops of most importance to poor farmers in developing countries – have battled the odds to provide wheat and nourish the world’s growing population. Their innovations have helped to boost wheat yields, fight debilitating pests and ward off diseases, improving the lives of nearly 80 million poor farmers.

Wheat plays a big role in feeding the human family. Over 1.2 billion resource-poor consumers depend on wheat as a staple food.

Small Investment, big gains: Research for free public goods shows the way

A new report by the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat shows that for an annual investment of roughly $30 million, the benefits gained from wheat research are in the range of $2.2 billion to $3.1 billion each year, from 1994 to 2014. Put another way, for every $1 invested in wheat breeding, $73 to $103 were returned in direct benefits, helping producers and consumers alike. Surely these healthy numbers — which are conservative because they do not include benefits from traits other than yield — would whet the appetite of any hard-nosed economist or bean counter looking for a convincing return on investment.

Science products like improved wheat lines from CIMMYT, the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, and ICARDA, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas – both members of CGIAR – are freely available to all and keep the global wheat research enterprise humming. Each year CIMMYT alone distributes half a million packets of corn and wheat seed from its research to 346 partners in public and private breeding programs spread across 79 countries where these crops are mainstays of people’s diets.

Today, the rapid spread of wheat varieties adapted to diverse ecologies is one of agricultural science’s unsung success stories. Almost half the world’s wheat land is sown to varieties that come from research by CGIAR scientists and their global network of partners. Even as wheat-free diets are on the rise in industrialized countries – whether due to personal preference, or medical necessity such as celiac disease – it is increasingly clear that wheat will remain an important grain in the diets of millions of people living in emerging economies.

Food in a changing climate: The future is here

So what could possibly be wrong with the scenario painted above? After all, CIMMYT has been around for five decades, and public funding has kept the wheels of discovery science turning and delivering improved varieties of the food crops that farmers demand and consumers need.

The big outlier, our known unknown, is climate change. For every one degree Celsius increase in growing season temperatures, wheat production decreases by a whopping 6 percent.

To beat the heat, CIMMYT scientists are working to reshape the wheat plant for temperature extremes and other environmental factors. New goals include dramatically enhancing wheat’s use of sunlight and better understanding the internal signals whereby plants coordinate their activities and responses to dry conditions and high temperatures.

Food demand is projected to rise by 20 percent globally over the next 15 years with the largest increases in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and East Asia where the map of hunger, poverty and malnutrition has an overlay of environmental stress and extreme resource degradation.

Climate change is already playing havoc with the global food system.

In 2009, one-fifth of Mexico’s corn production was lost due to drought. In 2011, extreme weather events such as cyclones destroyed one-third of Sri Lanka’s rice crop, and badly damaged rice paddies in Madagascar, one of the world’s poorest countries. Two successive seasons of poor rainfall from El Niño have decimated Africa’s corn harvest and left millions facing hunger this year.

Looking to the future, rising food demand – driven inexorably by population, rapid urbanization and increasing global wealth – shows no sign of abating. To meet food needs by increasing productivity, cereal yields – not wheat alone – would need to increase at 3 percent a year, a number that is 40 percent higher than the 2.1 percent gains achieved from 2000 to 2013. Alas, plant breeders do not have the luxury of complacency. New varieties take more than a decade to develop, test, and deploy through national certification and seed marketing or distribution systems.

CGIAR crop scientists are rushing to meet the challenges. In a taste of the future, a team of topnotch scientists at CGIAR’s Lima-based International Potato Center and NASA will test growing potatoes under Martian conditions to demonstrate that hardy spuds can thrive in the harshest environments.

As the world’s policy makers begin to grapple with the interconnected nature of food, energy, water and peace, every dollar invested in improving global food and nutrition security is an investment in the future of humanity.

To develop crops, livestock, fish and trees that are more productive and resilient and have a lower environmental signature, CGIAR is calling for an increase in its war chest to reach $1.35 billion by 2020. Is anybody listening?

One of the strongest El Niños on record is underway, threatening millions of agricultural livelihoods – and lives.

At least ten million people in the developing world are facing hunger due to droughts and erratic rainfall as global temperatures reach new records coupled with the onset of a powerful El Niño – the climate phenomenon that develops in the tropical Pacific and brings extreme weather across the world. Warmer than usual waters in the Pacific have made this year’s El Niño a contender for the strongest on record, currently held by the 1997 El Niño, which caused over $35 billion in global economic losses and claimed an estimated 23,000 lives. These extreme El Niños are twice as likely to occur due to climate change, according to a letter published in Nature magazine by researchers at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

Who is most at risk?

Nearly 40 million people will be in need of emergency food assistance this year – a 30 percent increase over previous estimates – due in large part to added stress from El Niño, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

This El Niño has resulted in severe drought throughout Central America, the Caribbean and Ethiopia, and is predicted to lead to flooding in the Horn of Africa and drought in southern Africa in the coming months. It has also disrupted the Indian monsoon and led to drier conditions in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, which has resulted in devastating wildfires across the country.

The El Niño phenomenon is often followed by a transition to La Niña, another driver of global weather patterns. If this were to happen again, it would mean more severe drought in the eastern Horn of Africa, and hurt crops like sugar, palm oil, and rice in Asia.

Responding to and mitigating El Niño’s effects

Ensuring farmers are equipped with climate resilient varieties that can withstand extreme stresses such as drought or waterlogging is an essential measure to counteract the side effects of El Niño. For example, after planting a drought tolerant maize variety developed by CIMMYT, farmers in Tanzania produced nearly 50 percent more grain than they normally would under the same conditions using other commercial varieties. In South Asia, CIMMYT has developed maize varieties that are tolerant to waterlogging and provide a safety net in years with heavy rains or flooding.

Equipping farmers with good agronomic practices and tools to reap the benefits of these crops is equally important. Ensuring farmers adjust planting times is critical for crops to adapt to changing weather patterns, while smart water management practices such as no-till farming can help raise wheat yields while reducing water and fuel costs. Precision land levelers – machines that level fields so water flows evenly into soil, rather than running off or collecting in uneven land – have enabled farmers in South Asia to save up to 30 percent more water, use less fertilizer and produce more grain yield.

Crop-index insurance is another tool that can serve as both a preventive and responsive measure to support smallholders during natural disasters. It allows farmers to purchase coverage based on an index that is correlated with those losses, such as average yield losses over a larger area or a well-defined climate risk – like drought – that significantly influences crop yields. If implemented correctly, index insurance can build resilience for smallholder farmers not only by ensuring a payout in the event of climate shocks like those caused by El Niño, but also by giving farmers the incentive to invest in new technology and inputs, such as seed.

So – are we prepared for this storm? Since 2003, nearly one-quarter of all damage and losses from climate-related disasters have occurred in the agricultural sector in developing countries. While global food security will likely not suffer another shock like that of 2007-08, primarily because global stocks of maize, wheat and rice are so large, natural disasters resulting from El Niño combined with climate change are playing out into unchartered territory, posing a real threat to people’s lives and livelihoods.

This isn’t the time to be complacent. We need to take preventive measures, and long-term investments in agricultural research will help us be prepared for future shocks and ensure crops and livelihoods can withstand more frequent natural disasters.

Since joining CIMMYT in June 2015, I’ve had the opportunity to learn first-hand the impact of its work around the world, and the appreciation for our work among our peers, partners, and friends.

For example, in China, three decades of partnership with CIMMYT have added $ 3.4 billion to wheat output, and Australia, a donor country, has benefited to the tune of A$ 30 million per year on an in-vestment in CIMMYT of just A$ 1 million. A recent study found that around $33 million invested in CGIAR wheat breeding yields $2-5 billion worldwide. When the devastating maize lethal necrosis disease broke out in eastern Africa in 2011, CIMMYT led a response to get resistant varieties in farmers’ fields within just four years.

Even from such few examples, it is clear that wherever CIMMYT is involved, we have a valuable and unique contribution to make.

There are many challenges to be addressed in the world, from insecurity and population movements to our changing climate. Fundamental to most is the issue of how we practice agriculture to sustainably feed the world, and maize and wheat rank among the most important crops for food security, responsible for 25% of global protein and calorie consumption. What is needed is sustained and increased investment in agricultural research, and organizations such as CIMMYT and its partners to carry it out.

The recently-adopted sustainable development goals respond to this need. Among them are the objectives of ending malnutrition by 2030, doubling the productivity and incomes of small-scale producers, especially women, introducing sustainable and resilient agricultural practices, and ensuring access to the world’s treasure of genetic diversity.

There is a clear consensus between CIMMYT’s work and global priorities identified at the highest level; the question is how we can use our partnerships to effectively mobilize resources in pursuit of these goals.

Traditional donors are rightly concerned about aid dependency, leading a call to move from aid to trade. In practice, this means working more closely with the agrifood sector to ensure that consumers always enjoy access to affordable, appropriate, safe, and nutritious food.
Another answer is that many of the poor no longer live in poor countries. Emerging economies are increasingly important partners in their own development, and in the development of other nations in similar circumstances.

Finally, there is always value in greater coordination and collaboration with new partners. Many development NGOs make extensive use of agricultural research, but too few are closely involved in it.

Agricultural research must be responsive to the needs of society, and can only be scaled out and sus-tained by governments, the private sector, and NGOs. Nonetheless, core funding for agricultural research is essential to the impacts it generates. Funding organizations themselves enable the employment of the brightest minds, development of effective institutional capacities, and the flexibility to engage in overlooked but essential research priorities.

In 2016, CIMMYT will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Fifty years of impact felt in farmers’ fields around the world, of continually expanding our research portfolio and collaboration with partners so that, to-day, CIMMYT is more prepared than ever before to respond to global needs. But it is not enough. New business models, strategies, and partnerships are needed for agricultural research to fulfill its promise to the world. The upcoming CIMMYT strategy for 2016-2030 will set out a framework for our future.