A global wheat conference originally scheduled to be held in June in Norwich, United Kingdom, now will take place virtually on Oct. 7-9.
The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative’s (BGRI) virtual technical workshop was postponed earlier this year due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Read more here: https://www.world-grain.com/articles/14150-wheat-researchers-to-gather-for-october-virtual-event
The world population is expected to rise to almost 10 billion by 2050. To feed this number of people, we need to increase food production while using fewer resources. Biofortification, the process of fortifying staple crops with micronutrients, could help to solve this problem.
However, it is not that easy to identify biofortified seeds.
Often, the process of biofortification does not change a seed in a visible way, opening the possibilities for counterfeit products. Farmers cannot verify that the seeds they buy are as advertised. Unsurprisingly, fake seeds are a major obstacle to the adoption of biofortified crops. Similarly, in the process from farm to fork, traceability of biofortified food is equally difficult to achieve.
Picture Aisha, a smallholder farmer in Nigeria. She’s in the market for biofortified maize seeds for her farm. How does she know which seeds to pick, and how can she be sure that they are actually biofortified?
One solution is blockchain technology.
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is a shared digital ledger for record keeping, where data is decentralized and allocated to users. Digital information, or blocks, is stored in a public database, or chain.
This technology platform helps in situations of lack of trust. It provides an unhackable, unchangeable and transparent record of events where users place trust in computer code and math, instead of a third party. This code writes the rules of the system and the software is peer-reviewed, so rules and data are resilient against corruption. When new data is added to the database, actors in then network verify and timestamp the data before adding it to the blockchain. After input, no one can change the information. No single entity owns or controls the database, allowing actors to trust in the system without having to trust any other actors.
While often associated with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology has many other uses in traditional industries, including the potential to transform agri-food systems. The Community of Practice on Socio-economic Data, led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), produced a report detailing the role blockchain can play in agri-food systems and biofortified seeds.
Blockchain for agri-food systems
Agri-food systems consist of complex networks that often mistrust each other. Blockchain technology can enhance transparency, traceability and trust. It could have a significant role to play in closing the yield gap and reducing hunger.
Many transactions done in the agri-food sector have paper records. Even when records are digital, disconnected IT systems create data silos. Blockchain enables stakeholders to control, manage and share their own data, breaking down silos.
For example, blockchain technology can help solve issues of land governance, unclear ownership and tenure by providing an accurate land registration database. It can help with compliance to standards from governments or private organizations. This technology could make financial transactions more efficient, limit corruption, and provide provenance, traceability and recall of products.
Verifying biofortified maize seeds
HarvestPlus conducted a study to understand the barriers to widespread adoption of biofortified seeds. The team interviewed 100 businesses and 250 individuals from farmers to global brands about their experiences with biofortification. Unsurprisingly, they found that a big barrier to adoption is the inability to distinguish biofortified crops from standard ones.
Therefore, it is crucial to have a system to verify biofortified seeds. HarvestPlus collaborated with The Fork to investigate solutions.
One solution is a public blockchain. The result could look like this: Aisha, our smallholder farmer in Nigeria wants to buy biofortified maize seeds for her farm. At the store, she takes a phone out of her pocket and scans a QR code on a bag to see a trustworthy account of the seeds’ journey to that bag. Satisfied with the account, she brings verified biofortified maize seeds home, improving nutrition of her family and community.
Contingent on farmers having access to smartphones, this situation could be possible. However, blockchain technology will not solve everything, and it is important we test and study these solutions while considering other challenges, such as access to technology and human behavior.
The Community of Practice on Socio-economic Data report, Blockchain for Food, gives principles of digital development of blockchain. It is crucial to understand the existing ecosystem, design for scale, build for sustainability and design the technology with the user. These are crucial points to consider when developing blockchain solutions for agri-food systems.
As the global food system is beginning to transition towards more transparency, circularity and customization, blockchain technology could play a major role in how this shift evolves. A new testing and learning platform for digital trust and transparency technologies in agri-food systems, including blockchain technology, was launched in February 2020. The platform will build capacity of the potential of this technology and ensure that it is usable and inclusive.
Read the report:
Blockchain for Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds.
Cover photo: Close up of a quality protein maize cob. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)
In November 2020, Alison Bentley will be joining the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) as the new program director of the Global Wheat Program. She will be succeeding Hans Braun, who has steered the program for the last 16 years.
Bentley is thrilled to join CIMMYT and excited about the opportunity to harness science and breeding to improve livelihoods. She believes in a collective vision for equitable food supply and in science-led solutions to deliver impact.
“It really is an exciting time for wheat research: the international community has worked together to produce sequence and genomic resources, new biological and physiological insights, a wealth of germplasm and tools for accelerating breeding. This provides an unparalleled foundation for accelerating genetic gains and connecting ideas to determine how we can practically apply these tools and technologies with partners to deliver value-added outputs,” she said.
Bentley has worked on wheat — wheat genetics, wheat genetic resources and wheat pre-breeding — her entire career. She is the UK’s representative on the International Wheat Initiative Scientific Committee, and is a committee member for the Genetics Society, the UK Plant Sciences Federation, the Society of Experimental Botany, and the Editorial Board of Heredity.
Bentley obtained her PhD from the University of Sydney, Australia, in 2007. She then joined the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) in the UK, where she progressed from Senior Research Scientist (2007) to Program Leader for Trait Genetics (2013), and Director of Genetics and Breeding (since 2016).
Currently, Bentley is involved in international research projects in Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana, India and Pakistan. She leads a number of UK-India projects with partners including Punjab Agricultural University, the Indian National Institute of Plant Genome Research and the University of Cambridge, studying variation and developing wheat and other cereal germplasm with enhanced resource use efficiency.
Wheat crop losses due to heat and drought affect food availability and increase the costs for billions of consumers around the world. The Alliance for Wheat Adaptation to Heat and Drought (AHEAD) is an international network that hosts initiatives and projects dedicated to addressing scientific gaps and builds synergies to support the development of new wheat varieties that are resilient to heat and drought.
Read more here.
A set of core survey questions has been developed in a bid to improve the collection and use of rural farm household data from low and middle-income countries.
Leading agricultural socioeconomists developed the 100Q report, which outlines 100 core questions to identify key indicators around agricultural activities and off-farm income, as well as key welfare indicators focusing on poverty, food security, dietary diversity, and gender equity.
The aim is to forge an international standard approach to ensure socioeconomic data sets are comparable over time and space, said Mark Van Wijk, the lead author of the recent report published through CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture.
Agricultural researchers interview hundreds of thousands of farmers across the world every year. Each survey is developed with a unique approach for a specific research question. These varied approaches to household surveys limit the impact data can have when researchers aim to reuse results to gain deeper insights.
“A standard set of questions across all farm household surveys means researchers can compare different data points to identify common drivers of poverty and food insecurity among different populations to more efficiently inform development strategies and improve livelihoods,” said Van Wijk, a senior scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).
Finding common ground among data collection efforts is essential for optimizing the impact of socioeconomic data. Instead of reinventing the wheel each time researchers develop surveys, researchers in the CGIAR’s Community of Practice on Socio-Economic Data (CoP SED) formed core questions they believe should become the base of all farm household surveys to improve the ability for global analysis.
CoP SED is promoting the use of the 100Q report as building blocks in survey development through webinars with international agricultural researchers. The community is also doing further research into tagging existing survey data with ontology terms from the 100Q to improve reusability.
Harmonization key to the fair use of data
Managing shared data is becoming increasingly important as we move towards an open data world, said Gideon Kruseman, leader of the CoP SED and author of the report.
“For shareable data to be actionable, it needs to be FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. This is the heart of the Community of Practice on Socio-Economic Data’s work.”
At the moment, international agricultural household survey data is disorganized; the proliferation of survey tools and indicators lead to datasets which are often poorly documented and have limited interoperability, explained Kruseman.
It’s estimated that CGIAR—the world’s largest network of agricultural researchers—conducts interviews with around 180,000 farmers per year. However, these interviews have lacked standardization in the socioeconomic domain for decades, leading to holes in our understanding of the agriculture, poverty, nutrition, and gender characteristics of these households.
The 100Q tool has been systematically designed to enable the quantification of interactions between different components and outcomes of agricultural systems, including productivity and human welfare at the farm and household level, said Kruseman, a Foresight and Ex-Ante Research Leader at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
Streamlining survey data through the world’s largest agricultural research network
Using these building blocks should become standard practice across CGIAR. The researchers hope standardization across all CGIAR institutes will allow for easier application of big data methods for analyzing the household level data themselves, as well as for linking these data to other larger scale information sources like spatial crop yield data, climate data, market access data, and roadmap data.
Researchers from several CGIAR research organizations, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and agricultural nonprofits worked to create the common layout for household surveys and the sets of ontologies underpinning the information to be collected.
“Being able to reuse data is extremely valuable. If household survey data is readily reusable, existing data sets can be used as baselines. It allows us to easily assess how welfare indicators vary across populations and different agro-ecological and socioeconomic conditions, as well as how they may change over time,” Kruseman said.
“It also improves the effectiveness of interventions and the trade-offs between outcomes, which may be shaped by household structure, farm management, and the wider social-environmental.”
CoP SED researchers work in three groups towards improving socioeconomic data interoperability. The 100Q working group focuses on identifying key indicators and related questions that are commonly used and could be used as a standard approach to ensure data sets are comparable over time and space. The working group SEONT focuses on the development of a socioeconomic ontology with accepted standardized terms to be used in controlled vocabularies linked to socioeconomic data sets. The working group OIMS focuses on the development of a flexible and extensible, ontology-agnostic, human-intelligible, and machine-readable metadata schema to accompany socioeconomic data sets.
For more information, visit the CoP SED webpage.
Cover photo: A paddy in front of a house in Tri Budi Syukur village, West Lampung regency, Lampung province, Indonesia. (Photo: Ulet Ifansasti/CIFOR)
The year 2019 showed us that while CIMMYT’s work may begin with seeds, our innovations support farmers at all stages of the value chain. CIMMYT continued to perform groundbreaking crop research and forge powerful partnerships to combat hunger and climate change, preserve maize and wheat biodiversity, and respond to emerging pests and diseases.
Read the web version of the Annual Report 2019
Read the web version of the Annual Report 2019
Download the Annual Report 2019 in PDF format
Download the financial report 2019
In 2019, CIMMYT continued to perform groundbreaking crop research and forge powerful partnerships to combat hunger and climate change, preserve maize and wheat biodiversity, and respond to emerging pests and diseases.
Bill Gates spoke about the “essential role of CGIAR research centers in feeding our future” and together with other stakeholders urged us to “do even better.” In his Gates Notes blog, he highlighted the great example of CIMMYT’s drought-tolerant maize, which helps resource-poor farmers withstand increasing climate risks.
Over the course of the year, we supported our national partners to release 82 maize and 50 wheat varieties. More than 14,000 farmers, scientists, and technical workers across the world took part in over 900 training and capacity development activities. CIMMYT researchers published 386 peer-reviewed journal articles.
In 2019, CIMMYT also marked the end of a decade of achievements in seed security. CIMMYT celebrated being the largest depositor at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault with 173,779 accessions from 131 countries. The most recent deposit included 15,231 samples of wheat and 332 samples of maize.
Innovative solutions like DNA fingerprinting – a method used to identify individual plants by looking at unique patterns in their genome – brought state of the art research into farmer’s fields, providing valuable insights into the diversity of wheat varieties grown in Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
CIMMYT also continued to play a key role in the battle against fall armyworm, coordinating a global research-for–development consortium to build an evidence-based response against the pest in both Africa and Asia.
Through the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), CIMMYT helped women find business opportunities and empowered female entrepreneurship with the help of mechanization solutions.
The year 2019 showed us that while CIMMYT’s work may begin with seeds, our innovations support farmers at all stages of the value chain. The year ahead will be a challenging one as we continue to adjust to the “new normal” of life under COVID-19. We hope you enjoy this Annual Report as we look back on the exciting year that was 2019.
Read the web version of the Annual Report 2019
In Lennart Woltering’s first job working on agricultural water management with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Niger, he observed a phenomenon that would influence his career path. Although drip irrigation involved huge benefits in terms of yields and productivity, adoption was low all across Africa. This fact made Woltering frustrated and interested.
In his second job at the biggest management consulting firm of Germany focused on international development, he was awarded a contract by the German development agency GIZ to lead a team on a demand-supply match for innovations from the CGIAR. Here he found that uptake of many innovations that showed superior performance over alternatives was limited and largely confined to the pilot project environment. When a few years later GIZ and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) advertised a Scaling Advisor position, Woltering knew this was the job for him.
Scaling is the process of expanding beneficial technologies and practices over geographies, and across institutions and levels to impact large numbers of people. This sounds very abstract, and Woltering is now supporting colleagues to make sense of the what, why and how of scaling in their specific contexts. The GIZ and CIMMYT contract modality does not force him to work on one project alone, but allows him to support a broad range of projects and programs to achieve more sustainable impact, within and beyond CIMMYT.
Changing mindsets
There is a modus operandi of doing projects in the most efficient way to meet targets, then moving on to the next project. Success is often measured by the number of beneficiaries reached at the last day of that project. However, this is often at the expense of important “systems work” such as building lasting relationships, developing organizational capacities and improving the enabling environment rather than finding holes in it. CIMMYT’s mission and vision are focused on social impact, hence the outcomes of our work are more important than our outputs. We cannot assume that adoption of an innovation leads directly to positive impacts — we have the responsibility to abide by the principles of “do no harm” and “leave no one behind.” Scaling is a process that should be part of the design of projects from the beginning.
Woltering keeps asking himself, “What happens when the project stops tomorrow? Do local actors have the capacities and desire to take responsibility of the scaling process once the project is over? What models of collaboration can survive the project?” He observes a strong underestimation of the importance of context for an innovation to be successful. Woltering’s guiding principle is “10% is the innovation and 90% is the context.”
The Scaling Scan
The first thing Woltering did at CIMMYT was visit the country offices and projects in Africa and Asia, to understand how colleagues give meaning to scaling and to identify opportunities and challenges. He saw that in every context there was a different bottleneck to scaling — government policies, the value chain, but hardly ever the technology. The common denominator among these situations was that there was always a weakest link. If that problem was solved, teams would encounter the next weakest link. He identified a need to think strategically about project elements from the beginning of the project.
Woltering came across a paper by PPPLab that mentioned ten scaling ingredients, or ten conditions for scaling to be successful. He got in touch with them to see how this could be useful for CIMMYT and the CGIAR. “How can we make this fluffy concept of scaling that people don’t understand into something meaningful?”
This idea became the Scaling Scan, developed by PPPLab and CIMMYT. The tool helps practitioners to analyze what they want to scale, while trying to keep the process as simple as possible. The Scaling Scan helps teams to come up with a realistic ambition and identify bottlenecks from the start. It highlights what project teams need to pay attention to on the journey to reach scale.
“One thing that immediately becomes clear is that impact at scale requires a much broader range of skills and disciplines than what any one organization can bring. The Scaling Scan and an associated partnership tool we developed helps teams to recognize what type of collaborations are necessary along the way. It is very encouraging to get emails from organizations like Catholic Relief Services and ILRI that they are using the Scaling Scan on their own,” says Woltering.
Progress towards impact
For many decades, CGIAR focused only on research, but in the last 20 years, it expanded to focus on what actually happens with those research outputs.
CIMMYT has always been working on things we now call scaling, in the sense of having a positive impact and changing people’s lives for the better. However, how that happened in that specific context has never been integrated systematically in the design, implementation nor the learning. “Scaling is finally getting recognized as a science but also as an art, and it is great to work on both fronts with scientists and project managers,” says Woltering.
There is a global community of practice on scaling with donors, implementers and practitioners. Five years ago, there were ten members and now the agriculture working group has members of more than sixty different organizations (including USAID, IFAD, CGIAR, CRS). CIMMYT is not only leading this community, but also set up a CGIAR-wide task force and a CIMMYT internal task force on scaling.
The COVID-19 crisis has shown that we need sustainable change at scale, and short term and one-off solutions will not do. This has only accelerated a trend of funders and implementers shifting to a more systemic approach. “CIMMYT is at the forefront of this wave which makes it a very exciting time to be working on this,” said Woltering.
Wheat, in its own right, is one of the most important foods in the world. It is a staple food for more than 2.5 billion people, it provides 20% of the protein consumed worldwide and, according to the FAO, supplies more calories than any other grain. Its long-term productivity, however, is threatened by rising temperatures, among other factors. Stress from heat, an increasing trend due to climate change, affects its performance, a fact that requires urgent solutions bearing in mind that, according to some estimates, the world’s population will reach 9 billion by the year 2050.
Read more here: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-heat-resistant-wheat-varieties.html
Developing climate-resistant crops is attracting increasing attention as climate change-related events worsen.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is a non-profit research organization that develops improved varieties of wheat and corn able to withstand drought, heat and pests in order to increase food security. It says that over 90% of its work relates to climate change.
Read more: https://www.ingredientsnetwork.com/investing-in-climate-changeresistant-crops-news083794.html
Filippo Guzzon is a plant biologist dealing with seed biology and conservation of plant genetic resources (PGR).
He studies germination requirements, seed ecology, seed longevity, seed physiology as well as germination under abiotic stresses. In order to improve the conservation and use of PGR, his research aims also at bridging technical gaps that prevent their successful ex situ conservation.
The critical global challenge of significantly increasing food production by 2050 is exacerbated by water limitations. Droughts and water scarcity affect crop production across the world and global climate warming is aggravating this effect. A central challenge for researchers and policymakers is to devise technologies that lend greater resilience to agricultural production in drier environments.
The Interdrought 2020 congress presents the latest developments to address this global challenge.
Interdrought 2020 was scheduled to be held in Mexico City in March 2020. As it was not possible to proceed with the congress as a face-to-face meeting due to the travel restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizing committee has delivered the scientific program of the congress online. Congress proceedings are available at interdrought2020.cimmyt.org.
Today the organizing committee extended the reach of the congress proceedings to the global community by providing free online access to 43 presentations, 75 abstracts and 35 posters. The complete book of abstracts can also be downloaded. To date over 10,000 members of the scientific community have been invited to watch presentations and read the proceedings online.
Internationally recognized keynote speakers participated in the seven main sessions, supported by nine symposia convened by global experts, on topics ranging from breeding and management approaches to the basic science of plant–water relations.
State-of-the-art research and technology
Interdrought 2020 is an opportunity for scientific leaders from across the world to share the latest research and technology developments to advance plant production in water-limited situations. Interdrought 2020 embraces the philosophy of presenting and integrating results of both applied and basic research towards the development of solutions for improving crop production under drought-prone conditions.
Interdrought 2020, also known as Interdrought VI (IDVI) is the sixth congress in the series. It builds on the success of previous congresses held in Montpellier in 1995, Rome in 2005, Shanghai in 2009, Perth in 2013, and Hyderabad in 2017.
The congress was organized by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the University of Queensland. The organizers share a strong history of collaboration in crop research and agronomy that seeks to increase wheat’s tolerance to drought and its yield potential in hot conditions, such as those seen in Queensland, Australia, and Sonora, Mexico.
The organizers and the congress committee would like to thank major sponsors Corteva, the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), the University of Queensland, and supporting sponsors in silico Plants, the Journal of Experimental Botany, Illumina, Analitek, and LI-COR. Our sponsors’ belief in the value of the scientific content enabled us to deliver congress proceedings to not only delegates but the broader scientific community.
For more information, please contact
Professor Graeme Hammer
Chair of the Interdrought 2020 congress committee
g.hammer@uq.edu.au
About CIMMYT
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is the global leader in publicly-funded maize and wheat research and related farming systems. Headquartered near Mexico City, CIMMYT works with hundreds of partners throughout the developing world to sustainably increase the productivity of maize and wheat cropping systems, thus improving global food security and reducing poverty. CIMMYT is a member of the CGIAR System and leads the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize and Wheat and the Excellence in Breeding Platform. The Center receives support from national governments, foundations, development banks and other public and private agencies. For more information, visit staging.cimmyt.org.
QAAFI at the University of Queensland
The Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) is a research institute of the University of Queensland supported by the Queensland Government via the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. QAAFI is comprised of four inter-related research centres working across crops, horticulture, animals, and nutrition and food sciences, with a focus on addressing challenges in the tropical and subtropical systems. For more information visit www.qaafi.uq.edu.au/about.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to transform the way the world operates, and agricultural production systems are not exempt.
Even in countries that have identified the agricultural sector as an essential one, ongoing restrictions on transport and freedom of movement are causing disruptions across the value chain — with potentially devastating impact on already fragile food systems in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
With this in mind, systems agronomists and mechanization specialists at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), discuss the impact of restrictions on agricultural labor and production, and the role farm mechanization can play in addressing new challenges.
What are the implications of the agricultural labor shortages that are emerging in Africa and Latin America as a result of COVID-19 restrictions?
Frédéric Baudron: The pandemic has demonstrated that food production systems around the world — even in countries where agriculture is thought to be highly mechanized — are highly dependent on farm labor.
Africa is often presented as being dominated by farms which rely mainly on the labor of family members. Therefore, one could expect that Africa would be spared from the consequences of unavailability and/or unaffordability of hired labor. However, a recent CIMMYT study shows that farming systems in Africa are far more dependent on hired labor than commonly thought, and that the quasi total dependence of smallholder farming on family labor is a myth. Depending on the farming system, a complete loss of hired labor could lead to a productivity decrease of up to 20% in Eastern and Southern Africa. Hired labor is also likely to be replaced by child labor.
Because most production on the continent is rainfed during a single season, most farmers only plant and harvest once per year, making the timing of each task critical. A delay in planting because of labor shortages — as will soon occur Ethiopia — could lead to dramatically reduced yields. A delay in harvesting — as is currently experienced in Zimbabwe — means a large fraction of the crop is likely to be spoilt in the field.
Jelle Van Loon: The situation is similar for Mexico and the general Central American corridor, although the main production cycle is only just starting. Proper land preparation and timely sowing are critical, not only in terms of food production and achieving proper yields, but also to ensure that farmers have a stable income at the end of the year. This is especially important now, as financial and food reserves are shrinking at a faster pace due to COVID-19 restrictions that heavily affect demand on informal markets.
Are you seeing a similar situation in South Asia?
Timothy Krupnik: Depending on the country, we’ve seen either abrupt interruptions in the movement of agricultural laborers — for example in India where millions of migrant laborers have not been able to travel home during lockdown — or an influx of people from urban areas who fled to their villages when lockdown began.
In the latter case, one might expect this to increase labor availability for farming, but we tended to observe the reverse. People remain largely frightened of coming out of their homes, so even in rural areas which saw an influx of people, labor availability has not necessarily increased. Where laborers are willing to work, our initial scan of the evidence indicates that daily wage labor costs have also increased considerably due to risks of infection spreading. In either situation, smallholder farmers who need to hire labor to assure crucial crop management activities like planting or harvesting are suffering. There are reports emerging also of increased child labor in the region as schools are closed and resource-poor farmers are allocating family members and children to work where they can’t afford to hire labor.
M.L. Jat: I would like to cite the specific example of intensive rice-wheat rotation in India’s breadbasket and the Green Revolution corridors in the western Indo-Gangetic plains, which provide the bulk of cereals to the national food basket. An ex-ante analysis on the consequences of the reverse migration of the agricultural workforce and social distancing due to COVID-19 revealed that a delay in the transplanting of rice seedlings by two weeks is likely, which will delay rice harvesting and consequently delay the planting of wheat. This will potentially lead to rice and wheat production losses of 10-25%, worth up to $1.5 billion.
In addition, the shorter turn around between harvesting rice and planting wheat may further increase the incidence of rice residue burning. This is a major problem which creates significant health issues and may exacerbate the threat of COVID-19 by increasing both infection rates and disease severity.
Krupnik: The situation has increased interest and policy to support use of scale-appropriate machinery for operations like harvesting. In Bangladesh, for example, there was a recent and very serious risk of losing much of the rice harvest as the monsoon has started early and flash flooding has been a concern. Without manual laborers to harvest the crop, CIMMYT-led projects like the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia – Mechanization and Extension Activity (CSISA-MEA) have played a key role in assisting the movement of combine harvesters and crop reapers to areas at risk of crop losses and helping to assure the rice crop is harvested on time.
It sounds like these machines were instrumental in avoiding crop losses. Does this mean that mechanization has a key role to play in lessening the impact of these labor shortages?
Krupnik: During the COVID-19 crisis, scale-appropriate machinery has become even more important for mitigating labor shortages. We work to facilitate the availability of scale-appropriate machinery not only so that farmers can buy and use equipment, but also by encouraging those who own machineries to become entrepreneurial service providers who offer efficient and mechanized land preparation, planting, irrigation, harvesting and post-harvesting to other farmers on an affordable fee-for-service basis.
This is a win-win situation for farmers who can’t access or afford the escalating costs of labor. In the COVID-19 crisis, these arrangements assist in responding to the labor crunch in locations where resource-poor farmers are most in need, and also allow farmers to get crucial work done while maintaining and encouraging social distancing.
Baudron: Over the past seven years, CIMMYT and its partners have fine-tuned technologies and developed delivery models — based on rural service providers supported by private sector companies — to scale the use of small machines in East and Southern Africa. These are profitable for both farmers and service providers and reduce labor requirements tremendously.
In Zimbabwe, we found that labor requirements were 15 times lower when establishing a maize field with a direct seeder pulled by a two-wheel tractor, and 23 times lower using a similar technology for establishing wheat in Rwanda, compared to the conventional method based on labor and draft power. A ton of maize that would take 12 people a full day to shell manually, can be shelled in one hour using a small double-cob sheller that costs about $300.
Jat: Rapid policy decisions by sub-national and national governments on facilitating more mechanized operations in labor intensive rice-wheat production regions will address labor availability issues while contributing to productivity enhancement of succeeding wheat crop in rotation, as well as overall system sustainability. Our ex-ante analysis on the implications of labor shortages in rice-wheat rotation in the western Indo-Gangetic plains due to COVID-19 indicates that adoption of scale-appropriate farm mechanization has the potential to stabilize the food production as well as reducing the income losses and air pollution surges in northwest India.
The situation in the regions each of you have mentioned is unique, but are there any global trends that you’ve noticed? And if so, can other regions learn from these localized experiences?
Krupnik: A huge part of what we do as a research and training institute is facilitate exchanges of information across continents and countries. Different types and designs of machinery that can be used in similar circumstances can be shared, as can business models supporting service providers.
Importantly, part of the concept of ‘scale-appropriate mechanization’ is also learning when and where machinery makes sense — where labor is not scarce and rural communities are highly dependent on income from labor to sustain their communities, some forms of mechanization may not be appropriate. We work to understand these dynamics and target the right machines in the right time and right places.
Van Loon: In addition to reducing pressure on available labor and alleviating drudgery, modern farm equipment tailored to the needs of smallholders can also increase competitiveness, as it allows for higher precision and efficiency.
In this sense, scale-appropriate mechanization can stimulate rural transformation incentivizing short and efficient value chains while ensuring stable food provision — aspects that have become essential to navigating the present crisis.
Has the current pandemic brought up any new perspectives in terms of how you consider labor and mechanization?
Baudron: We often look at yield and area planted in staple crops to assess the food security situation of a country during a particular year. This pandemic has shown us that we need to pay more attention to labor productivity. In many countries, policy-makers and development agents fear that mechanization will displace labor, but the dependency of staple crops on labor is a threat to food security, as we currently see in Africa and South Asia.
If the production of fruit, vegetables, cash crops, and so on will continue to depend on manual labor, it is essential in my view for critical tasks in the production of staples to be mechanized — particularly planting and harvesting. This will ensure the resilience of national food systems in the case of a future disruption similar to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cover photo: Establishment of demo trial in Nyanga, Zimbabwe. (Photo: CIMMYT/ZRBF)
About 25 years ago, Yoseph Beyene first heard about the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) from one of his professors, back when he was pursuing his undergraduate degree in Plant Science at Haramaya University in Ethiopia. “The professor, whom I regard as a great mentor, (…) always told me that if I ever got an opportunity to work at CIMMYT, I should not hesitate to take it up, as it was a great place to conduct maize breeding,” recollects Beyene, now a maize breeder at CIMMYT. He grew up in Alem Ketema, a village located 190 km north of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital.
In retrospect, he did not know this would change his perspective on how he viewed crops, especially maize, on smallholder farms. Like many other families in Alem Ketema, his family attended to their small farm to meet their food and nutritional needs. Most people practiced subsistence farming, intertwined with livestock keeping, on small plots that were typically less than 2 hectares. At the backyard of his family’s farm, different crops such as maize, sorghum and teff were grown. As a child, he never quite registered in his mind that farmers grew mainly recycled seed. “In hindsight, I can say that the yield of a crop such as maize was just about 1.5 tons per hectare at the time,” he reckons.
Such low yield potential meant feeding relatively large family sizes of about seven people was a tall order. It did not help that crops such as maize and wheat were frequently affected by diseases and pests and erratic rains, which diminished yields. It was not until his high school days when he had firsthand experience with high-yielding improved crop varieties. As part of the farm management class, he actively participated in the school’s farm management unit. He got to appreciate the yield variation between improved and local varieties, grown on the school plots. These improved seed, he quickly realized, were the ideal antidote to the low yield farmers obtained.
Struck by an epiphany
“This was like a eureka moment for me. When I realized that it was possible to improve and deliver desirable seed varieties that could double farmers’ yields, I decided to study plant breeding at the university. If only the farmers back in my village knew about the improved seed and adopted them at the time, it could not only have helped solve the problems of food insecurity but also bettered their livelihoods,” he ponders.
When he enrolled for a PhD in Plant Breeding and Genetics at the University of Pretoria, he did his research in highland maize in collaboration with CIMMYT in Ethiopia. Upon completion, he was appointed as a senior cotton breeder at South Africa’s Agricultural Research Council (ARC), where he worked for one and a half years.
“One day, I saw an advertisement in which CIMMYT was looking for a maize breeder. I applied, went for the interview and was happy to get the position. That was in 2008,” he says.
The right tool for the right variety
Biotic and abiotic stresses are becoming more frequent and vicious because of climate change and there is growing urgency to tackle them to avert future potential food crises.
Beyene’s current research focuses on developing high-yielding and climate-resilient maize inbred lines and hybrids for sub-Saharan Africa. He uses conventional and molecular breeding, including integration of novel tools and techniques, such as doubled haploid, and marker-assisted recurrent section and genomic selection. Over the years, he has developed at least 25 new drought-tolerant maize hybrids recommended for commercialization in Kenya, Mozambique, Uganda, South Africa and Tanzania. Currently, 23 seed companies have been engaged to produce and market the released hybrids through sub-licensing.
Presently, as the Regional Breeding Coordinator for Africa, he is responsible for assessing the progress of implementing product profile-based breeding, appropriate germplasm exchange within and across regional breeding hubs, and ascertaining the progress on new initiatives by regional breeding teams.
A long-term endeavor
Breeding is a costly, time consuming and complex exercise. “It takes at least 10 years from crossing to release using pedigree breeding because the hybrids should be evaluated in multiple years and tested in multiple locations, which increases costs and time of the breeding cycle. You have to appreciate the fact that you are not breeding for now but for the future,” he says.
“As a breeder, you have to keep testing new tools and techniques to make breeding more efficient. Yet, resources are not always constant but inadequate. Stresses are becoming more urgent and vicious, despite increased urgency in tackling them to avert a potential food crises,” he says.
To reduce the time and accelerate genetic gains, Beyene and his colleagues at CIMMYT are currently applying the genomic selection technique for maize breeding, using it to predict the performance of un-phenotyped genotypes at early stage of testing. He and his colleagues recently published their research comparing genomic selection with phenotypic selection, as used by CIMMYT’s maize breeding program in sub-Saharan Africa. They found that the use of genomic selection for yield under optimum and drought conditions in tropical maize can produce selection candidates with similar performance as those generated from conventional phenotypic selection, but at a lower cost. They concluded that this strategy should be effectively incorporated into maize breeding pipelines to enhance breeding program efficiency.
Breeding challenges notwithstanding, Beyene feels fulfilled whenever he sees a farmer has planted a variety that he helped breed. “The epitome of my inspiration is when there is a smile on their face because of the variety’s good performance on their farm,” he says.
Interacting with the farmers and seed companies provides an opportunity for him to learn, understand their varietal preferences as well as appreciate the impact that his work has on their operations. He is also actively engaged in building the capcity of public and private partners, and supervising master’s and doctoral students from various countries. He has published more than 50 articles in journals.
The life of a breeder is not as lonely and boring as some would think. Beyene creates time to be with his three children, playing with them and helping with their homework, taking them out for social events. He also dedicates time to watch football, reality television, comedy and drama with his family.
When a maize lethal necrosis (MLN) outbreak happened in Kenya in 2011, scientists knew they needed to act fast. This viral disease, new to Kenya, was decimating maize fields. Within a few years, the viral disease spread rapidly in eastern Africa, through both insect vectors and contaminated seeds. If the virus were to spread into southern or West Africa, it would spell disaster for the smallholder farmers across the continent who depended on maize as a staple crop and for their family’s income and livelihoods.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and its partners immediately took action to impose a strict seed quarantine and restrict the movement of seed between eastern Africa and other regions in Africa. In addition, they worked intensively on developing and disseminating improved maize cultivars with tolerance or resistance to MLN, undertook extensive surveillance efforts, and sensitized partners on the importance of producing and commercializing MLN-free seed.
Due to these efforts, in the last nine years MLN has not been reported in sub-Saharan Africa outside of eastern Africa.
On the occasion of a recent publication on Virus Research about how MLN was contained, we interviewed B.M. Prasanna, director of the Global Maize Program at CIMMYT and the CGIAR Research Program on Maize (MAIZE), to discuss the MLN success story, the global COVID-19 crisis, and the similarities in the challenge to tackle plant and human viral diseases.
What were some of the extreme measures CIMMYT had to take to stop the spread of MLN?
The first step that we had to take in the fight against MLN was to rigorously analyze seed for any possible contamination with MLN-causing viruses and restrict movement of seed from eastern Africa to southern Africa.
The second most important step was to sensitize the national partners and the commercial seed sector about the danger of seed contamination with MLN-causing viruses, and how seed contamination can lead to the proliferation or spread of the disease.
The third important step was to build a new MLN quarantine facility in Zimbabwe, in partnership with the National Plant Quarantine Institute. Only when that quarantine facility was functional in 2017, we reinitiated transfer of research material from CIMMYT’s breeding hub in Kenya to CIMMYT in Zimbabwe. Only when the materials were certified to be MLN-free both in Kenya and Zimbabwe, through plant-by-plant analysis using immunodiagnostic kits, the seed was multiplied and further distributed to partners. So, the principle of containment and effective management is extremely important, whether it is a plant viral disease or a human viral disease.
We must note here that in terms of scale and intensity, as well as global effects and implications, any plant disease, including MLN, cannot be compared with a pandemic like COVID-19, which has affected every aspect of our lives.
How do you think the COVID-19 pandemic is going to impact our food systems?
We are indeed in a grim situation. The pandemic will undoubtedly have a serious effect on food security.
Many countries which do not have enough food reserves or those where the food systems are vulnerable to shocks like this are suffering. The people’s capacity to procure inputs for agriculture, including seed, is going to be affected too, as the markets are affected. This is really a serious situation that we all should be concerned about. The CGIAR has an important role to play, in terms of working closely with national partners and mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on agriculture.
We should be particularly worried about farmers, especially smallholder farmers, who are quite vulnerable to the ongoing challenge. Even without COVID-19, agriculture in many developing countries worldwide has been already under distress. Small and marginal farmers were often unable to find a market for their produce and earn sufficient income to support their families. Their livelihoods are fragile, and vulnerable to climate change and volatile market prices. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is unfortunately compounding the crisis.
What lessons can agricultural research learn from this pandemic?
What do these pandemics or epidemics teach us? They remind us that systems need to be in place to prevent the proliferation of such diseases, whether it is plant diseases or animal diseases or human diseases. No country can be considered completely safe, and such diseases do not discriminate between a developed and a developing country, or the rich and the poor.
The second most important lesson is emergency preparedness. Whenever such devastating transboundary viral diseases show up, how quickly the country can respond — containing that infected area and not allowing the disease to spread, and then mitigating the damage systematically and quickly — is key. This is not the first time that a disease like MLN has emerged. There could be more serious viral or fungal diseases that could emerge in the future due to various reasons, including changing climates, international trade, movement of human beings, air currents, etc. There are multiple ways that diseases can go across continents, across countries within a continent, and within countries. Therefore, the key is how well we can capacitate the national systems to be able to proactively prevent, detect, and intervene very fast.
Another big lesson here for agricultural systems is that a problem that happens in some other continent cannot be ignored because you work in a different continent. What COVID-19 shows is that the world is far more connected than we think.
For you, what is the biggest takeaway from the MLN success story?
I won’t say it is still a complete success. Through intensive partnerships and efforts, we were able to prevent the disease from devastating maize production in millions of smallholder farmers’ fields in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2014, there has been no new country in Africa — outside eastern Africa — that has reported an outbreak of MLN. That, to me, is a tremendous success.
The work is still not over. The journey has to continue. And we still need to make sure that countries are continuously protected from devastating diseases like MLN. MLN is still not eradicated from eastern Africa. It may not be even possible to completely eradicate this disease, as the two viruses that together cause it can survive not just on maize but on multiple grasses. We can however contain the disease and limit its impact through continued efforts, like what we have done for the past 7 or 8 years. But if we lower our guard, there is a very high likelihood that the disease can still spread to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, especially the major maize-growing countries in southern Africa or West Africa. Efforts need to continue. So, let us continue to maintain a high vigil to protect the smallholders in Africa from transboundary diseases like MLN.
Read the full article on Virus Research:
Maize lethal necrosis (MLN): Efforts toward containing the spread and impact of a devastating transboundary disease in sub-Saharan Africa