Location: Venezuela

CGIAR Initiative to increase resilience, sustainability and competitiveness in Latin America and the Caribbean

Written by Sarah Fernandes on May 11, 2022. Posted in News.

Este artículo también está disponible en español.

With the participation of more than 30 researchers from four CGIAR Centers located in the Americas, a planning workshop for a new CGIAR Research Initiative, AgriLAC Resiliente, was held on April 4–6, 2022. Its purpose was to define the implementation of activities to improve the livelihoods of producers in Latin America, with the support of national governments, the private sector, civil society, and CGIAR’s regional and global funders, and partners.

“This workshop is the first face-to-face planning meeting aimed at defining, in a joined-up manner and map in hand, how the teams across Centers in the region will complement each other, taking advantage of the path that each Center has taken in Latin America, but this time based on the advantage of reaching the territories not as four independent Centers, but as one CGIAR team,” says Deissy Martínez Barón, leader of the Initiative from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.

AgriLAC Resiliente is an Initiative co-designed to transform food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean. It aims to increase resilience, ecosystem services and the competitiveness of agrifood innovation systems in the region. Through this Initiative, CGIAR is committed to providing a regional structure that enhances its effectiveness and responds better to national and regional priorities, needs and demands.

This Initiative is one of a number that the CGIAR has in Latin America and the Caribbean and consists of five research components:

Climate and nutrition that seeks to use collaborative innovations for climate-resilient and nutritious agrifood systems;
Digital agriculture through the use of digital and inclusive tools for the creation of actionable knowledge;
Competitiveness with low emissions, focused on agroecosystems, landscapes and value chains, low in sustainable emissions;
Innovation and scaling with the Innova-Hubs network for agrifood innovations and their scaling up;
Science for timely decision making and the establishment of policies, institutions and investments in resilient, competitive and low-emission agrifood systems.

The regional character of these CGIAR Initiatives and of the teams of researchers who make them a reality in the territories with the producers, was prominent in the minds of the leadership that also participated in this workshop. Martin Kropff, Global Director, Resilient Agrifood Systems, CGIAR; Joaquín Lozano, Regional Director, Latin America and the Caribbean, CGIAR; Óscar Ortiz, Acting Director General of the International Potato Center; Jesús Quintana, Manager for the Americas of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT; and Bram Govaerts, Director General of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), all stated the importance of CGIAR being central to every discussion in which the teams are co-constructing a greater consensus on what AgriLAC Resliente is, what it wants to achieve, the approach it will use, and the goals it aims to achieve through synergies among its five components.

Acting as an integrated organization is also an opportunity for CGIAR to leverage co-developed solutions and solve local challenges in the global South related to climate change and agrifood systems transformation. “Building the new CGIAR involves tons of collaboration and coordination. In this AgriLAC Resiliente workshop, we have had a dialogue full of energy focused on achieving real impact” highlighted Bram Govaerts. He continued, “this is an occasion to strengthen teamwork around this CGIAR Initiative in which the Integrated Agrifood System Initiative approach will be applied in the Latin American region, which is a very interconnected region” he pointed out.

One of the main results of this workshop is an opportunity to carry out the integration of the CGIAR teams in the implementation of the AgriLAC Resiliente Initiative, with applied science and the decisive role of the partners at each point of the region, as mechanisms for change.

In 2022, the research teams will begin to lay the groundwork for implementing the Initiative’s integrative approach to strengthen the innovations to be co-developed with partners and collaborators in the Latin American region, that encompass the interconnected nature of the global South.

Learn more about the Initiative:
AgriLAC Resiliente: Resilient Agrifood Innovation Systems in Latin America and the Caribbean

This article, authored by the AgriLAC Resiliente team, was originally published on CGIAR.org.

Latin American ministers visit CIMMYT and develop food price crisis strategy

Written by on May 14, 2012. Posted in News.

CIMMYT E-News, vol 5 no. 5, May 2008

may05 Skyrocketing food prices recently brought Latin American agriculture ministers from 14 countries and development experts to CIMMYT to seek a way forward for a region characterized by serious rural poverty.

On 26 May 2008, ministers of agriculture and government officials from Belize, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Venezuela, as well as representatives of international organizations working in agricultural development and the Mexican media—more than 70 persons in all—visited CIMMYT’s headquarters in Mexico to learn about the center’s work and discuss collaborative strategies for addressing the food price crisis. The visit was part of a two-day summit organized by Mexico’s agriculture (SAGARPA) and foreign relations (SRE) ministries, following up on recommendations from a regional summit on the same topic in Nicaragua earlier this month.

Speaking on behalf of the Alliance of Centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in his welcoming talk, CIMMYT Director General Tom Lumpkin emphasized the need to move from the present emergency to a permanent vision for addressing the crisis. “It appears that two decades of complacency about basic food production has finally given way to a sense of urgency,” Lumpkin said. “We must now transform that urgency into a long-term vision, making sensible investments in agricultural research and extension to provide food for our children and our grandchildren.”

Have policy makers forgotten small-scale farmers?

The rising cost of food is being felt around the world, especially by poor people in rural zones. Though often not on the radar screens of policymakers, the rural poor are numerous. A recent paper from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) says there are more than 400 million small farms in developing countries, and that these are home to most of the world’s hungry and disadvantaged. In Latin America and the Caribbean, nearly 64% of the rural population lives below the poverty line, according to a report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Over the last two decades, the number of poor people in rural areas in the region has increased in both absolute and relative terms, the report says.

SAGARPA and CIMMYT undertake new, joint projects

As the meetings closed, Lumpkin urged “…the governments of Mexico and other countries in the region to re-examine their relationship with CIMMYT and bring new backing for research to increase food production and farm productivity.” In the week following the visit and at the invitation of Mexico’s Secretary of Agriculture, Alberto Cárdenas Jiménez, the center has submitted proposals for joint SAGARPA-CIMMYT work to develop, test, and disseminate drought tolerant maize varieties, as well as management practices that reduce small-scale farmers’ losses of stored maize grain to insect pests.

For more information: Rodomiro Ortiz, Director, Resource Mobilization (r.ortiz@cgiar.org)

may06

CIMMYT quality protein maize hybrids shine in 2005-06 trials

Written by on November 17, 2006. Posted in News.

In global trials during 2005-06, white-grained, quality protein maize (QPM) experimental hybrids from CIMMYT significantly outyielded the best seed industry checks. QPM grain contains nearly twice normal maize’s levels of the essential amino acids, lysine and tryptophan. Normal and single-cross (two inbred lines as parents) QPM hybrids were tested at 15 locations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and three-way-cross (an inbred line and a single-cross hybrid as parents) QPM hybrids were tested at 44 locations in Central America, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela. The best white-grained QPM hybrids beat the best seed industry checks across country sites and at more than 50 individual locations.

“This is a new generation of QPM hybrids,” says CIMMYT maize breeder and Distinguished Scientist, Hugo Cordova. “In Mexico two of the experimental hybrids out-yielded the checks by 28% and 38%. Ear rot was heavy in Central America in 2005 as a result of Hurricane Stan, but the best QPM hybrids showed damage levels well below those seen in seed industry checks.”

Cordova, who has led QPM research and dissemination with partners since the mid-1990s, recently visited a trial sown in the field of a farmer in Tepalcingo, Morelos State, Mexico, by former CIMMYT maize breeder, Narciso Vergara, now working with the company BIOFABRICA SIGLO XXI, which markets QPM and biofertilizers as package.

During 2006 partners in the Agrosalud Project, funded by CIDA-Canada and implemented by CIMMYT, are conducting nearly 600 demonstrations worldwide involving QPM hybrids and varieties. Preliminary results indicate good acceptance by farmers. Production of basic and commercial seed is in progress. The release by national agencies of new QPM cultivars is expected for early 2007.

PHOTO: “This maize has good yield and the ears are clean of rot,” says Farmer J. Jesús Rebolloza Vergara of Tepalcingo, Morelos State, Mexico. He and CIMMYT maize breeder Hugo Cordova stand before a pile of the CIMMYT QPM hybrid 519c, an improved version of a hybrid originally released by the Mexican National Institute of Forestry, Agriculture, and Livestock Research (INIFAP). The same hybrid is being evaluated in El Salvador for release as “Platino” in 2007. Rebolloza lent the 0.6 hectare plot shown here for 2006 trials in which CIMMYT QPM hybrids beat popular seed industry hybrids.