Like many scientists at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) who grew up in smallholder farm households, Dagne Wegary draws inspiration from recollections of adversity and has found in science a way to make things better.

“I saw how my community struggled with traditional crop and livestock husbandry and, at an early age, started to wonder if there was a science or technology that might ease those hurdles,” Wegary said, referring to his childhood in a village in Wollega, a western Ethiopian province bordering South Sudan.

“I chose to study and work in agriculture,” Wegary explains. “Even though the farming system in my home village has not changed significantly, I am happy that the community is now among Ethiopia’s top maize producers and users of improved seed and other agricultural inputs.”

As a maize seed system specialist, Wegary works at the nexus between breeding science and actual delivery of improved seed to farmers. He interacts regularly with diverse experts, including CIMMYT and Ethiopia’s breeders and members of the national ministries of agriculture, the Ethiopia Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), non-governmental organizations including Sasakawa Global-2000 and World Vision, and especially public, private or community-based seed producers.

Quality seed is farmers’ principal means to improve productivity and secure food, according to Wegary, who calls it “the carrier of complementary production technologies, which in combination with improved agronomy can significantly increase crop yields.”

“I am most happy with Ethiopia’s increased maize productivity and self-sufficiency, which is due partly to the use of improved technologies to which we all contribute,” he said, noting that maize grain yields in Ethiopia had more than doubled since the 1990s, reaching 3.7 tons per hectare in 2016, a level second only to that of South Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa.

According to Wegary, these improvements are the result of strong government support for maize research and development, along with the strong partnership between CIMMYT and the national program that has led to the release of high-yielding, stress tolerant and nutritionally-enriched maize varieties. He said that farmers’ have also increased their use of improved technologies and that public, private and community-based companies now market seed.

“Supplying seed used to be highly-centralized, but farmers’ main sources of seed now are cooperatives that buy from seed companies or companies that market directly to farmers” Wegary explained. “Many companies have their own stockists and dealers who directly interact with farmers.”

Before joining CIMMYT, as a scientist with the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), Wegary helped to implement a number of CIMMYT-led projects. “These allowed me to know CIMMYT very well and sparked my interest in joining the Center and working with its high-caliber and exemplary scientists.”

A plant breeder by training with a doctoral degree in breeding from the University of the Free State, South Africa, soon after joining CIMMYT Wegary began to contribute to projects to develop and disseminate seed of improved maize varieties with high levels of drought tolerance and enhanced protein quality.

He has been involved since the early 2000s in promoting quality protein maize (QPM). The grain of QPM features enhanced levels of lysine and tryptophan, amino acids that are essential for humans and certain farm animals. Wegary took part in a CIMMYT project that supported the release of five new QPM varieties.

“Many companies are now producing and marketing QPM in Ethiopia,” Wegary said. A 2009 study in the science journal Food Policy found that eating QPM instead of conventional maize resulted in 12 and 9 percent increases in growth rates for weight and height, respectively, in infants and young children with mild-to-moderate undernutrition and where maize constituted the major staple food.

Wegary believes sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest challenges include climate change-induced heat and drought, natural resource depletion, and pest and disease outbreaks, coupled with increasing populations. In combination these factors are significantly reducing food security and the availability of resources.

“I want to be a key player in the battle towards the realization of food and nutritional security, as well as the economic well-being of poor farmers, through sustainable and more productive maize farming systems.”

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Social inequality, including gender discrimination, hinders the potential for economic development, a key focus of the agriculture for development community.

Women in developing countries make up more than 40 percent of waged farmworkers, a percentage that is even higher if unwaged farm work is included, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Despite their significant representation in the sector, women often experience acute poverty due to unequal access to seeds, fertilizer, land and other agricultural necessities.

The challenges are great, but the aim of achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls everywhere by 2030 is entrenched in the international development framework by the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Spurred on by the SDGs, gender has become a key agricultural research and policy focus for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the CGIAR system research programs in recent years.

“Despite improvement, there are still several opportunities which could significantly decrease inequality between men and women,” said CIMMYT gender researcher Anya Umantseva. “Little data exists on gender roles in rural communities and most importantly, a systematic integration of social components like gender into scientific, data-based research could really help expand outcomes and impacts to more women as well as men.

“Women in rural communities often face very strict gender norms,” said Umantseva, referring to local women’s and men’s expected roles and behaviors. “What we’re trying to do is see how these norms influence the way men and women adopt agricultural innovations, and how adoption of different innovations affects gender norms across different communities.”

Umantseva is one of many researchers working on GENNOVATE – a global comparative research initiative, which addresses the question of how gender norms influence men, women and youth to adopt innovation in agriculture and natural resource management.

Gender norms include restricted access to land and financial resources, or even the social taboo of walking alone as a woman, can make it difficult to have equal access to agricultural trainings and other farming inputs, she explained.

Umantseva grew up in Yurga, Russia during the country’s economic transition to capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. “Witnessing the abrupt change of political-economic regimes, and the impact it had on society, shaped my interest in social sciences and anthropology,” she said. “I decided that I wanted to study how social norms and culture are historically constructed.”

“Gender in agricultural research for development is not an isolated topic; it is deeply intertwined with social inclusion of disadvantaged groups in general,” Umantseva said. “Gender is not just about men and women, but who these men and women are. Through GENNOVATE we want to go deep into their stories, their socio-economic status, religion, position in the family and more.”

Around 8,000 rural study participants of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds reflected on gender norms and how these social rules affect their ability to access, adapt and benefit from innovations in agricultural and natural resource management.

“GENNOVATE is the first attempt of this scale  providing this type of gender-based data for agricultural research for development initiatives,” said Umantseva. “But most importantly, we want to convince the research for development community  of the important opportunities, that insights from this kind of data, can bring. It might not always be easy to integrate gender into research, and may require us to do certain things a little differently, but it is necessary if we want to have inclusive development impact.”

Along with other researchers, Umantseva is analyzing GENNOVATE data to produce a series of reports, journal articles and other products so researchers and project managers can begin incorporating GENNOVATE’s findings into their work.

“Right now we’re looking at men and women who have successfully adopted agricultural innovations and what factors their success might have in common, and how men and women differ in adoption. We hope to produce a paper on these findings sometime this year,” said Umantseva.

Umantseva received her bachelor’s degree in linguistics and translation from Russia’s Tomsk State University. She then went on to pursue a master’s at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, where she studied minority policies, ethnic relations and gender norms.

Before she joined CIMMYT in 2016, she worked at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, focusing on human trafficking and migration.  She currently lives in Mexico City and is based at CIMMYT’s Headquarters in El Batan, outside Mexico City.

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – In Pakistan, maize is the third most important cereal crop after wheat and rice and it is the first in productivity among all the cereals. However, Pakistan imports about 90 percent of the hybrid seeds used to produce the crop, costing the country as much as $60 million annually. Furthermore, the genetic diversity of the currently available maize varieties is not diverse enough to adapt to the varied agro ecologies of Pakistan.

To address these issues, AbduRahman Beshir, maize improvement and seed systems specialist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), and his team, working under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Agricultural Innovation Program (AIP) for Pakistan, are developing climate-resilient, biofortified and biotic stress-tolerant maize to enhance the maize seed sector.

“Pakistan can be considered as a new frontier for CIMMYT’s maize impacts,” Beshir said. “Except for some limited maize activities in the early 1980s, there were no coordinated research activities in the past 32 years. I am glad to revitalize and breathe new life into Pakistan’s maize sector.”

Almost half of children under age 5 are reportedly malnourished, Beshir said, adding that protein, vitamin A, and other micronutrient deficiencies in Pakistan are rampant, while the mortality rate is among the highest in South Asia.

Beshir’s work targets these underprivileged groups and in the foreseeable future, he hopes to see nutritional benefits improve significantly.

Throughout his life, Beshir has witnessed how small scale farmers are often unable to fulfill their basic needs as they struggle to get fair market prices for produce, in part due to middlemen and a lack of information in the market.

He grew up in Ethiopia, a country where agriculture is the mainstay of the economy, accounting for 80 percent of employment, according to UNDP.  The livelihoods of Beshir’s grandparents and most of his relatives were dependent on agriculture, but his parents switched to a sideline business selling agricultural and food related products.

“I was brought up observing my parents’ entrepreneurial skills and efforts, but they wanted their children to pursue a career in science,” Beshir said, explaining how his parents encouraged him to attend university. “My father used to call me ‘doctor’ when I was a fourth grade pupil to inspire me in my education.”

Earning an undergraduate degree in agriculture and plant sciences was a life changing experience for Beshir, serving as an eye opener to the dire need for educated agricultural professionals to transform the livelihoods of rural farmers.

“Since then, I developed a passion on how to increase profits for rural farmers through technology promotion and targeted intervention.”

Beshir earned a Ph.D. in plant breeding from the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, in South Africa, and was awarded a gold medal for his research project highlighting the severity of malnutrition in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and the ways quality protein maize seeks to address the issue.

Before joining CIMMYT in 2013, Beshir was the national partner in Ethiopia for a CIMMYT-led project on quality protein maize development and drought-tolerant maize for Africa.

“My involvement in these projects gave me a good grasp of how CIMMYT’s impact-oriented interventions practically change the life of farmers and brought a maize revolution in my country, in partnership with local institutions,” he said.

His current work in Pakistan mainly involves extensive testing of various maize products sourced from CIMMYT breeding hubs in Colombia, Mexico, Zimbabwe and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). Since 2014, more than 2,200 maize entries have been tested through the project.

Test samples consist of biofortified maize, as well as maize varieties that can tolerate major biotic and abiotic stresses, and they have been evaluated on more than 300 different sites in Pakistan. Such large scale testing is unprecedented in the history of maize in Pakistan.

Beshir’s led efforts resulted in the allocation of 49 market ready maize products (hybrids and OPVs) to partners in less than three years, a process that would otherwise have taken eight to 10 years to develop even a single product. The allocation of the new maize products has also given partners access to CIMMYT’s parental lines and breeder seeds, so that they can continue to lead sustainable seed businesses even after the project ends.

“Our intervention is the first program in Pakistan to introduce and identify biofortified maize, including pro-vitamin A, quality protein maize, and zinc-enriched hybrids/open pollinated varieties suitable for Pakistan,” Beshir said, adding that the research also led to the inauguration of the first maize stem borer mass rearing facility in Pakistan.

The facility will help national programs develop maize germplasm tolerant to maize stem borer attacks.

“As imported hybrid seeds are simply unaffordable to millions of small scale maize farmers, our research will enable local companies to provide affordable options to farmers,” he said.

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

MEXICO CITY (CIMMYT) – As a child helping out on his family’s farm in rural India, Vijay Chaikam dreamed of helping farmers increase the hard won returns of their agricultural labor to improve their livelihoods. Today, he works as a scientist and manager at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) doubled haploid (DH) facility in Kiboko, Kenya.

He produces DH maize lines, which are highly uniform, genetically pure and stable, making the maize breeding process more intuitive and efficient by simplifying logistics. The outcome of this work is that breeders can develop improved maize varieties faster than ever before so that they can be delivered to the smallholder farmers that need them the most.

“I grew up in a rural village in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, where my family depended on agriculture for their livelihood,” Chaikam said. “During my childhood, I used to work in the fields, planting, weeding and harvesting alongside my family members to save labor costs. I realized that despite their backbreaking work, most farming families suffer economically. This inspired me to pursue a career in agriculture that would allow me to contribute to reduce the efforts of the farmers and increase their farm income.”

After receiving his doctorate in genetics at West Virginia University in the United States, Chaikam worked at Purdue University and then moved to CIMMYT headquarters in Mexico in 2011 as an associate scientist. His work involved conducting research on developing and implementing maize DH production technology for tropical breeding programs.

In 2016, he moved to CIMMYT’s office in Kenya to manage the Maize DH Facility at KALRO-Kiboko Center, where he assists maize scientists from CIMMYT and partner organizations in the development of DH lines. The efficiency of the DH procedure in maize cuts the time it takes to develop parental lines from six to eight seasons to just two or three seasons.

“My work allows farmers to receive improved maize varieties much quicker,” Chaikam said. “Time is of the essence for farmers planting improved maize varieties in regions affected by stresses such as drought or maize lethal necrosis (MLN). DH technology can drastically cut short the time it takes to derive parental lines in a hybrid maize breeding program.”

CIMMYT’s work on DH has greatly expanded in the past few years. Between 2012 and 2016, CIMMYT scientists produced over 100,000 DH lines, up from less than 5,000 in 2011. However, adoption of the technology is lagging behind in tropical maize breeding programs due to the lack of adapted haploid inducers with high haploid induction rates. The haploid inducers enable generations of haploids – maize varieties containing only one set of chromosomes instead of the usual two sets of chromosomes found in normal diploid maize – at a high frequency. These haploids are then detected using a color marker on the kernel, and the chromosome complement is doubled artificially using treatment with a chromosome doubling agent to derive doubled haploid plants, and consequently seed from those plants.

Chaikam’s current research is aimed at improving the adoption of DH technology in tropical maize breeding programs by developing improved haploid inducers for tropical maize breeding programs, developing novel methods of haploid identification and efficient protocols for chromosomal doubling, and optimizing the agronomic management for deriving doubled haploids. He works closely with breeders to develop ways of using DH lines more efficiently in maize breeding programs. This research could be valuable in the development and deployment of improved maize varieties that benefit smallholder farmers in the developing world. In addition to his work in the DH facility, Chaikam has published several journal articles and book chapters. He has also coordinated scientific training courses.

“I always wanted my work to be relevant to the needs of farmers,” he said, explaining the factors that drew him to work at CIMMYT. “CIMMYT offered such an incredible opportunity, where my day-to-day activities have a direct impact on the development and deployment of improved maize varieties needed by farming communities. I also enjoy working with, talking to and listening to my passionate colleagues who love the work they do to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers.”

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – David Guerena is fascinated by what he learns from smallholder farmers about the interactions between agriculture and the environment.

He recently joined the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), where, as soil scientist-systems agronomist, he leads the soils/nutrient management activities for the Nepal Seed and Fertilizer Project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Feed the Future Program.

Guerena’s work involves the strategic planning and execution of multidisciplinary spatial agronomy programs across complex ecologies. In addition to strict biophysical work, which involves integrating chemistry, biology, and physics into agricultural systems, he also engages in socio-economic and market facilitation dynamics research.

“Humanity has been eking out a cultivated living from the earth for around 10,000 years,” Guerena said. “Smallholder farmers are the direct link to this collective knowledge, which has shaped and defined human history. I really enjoy witnessing farmers reap satisfying harvests from their own efforts, but via outputs from agronomic systems research of which I have been a part.”

“Agriculture is intensely satisfying. A seed, fertile soil, water and sunshine eventually turn into food. This is such a simple process, yet millions of people around the world don’t get enough to eat. I draw inspiration from being a part of positively changing this dynamic.”

Originally from Santa Barbara, California, Guerena has always been fascinated by the natural sciences and international travel. He decided to pursue a career in international agriculture by obtaining his Ph.D. from Cornell University, specializing in crop and soil science. Prior to joining CIMMYT, he worked as a soil scientist and agriculture innovations manager at One Acre Fund, served as an international research fellow with the World Agroforestry Center and a Borlaug Fellow in international food security.

CIMMYT provided a unique opportunity for Guerena to work on global food systems. “Together, maize and wheat make up a significant proportion of the global food supply – maize and wheat research is a globally important mandate,” he said. “CIMMYT has also left an indelible mark on human history through facilitating the Green Revolution.”

Currently, Guerena is working on spatial agronomy programs, focusing on questions such as how to move from blanketed to site-specific agronomic recommendations across complex agro-ecologies in the developing world. Guerena will also investigate how digital technologies like SMS, smartphones, image recognition, and remote sensing data can be used and integrated into agronomy programming for smallholder farmers living in poverty.

Precision agronomy, a farming management concept based on observing, measuring, and responding to inter- and intra-field variability in crops, is already transforming agricultural efficiency in the developed world, but these advancements have not yet reached the developing world.

This is of the utmost importance, as worldwide, the vast majority of farmers are smallholders producing most of the global food supply. CIMMYT is not only looking at ways to put its top-level science into the hands of farmers, but also at ways to use these technologies to turn farmers themselves into world-class agronomists. This approach may be a way to bypass cumbersome agricultural knowledge generation and dissemination systems and reach farmers directly, at scale.

The project receives support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Growing up on a small farm in India’s northwest Punjab state, Kanwarpal Dhugga was a young boy when the first Green Revolution wheat varieties arrived in his village. Now stationed in Mexico as Principal Scientist and head of biotechnology for agricultural development at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Dhugga has witnessed vast changes in his boyhood community.

“It was tight for families there, living from season to season with no extra money to spend,” Dhugga said, reflecting on the period during the 1960s before new high-yielding, disease resistant wheat varieties began to reshape agricultural potential throughout Asia. “Farmers used to plant a mixture of wheat and chickpeas.  If rains were good, you got good wheat yield; if there was a drought, you got at least chickpeas.”

The use by farmers of the new, high-yielding wheat varieties developed by the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, who was head of the wheat program at CIMMYT headquarters in Mexico, coincided with the introduction of electric power to Dhugga’s area.  Electricity enabled pumping underground water for irrigation, making farming more predictable. Within a couple of years, everyone was growing new, more resilient semi-dwarf wheat varieties and yields had increased substantially.

The community was poor and without many educational resources. Dhugga recalls sitting on the ground at elementary school in India and carrying his books in a satchel along with a burlap gunnysack, which he used as a mat to sit on. Despite challenges, his perseverance and determination eventually took him to Punjab Agricultural University, where he earned a master’s degree in plant breeding, then to the University of California, Riverside for a doctoral degree in botany and plant genetics, and finally for a post-graduate degree at Stanford University, where he worked directly with Peter Ray, renowned biologist and now a Stanford emeritus professor.

“I started in genetics and finished in biochemistry,” Dhugga explained. “Science grew on me and I became so fixated that I couldn’t live without it, and that after I had no clue growing up what I wanted to become in life. The vision extended only as far as the next year.”

From 1996 through 2014, he worked at DuPont-Pioneer, the multinational seed producer, where his work included leading research on expressing high-value industrial polymers in maize grains and soybean seeds, developing in-field screening tools to screen maize hybrids for stalk strength, improving nitrogen use efficiency in maize, and on developing a combined genetic marker x metabolites model for predicting maize grain yield, demonstrating that the combined model was more effective than genetic markers alone.

“I was a developer and supplier of advanced plant genetics for a company that was providing high-quality maize seed to farmers around the world, but I felt like something was missing – a social component,” Dhugga said.

Taking a job at CIMMYT, where the focus is on helping improve food security for poor smallholder farmers in the developing world, satisfied this urge, according to Dhugga. “It felt like completing a circle, given where I came from and the role of CIMMYT in improving farmers’ food security and incomes.”

At CIMMYT, he is leading work to apply a recent technology for what is commonly called “gene editing.” Known as the CRISPR-Cas9 system, it allows researchers to enhance or turn off the expression of “native” genes as well as modify the properties of the translated proteins in crops like maize or wheat more simply and effectively than with other methods, including transgenics.

“To deactivate a gene and thus learn about what it does used to be a major undertaking that took years, and even then you didn’t find some of the things you wanted to,” Dhugga explained. “With the new technology, you can find what you’re looking for in much less time. That’s the main focus of my work right now.”

CIMMYT is collaborating with DuPont-Pioneer to fine map, isolate and validate a major gene in maize for resistance to maize lethal necrosis, which appeared in sub-Saharan Africa in 2011 and has caused major losses to maize crops, decreasing food security and the ability of the smallholder farmers to provide for their families.

“We already know a locus that confers high levels of resistance against the combination of viruses that cause the disease,” he said. “Once we have the specific gene, we can edit it directly in elite maize lines used for hybrid production in Africa, eliminating the need for generations of expensive crosses to get uniform lines with that gene.”

Dhugga greatly respects living systems and, rather than viewing his work as inventing new methods, believes he is drawing out the best potential of nature.

“The biology for these processes is already there in nature; we just need to rediscover and apply it to benefit farmers and ensure food security,” he said.

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Akhter Ali always knew he wanted to have an impact on the livelihoods of farmers in Pakistan.

“I come from a farmer family – the poverty and inequality of rural communities always disturbed me,” said Ali, who was born in Multan district, Pakistan. “I knew from a young age I wanted to do something to help my community and the rural poor throughout my country.”

Ali, an agricultural economist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), is working to sustainably increase agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers through the Agricultural Innovation Program (AIP), an initiative funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to build up the country’s agriculture sector through the development and dissemination of new agriculture technologies.

“Agriculture supports nearly half of Pakistan’s population – more than two thirds for those living in rural areas –  and accounts for over 20 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product” Ali said. “Strengthening this sector by connecting and addressing the needs of different actors in rural markets is key to poverty reduction and achieving food security.”

Despite the significant role of agriculture to the economy, the sector has only grown 2.8 percent in recent years due to weak market structures, resource depletion and other challenges. Ali, along with other researchers, is analyzing how maize and wheat farmers can access the best seed, technology and practices to sustainably increase crop yields across the country.

“If we want to boost farmer livelihoods, we need to change how farmers work by ensuring they know how to sustainably manage their land, water and other resources,” Ali said. “We then need to ensure that the markets in which these farmers operate are stable so that they have easier access to agricultural inputs like seed.”

Ali’s research over the past four years at CIMMYT has focused on making these goals a reality, from conducting comprehensive surveys, which are expected to help develop the durum wheat market in Pakistan, to adoption and impact studies of such sustainable technology as zero tillage machines and precision land levelers, now used by thousands of farmers throughout Pakistan.

“There are 80,000 farmers – 20 percent of which are women, whose numbers are growing – working with AIP who have adopted these new, sustainable technologies,” said Ali. In the future, Ali hopes to see his work continue to be used as a tool by policy makers, extension workers and others.

“We still face challenges with farmer access to seed, from engaging women to market constraints, so it’s critical we create policies that facilitate sustainable development in rural communities,” Ali said.

Shifting trends in Pakistan from urbanization to climate change will make it even more necessary to understand how rural communities operate in the coming years, he said, adding that policies supporting its development will be key to feeding the country and alleviating rural poverty.