Location: China

The bi-annual Board of Trustees (BoT) meeting commenced at CIMMYT headquarters at El Batán on 31 March 2012. In his opening report to the board, Director General Thomas Lumpkin described developments at CIMMYT over the past 6 months. “Our stature is rising. Our capacity is rising. But the challenges we are facing—especially taking into consideration climate change and population increases—are just daunting,” he said.

This session of meetings was the first chaired by Sara Boettiger, who has served on the BoT for the past eight years, and took over the position of Board Chair from Julio Antonio Berdegué Sacristán in October 2011. Boettiger, originally from the US, also serves as an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of Agricultural and Research Economics.

During the meetings, Boettiger applauded CIMMYT’s “reputation for professionalism from our partners and collaborators.” CIMMYT’s funding strategy was also highlighted as forward thinking and innovative. Rather than the traditional model of investment from industrialized nations such as the US, Germany, and the UK, CIMMYT has undergone a shift in its funding in the past 5 years, with the largest proportion of funding currently sourced from emerging market countries.

During a summary report to CIMMYT staff on 04 April 2012, Boettiger stated, “globally, emerging markets are going to be the strength of the world. These will be the powerhouses funding agricultural development.” Recent reports show that half of the world’s GDP comes from emerging markets. They also produce a third of the world’s exports and are home to 85 percent of the world’s population. In recent years, CIMMYT has made a concerted effort to strengthen linkages with emerging market countries such as India, where CIMMYT launched the newly established Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA) in October 2011, as well as China where CIMMYT currently has the largest research capacity of any of the CGIAR centers.

Upcoming events were also discussed during the meetings, including the G20 in Mexico, and the impending visit to CIMMYT of the CGIAR’s new CEO, Frank Rijsberman, who will come in June after representing the CGIAR at Rio+20.

During the four-day meeting, BoT members had their first opportunity to tour the construction sites and new facilities being developed at CIMMYT headquarters. The project—which is to include new biotechnology buildings, labs, greenhouses, and housing facilities—will conclude later this year and an event to officially inaugurate the facilities is set to take place by 2013.

The next BoT meeting will take place in October 2012.

By Susan MacMillan, ILRI

Speaking on ‘Sustainable food systems for food security’, Marianne Banziger, a scientist at the CGIAR maize and wheat centre (CIMMYT), this afternoon gave a ‘Rank Lecture’ at the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London.

She began with a bald statistic: To meet the food security challenges converging over the next 50 years, she said, we will have to produce as much food as has been consumed over the entire history of humankind.

Things did not get better after that.

We can expect more food price hikes, she argued, like those the world experienced in 2008 and 2010. Those peaks were due to low stocks; food prices went up three-fold and food prices have never returned to 2006 levels.

A large part of the changing food situation, Banziger explained, is due to the many people in developing countries that are newly incorporating into their largely starch-based diets meat, milk and eggs. However, most people gaining a bit of disposable income for the first time and using it to buy animal-source foods are still consuming far less of these foods than people in rich countries.

Biofuels are complicating the situation further: some 40% of the US maize crop now goes to biofuel, which is more than what is produced for animal feed.

Food price increases push people back into poverty, she reminded her audience. As food prices increase, and people find food less and less affordable, the proportion of their consumption of staple crops increases. If we do not act, food and energy price inflation will exceed income growth of the poor—pushing them further into poverty.

Living on borrowed resources

What goes up must come down: As fertilizer prices go up, the profitability and yields of smallholder farmers in developing countries go down.

Some 300 million people in India and China are sustained with grain grown from the over-pumping of water (that is, water resources not renewed by rainfall).

Social unrest is likely to come back again and again; deforestation, water scarcity and human migration are all likely to increase,

We still have the time to act.

Science usefully provides us with options.

We could reduce our consumption of food. How many of us now recycle and conserve water? Reduce food wastage? Eat less meat? These actions reduce demand. Those people now climbing out of poverty have as much right as we do to eat well.

On the other hand, we could increase our production of food.

The more we delay investments in this, the steeper will be the challenges we face.

Among new opportunities for increasing productivity are use of precision agriculture and cell phones (for conducting financial transactions, buying crop and input insurance).

We should not make the same mistakes as in the past by focusing on higher productivity alone. Farmers also need to generate greater income, to build greater resilience to shocks, to conduct sustainable farming, and to access viable markets and value chains.

Eyes wide open

Closing the yield gap among today’s marginalized farmers will not be enough, Banziger said. Farmers in the Indo-Gangetic Plains now grow wheat for 700 million people. But the encroachment of heat on these plains is expected to reduce yields 20–30% by 2050.

We need to explore the untapped biodiversity of staple crops. Drought-tolerant maize varieties have succeeded in the past. We’re looking for heat tolerance in wheat. Will transgenics be needed? The challenges are extreme, so ‘we need to keep our eyes open’.

Catch 22

At the close of Banziger’s presentation, a population expert in the audience asked what he might have presumed to be a rhetorical question: Why had Banziger omitted all reference to reducing the human population as a main method of ensuring food security?

Banziger responded forthrightly: It is not the increasing numbers of people per se that is the greatest factor in our food challenges, she said. Rather, it is the great numbers of people who are escaping absolute poverty (especially in India, China and Southeast Asia), and who are improving the quality of their diets as they do so by adding animal-source and other highly nutritious foods to their daily meals.

The implications are that reducing the numbers of people on the planet will not solve our food problems if great numbers of those people that remain keep moving out of poverty–a trajectory that many of this conference’s delegates are spending their professional lives working to advance.

On 23 November 2011 CIMMYT-El Batán welcomed six hybrid wheat researchers from China. Changping Zhao, Yiqiang Ge, Mingshan You, Mujun Yang, Shengrong Li, and Shengquan Zhang came to discuss the advances of wheat photoperiod and thermo-sensitive male sterility (PTMS) systems in China. In the last 20 years, approximately 5000 different PTMS lines have been bred, with BS and C49S now being successfully used in hybrid wheat breeding. Seven PTMS hybrid wheat cultivars have been approved by national or provincial governments, with 500 tons of seed now being produced on 700 ha. Progress is also being made on hybrid seed production, and it is now possible to obtain 3.75 tons/ha. The discussion was hosted by Hans Braun, Director, Global Wheat Program, and attended by CIMMYT scientists and eight Chinese visiting scientists.

Guest post by Farming First

Ahead of the G8 summit this week in France, Farming First has launched a new online infographic that demonstrates how agriculture can help build a green economy.

Green growth is one of the top items on the meeting agenda and, with the inclusion of African leaders at this year’s summit, the G8 leaders should foster policy coherence on food security and price volatility to achieve agriculture’s potential.

As a critical sector for achieving the G8’s goals of food security and a green economy, we have collected existing data from leading research organisations and assembled it into graphs and visuals to put agriculture forward in the wider political agenda.

The infographic clearly highlights the value and return to investment in agriculture, both in terms of poverty reduction but also in improving food security through increased productivity. The data also draws attention to the impact of agriculture on women’s livelihoods; 41 percent of total farmers worldwide are women, and this goes up to 64 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Despite this, the G8 leaders’s commitment to provide $22 billion to food security by 2012 has yet to be met. Agricultural productivity needs be addressed through investment in agricultural research and extension services, in order to feed a global population of 9 billion in 2050.

Food production must increase to ensure food security now and for future generations and it is increases in yield that will provide over 70 percent of that growth. The World Bank estimates that 1 hectare of land will need to feed five people in 2025, whereas in 1960, 1 hectare was required to feed only 2 people.

However, if we look at investment in agriculture today, the sector has been a victim of underinvestment for a long time, both in terms of government spending and foreign aid. Public spending allocated to agriculture declined to under 7 percent in 2000, and the share of ODA to agriculture fell to 5 percent in 2004.

The implications of a lack of investment are reflected in the present reality of crop yield growth. Grain yield growth in developing countries has fallen from 3% per year from 1961 to 2007, to a 1 percent increase per year today.

As an example of the huge potential that lies in investing in agricultural research, the impact of the Chinese government’s increased investment in agricultural research has helped China achieve year-on-year yield growth, making the country the largest agricultural producer in the world.

Through our infographic, we hope that G8 leaders will recognise the true contribution that farmers can provide to continued global prosperity, while helping to create sustainable livelihoods, reduce poverty and safeguard the environment. If we invest in farmers today, we can seize the challenge of growing a green economy.

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Farming First is a global coalition representing the world’s scientists, engineers and industry as well as more than 100 farmers’ associations and agricultural development organisations. Farming First calls for a broad- based, knowledge-centred approach to increase agricultural output in a sustainable and socially responsible manner.  To view Farming First’s position on the green economy, visit:  www.farmingfirst.org/green-economy

The Chinese Academy of Engineering honored Zhonghu He, principal scientist of CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program and China country representative, for his work with wheat quality improvement and promotion of China-CIMMYT collaboration. Zhonghu received the Guanghua Award in a ceremony on 09 June 2010 in Beijing. Established in 1996, this award recognizes Chinese scientists who have made signification contributions in applied science and management. To date, only eight scientists with agriculture or forestry backgrounds have received the Guanghua Award.