Former CIMMYT Wheat Program director, Tony Fischer, has won the 2007 Farrer Memorial Medal, an annual award established in 1911 to perpetuate the memory of famous Australian wheat rust researcher William Farrer and to encourage and inspire agricultural scientists.
In announcing the award, Farrer Memorial Trust Chairman Barry Buffier described Tony as the preeminent Australian crop physiologist of his generation. Tonyâs main interest throughout his carrier has been wheat yield under both dry and well-watered conditions, with the goal of applying physiological knowledge to wheat improvement through breeding and agronomy. He has published more than 120 scientific publications, including several papers drawing on data from his own property in southern NSW where he kept crop, soil and climatic records for more than 40 years.
Tony received his medal in August at a ceremony in Canberra held to coincide with the Crawford fund 2007 Conference. He then delivered the 2007 Farrer Memorial Oration.
CIMMYT Bangladesh held an opening ceremony for their new visitorsâ office at the Regional Wheat Center at the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) on 08 January 2008. Harun-or-Rashid, Director General of BARI, formally inaugurated the office, and Abu Sufian, Director of Research at BARI, attended the ceremony as a special guest.
The visitorsâ office will serve as a work space for visiting scientists and international collaborators. Other visitors to CIMMYT Bangladesh will still be received at the office in Banani, Dhaka. The new visitorsâ office is located at BARI-Gazipur and will house various documents, books, and publications. The building where the new office is located was built with money from CIMMYT and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and was given to BARI in 1984.
Long-time CIMMYT collaborator ABS Hossain, consultant and in-country coordinator for the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), and Enamul Haque, Senior Program Manager for CIMMYT Bangladesh, will be working in the new office space.
Md. Saifuzzaman, Principal Scientific Officer for the Wheat Research Center (WRC) at BARI, presided as chair of the opening ceremony. Directors, division heads, WRC scientists, the IRRI liaison scientist, and CIMMYT staff also attended the opening ceremony.
The Chinese National Wheat Quality Conference, jointly organized by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS), the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS), and CIMMYT, was held in Beijing on 13 to 14 December. The program covered market needs and quality improvement, biotechnology applications, quality testing, the development of high-quality varieties, and crop management. In addition to 150 Chinese participants from more than 20 provinces, Roberto Javier Peña and Erika Meng from CIMMYT, Rudi Appels from Australia, and Peter Shwery and Huw Jones from Rothamsted Research were invited to talk on global wheat quality, the health grain project, and wheat transformation.
This is a continuation of CIMMYT-China joint efforts in promoting Chinese wheat quality. Zhonghu He, CIMMYT representative in China, talked about Chinese wheat quality and future trends. More than 8 wheat quality workshops and conferences, including the Sino-Australia Wheat Quality Conference (2002) and International Wheat Quality Conference (2004), with a total of more than 1,000 participants, have been organized by CAAS and CIMMYT during the last 10 years.
The Sino-UK Wheat Workshop, jointly organized by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, Rothamsted Research, and CIMMYT, was held in Beijing on 10 to 11 December. It was coordinated by Zhonghu He, CIMMYT Representative in China, and Peter Shwery from Rothamsted Research. They were more than 40 participants, including 20 from Rothamsted Research, UK, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, John Innes Center, and University of Nottingham, along with participants from 6 Chinese institutes. The presentations covered breeding technologies, sustainability and yield, grain development and quality, and plant pathogens. Lijian Zhang, CAAS vice president, was presented in the opening ceremony. Priority areas for future collaboration were identified and the second Sino- UK wheat workshop will be held in UK in 2009. The workshop was sponsored by UK Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC), the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, and the National Nature Science Foundation of China.
As part of its capacity building initiatives, CIMMYT conducts periodic in-country training for visiting senior scientists drawn from national research systems. Three such scientists – Luka Atwok, Kaka Meseka (both from Southern Sudan) and Mbuya Kankolongo (the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – completed their six-month tour of duty at CIMMYT Kenya at the end of November. Their comprehensive training spanned an entire cropping season and they were taken through all aspects of a cropping system – planning, executing, data collection and analysis as well as reporting – within a breeding program. The breeding programs included those for Striga management, drought tolerance, insect resistance and improved protein quality in maize. The three were awarded their course completion certificates at a colorful and tasty lunch, hosted in their honor. They were grateful to CIMMYT for the opportunity to have participated in the training and were more confident of their capacity to lead their national breeding programs, once back in their respective countries.
CIMMYT Kenya held its joint Christmas and end of year lunch on 7 December. There was a convivial mood all round as the event provided a wonderful opportunity for all the team (including visiting consultant David Watson) to share a warm meal and stimulating conversation, while reviewing the year that was. Everyone was in good spirits and agreed that 2007 had been a good year for CIMMYT Kenya. Global Maize Program Director Marianne BĂ€nziger congratulated everyone for their excellent team efforts, hard work, and dedication throughout the year. From CIMMYT Kenya, it is a joyous and restful festive season to you all!
William Eusebio and Warren Constantino, both from the IRRI CRIL office, are spending two weeks working with Vivek Bindiganavile at the CIMMYT-Zimbabwe station. They are planning the integration of the maize field book system with ICIS (International Crop Information System) and finalizing software tools for capturing maize pedigree information from the breeding program. Initial development resulted in a semi-automated user interface for inputting and analyzing pedigree information to ensure the correctness of entries. A work plan was drawn to build the bridge that would attach the maize field book to the ICIS databases. Though two weeks is a short time, the foundations have been laid to connect another isle of information into the growing ICIS community. In a related activity, former CIMMYT maize scientist Scott McLean is wrapping up a several-month consultancy to gather Global Maize Program trial data and render them in a usable storage and access format.
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.
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 yearâs 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 ââŠa model for multi-stakeholder regional R&D collaboration and enhanced researcher-extension-farmer-market linkagesâ. 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
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 Palaciosâ 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.
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.
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!
The team also elected CIMMYTâs 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.
During 20-21 November, 16 CIMMYT staff from diverse areas took time out from their busy year-end schedules to attend the workshop âTime Management and Organizing Skills,â 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. âYou canât manage or control time,â explained instructor Harry Peasley, âbut you can manage yourself in relation to time, and control how you use it.â One key approach Peasley promotes is using a weekly calendar to order oneâs work life. âA 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!â
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 operationsâall components seem to run like clockwork. âOne feels right at home, regardless of where one is based within CIMMYT,â says Wangalachi.
A hearty Asanteni sana (thank you very much) goes to you all at CIMMYT-Zimbabwe!
This Wednesday, CIMMYT was represented at a Monsanto-sponsored informal media exchange dinner at Nairobiâs 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-usersâthe farmers themselves; likened to the age-old African custom of having discussions âaround the fire.â 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.