Seed security is the first step towards food security. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) preserves 28,000 unique seed samples of maize and 150,000 of wheat at its genebank in Mexico.
The Global Seed Vault in Svalbard opened in 2008. Since then, CIMMYT has duplicated and deposited 50 million seeds — 170,000 samples of maize and wheat — at Svalbard.
This year, CIMMYT sent 24 boxes of seed, with 332 samples of maize and 15,231 samples of wheat.
Join these seeds on a journey, as they travel more than 8,000 km from CIMMYT’s genebank in Mexico to the Global Seed Vault in the Arctic.
A supermarket, rather than a museum
This treasure, kept in the global network of genebanks, is key to ensuring sustainable, nutritious agricultural systems for future generations.
The purpose of genebanks is not just to preserve seed, but to use its biodiversity to address the needs of the future — and the needs of today.
Climate change is already impacting resource-poor farmers and consumers in low- and middle-income countries. Researchers and breeders at CIMMYT are rolling out solutions to these challenges, based on the diverse genetic resources kept in the genebank. As a result, farmers can use new varieties that yield more, need less inputs, and are more tolerant to drought or heat.
Our internal estimates show that about 30% of maize and more than 50% of wheat grown worldwide can be traced to CIMMYT germplasm.
Humanity’s legacy
Maize and wheat originated about 10,000 years ago. Since then, it’s survived war, drought, diseases, migration, birds, low yields — and the hard choice between feeding children or planting again.
Keepers of genebanks around the world are only the depositors of this legacy, which belongs to all humanity. CIMMYT will continue to preserve these seeds and to make their biodiversity available to researchers and famers, to solve today’s and tomorrow’s most pressing issues.
Cover photo: A NordGen staff member brings a box of seed into the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway. (Photo: Thomas Sonne/Common Ground Media for NordGen)
An overview of the proposed ILRI scaling process. (Graphic: ILRI)
“Agricultural research for development is increasingly being held accountable to demonstrate that research goes beyond successful pilots,” said Iain Wright, deputy director general of research and development at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).
In a bid to scale impact of its research outputs, ILRI has recently undertaken a systematic review of the scaling tools and processes available to help guide and improve the organization’s efforts.
The Scaling Scan has been incorporated into a new scaling framework for ILRI projects and for the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock (Livestock CRP). The Scaling scan, developed in 2017 by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in collaboration with PPPLab at SNV, is one of three tools that have been identified as most suitable for the ILRI and CGIAR operational contexts.
“ILRI’s scaling framework applies the Scaling Scan and the USAID Scaling Pathway methodology before diving deep using the RTB/Wageningen Scaling Readiness methodology,” explained CIMMYT Scaling Coordinator Maria Boa. “It’s exciting because it aligns some of the best available tools to scale impact with a systems view.”
Designed for use by anyone involved in pro-poor and sustainable development programs looking to scale impact, the CIMMYT Scaling scan is found to be user-friendly and quick to help project implementation teams understand and define their scaling ambitions and asses their scaling environment. Though it is often applied as part of annual project review meetings, the tool can in fact be used at any stage of a project’s lifecycle. This helps stakeholders understand the multiple dimensions of scaling and the significant role nontechnical factors play in a scaling mindset.
CIMMYT shared lessons on how the methodology can be applied in a workshop setting and the Livestock CRP team has already used these to organize two workshops around improving productivity and incomes in Uganda’s pig value chain. The workshops, held in November 2019 and February 2020, brought together value chain actors, CRP researchers and project staff to better understand the multiple dimensions of scaling, develop realistic scaling goals, and identify key bottlenecks and opportunities using the Scaling Scan.
A new testing and learning platform for digital trust and transparency technologies — such as blockchain — in agri-food systems was launched at the Strike Two Summit in late February.
AgriFoodTrust debuted at the summit which brought together key agri-food system players to discuss how blockchain and related technologies can contribute to food safety, quality and sustainability, said Gideon Kruseman, an economist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), who co-founded the platform.
“Blockchain is often associated with the digital security that led to cryptocurrencies. However, growing research is providing evidence on its unique potential to bring greater efficiency, transparency and traceability to the exchange of value and information in the agriculture sector,” said Kruseman.
“Many of the wicked problems and seemingly insuperable challenges facing dynamic, complex agri-food system value chains, especially in low and middle-income countries, boil down to a lack of trust, transparency and reliable governance structures,” said the researcher who also leads the Socio-Economic Data Community of Practice of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data inAgriculture.
Future Food panelist speak at the Strike Two Summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo: The New Fork)
A blockchain is a ledger that is almost impossible to forge. It can be described as a data structure that holds transactional records and ensures security, transparency and decentralization. Technology may be at the foundation of the solutions, but technology is the easy part; solving the softer side has proven to be a seemingly insuperable challenge over the past decades, Kruseman explained.
Digital trust and transparency technologies can be used to improve governance structures and limit corruption in agri-food systems in low and middle income countries, said Marieke de Ruyter de Wildt, co-founder of AgriFoodTrust.
“This new generation of decentralized technologies is, in essence, improving governance structures. People often think it is about technology, but it’s not. It is about people and how we organize things.”
“These technologies are neutral, immutable and censorship resistant. You can mimic this if you think about rules without a ruler. Just imagine what opportunities arise when a system is incorruptible,” said de Ruyter de Wildt.
It is hoped, accessible via QR codes, for example, that the technology can be used to tackle challenges, such as preventing the sale of counterfeit seeds to smallholder farmers, ensuring the nutritional value of biofortified crop varieties and promoting the uptake of sustainable agricultural principles whilst improving the implementation and monitoring of international agreements related to agriculture.
“This is where the platform comes in as a knowledge base. The AgriFoodTrust platform sees researchers from CGIAR Centers and academia, such as Wageningen University, experiment with these technologies on top of other solutions, business models and partnerships to determine what works, how, when and for whom, in order to share that information,” Kruseman added.
Findings on the new platform will be used to build capacity on all aspects of the technologies and their application to ensure this technology is inclusive and usable.
Along with Kruseman, AgriFoodTrust co-founders include digital agriculture experts de Ruyter de Wildt, the Founder and CEO of The New Fork, and Chris Addison, Senior Coordinator of Data for Agriculture at CTA. Seed funding for the platform has been raised through CTA, the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture and the CGIAR Programs on MAIZE and WHEAT.
“AgriFoodTrust sets out to accelerate understanding about these technologies and fundamentally make food systems more integer and resilient,” explained de Ruyter de Wildt.
By 2050, farmers will need to grow enough diverse and nutritious food to feed 10 billion people on less land using less resources while faced with the challenges of a changing climate. This has led researchers to push for agricultural technologies that engender more inclusive, sustainable food systems. It is hoped that increased trust and transparency technologies can help overcome counterproductive incentives, poor governance structures, prevailing institutional arrangements and market failures.
The rising and shifting demand for wheat, with rapid urbanization and increasingly globalized food markets, is pushing farmers more than ever to produce high-quality grain, according to the scientist who leads wheat quality research in the world’s foremost publicly-funded wheat breeding program.
“Wheat quality is becoming more and more important, as the industrial production of bread and other wheat-based foods increases to meet the demands of city dwellers, working women, and wheat consumers in wheat-importing countries,” said Maria Itria Ibba, head of the Wheat Chemistry and Quality Laboratory at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
“Companies that produce and market food for such consumers demand high, consistent quality in grain they purchase and we have to help wheat farmers to meet stringent requirements.”
This is so important that CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program — whose contributions figure in more than half of the wheat varieties released worldwide — directly uses lab data on milling, processing and end-use quality to decide which bread and durum wheat lines to move forward in its breeding programs, according to Ibba.
“Assessing quality is a huge task, because wheat is used to make hundreds of different foods, including all kinds of leavened bread, flat breads, pastas, noodles and steamed bread,” said Ibba. “Our lab is an integral part of breeding, analyzing thousands of grain samples from thousands of wheat lines each year for nearly a dozen quality parameters.”
Cut out for quality
A native of Viterbo, Italy, Ibba has led the Wheat Chemistry and Quality Laboratory since 2019 and is uniquely qualified for the job, with a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology, a master’s degree in biotechnology for the safety and quality of agricultural products — both from the University of Tuscia, Viterbo — and a doctorate in crop science from the Washington State University. Her Ph.D. dissertation addressed “low-molecular-weight glutenin subunit gene family members and their relationship with wheat end-use quality parameters.”
With a mother who studied medicine and a father who worked at the Italian Space Agency, Ibba said that in school she always enjoyed science subjects such as biology and chemistry. “They were easy for me to understand and I really liked how, after studying them, I was able to explain and understand many things around me.”
Ibba said the biggest challenges for her and her lab team are to understand wheat quality needs and conduct faster and better analyses.
“Several of the tests we do are expensive, time-consuming, and require skilled personnel and significant amounts of grain,” she explained, citing the use of exotically named devices such as the “Quadrumat Senior mill,” the “mixograph,” and the “alveograph,” to list a few. “We’re continuously looking for novel methods that are quicker, use smaller samples of grain, and with lower costs.”
Understanding the biochemical and genetic bases of wheat grain and flour quality traits is key to this, according to Ibba, but wheat quality traits are so complex genetically that DNA markers are of little help in breeding. “We’ve begun to explore whole genome selection for wheat quality traits, in collaboration with Kansas State University, but this will never completely replace the laboratory tests.”
Let’s talk health and nutrition
A staple of tours for the hundreds of visitors that come each year to CIMMYT in Mexico, the wheat quality laboratory combines the razzle-dazzle of high-tech devices with hands-on, sensory attractions such as inflating dough balls and freshly baked test loaves.
Ibba’s work includes talking to visitors about wheat, its important history and role in human nutrition and food, and concerns in the popular media regarding wheat and health.
“I think people know more now about what gluten is and its importance, but there is still the need to talk about gluten and wheat so that people can make informed decisions based on scientific facts,” she said. “I was happy to see the recent article from CIMMYT on a review study which, among many other things, showed there was no scientific evidence for the idea that eating refined flour is bad for your health.”
“Wheat provides about 20 percent of calories and protein for more than 4.5 billion people in developing countries,” Ibba pointed out. “There’s an increasing focus on understanding and improving the nutritional quality of wheat and its products because of the greater overall interest in diets and in the nutritional value of diverse foods.”
Thokozile Ndhlela is a maize line development breeder with CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program, based in Zimbabwe. Her work mainly involves breeding for stress tolerant and nutritious maize varieties to boost food and nutrition security, especially in developing countries.
Gerald Blasch is a Crop Disease Geo-Spatial Data Scientist whose work focuses on research for development (R4D) of remote sensing and geospatial solutions for crop disease early warning systems. He holds a PhD in Agricultural Remote Sensing from Technical University Berlin, Germany, and an MSc in Physical Geography from University Regensburg, Germany.
Blasch has 13 years of research and consultancy experience on both international and national projects in the agriculture and development sectors of several countries (e.g. Australia, China, Germany, Mexico, and the UK). As researcher, he developed remote sensing and GIS tools for precision and conservation agriculture, digital soil mapping, and environmental monitoring during his Post-Doc (Newcastle University, UK) and PhD studies (GFZ Potsdam, Germany), and consultancy activities (CIMMYT, Mexico). As a GIS expert (GIZ, Germany; SEMARNAT, Mexico) he built and managed a GIS for waste management, including capacity building and knowledge transfer.
Sita Kumari, a farmer, stands on a maize field in Nepal. (Photo: C. de Bode/CGIAR)
The world is changing, and so is CGIAR. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, food systems — the way we grow, catch, transport, process, trade, and consume food — must be transformed, while meeting the challenges of climate change, and restoring the natural environment. The global pandemic further highlights the need for an integrated approach to food systems, and human, animal and environmental health.
In the face of these interdependent challenges, CGIAR, as the world’s largest public research network on food systems, is undergoing a dynamic transformation of its partnerships, knowledge, assets and global presence. Emerging as One CGIAR, it is sharpening its mission and impact focus to 2030, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. CGIAR is integrating management, policies, and services; finding new, more impactful ways of doing research; sharing and investing more, pooled funding; and unifying its governance, including creation of the One CGIAR Common Board.
CGIAR’s Nominations Committee invites applications from qualified individuals to serve as members of the One CGIAR Common Board. The anticipated appointment date is September 1, 2020. Board members will be central to the transformation of CGIAR and its mission to deliver on global goals. The role presents opportunities to work with leaders across the CGIAR System, forging new linkages and partnerships in pursuit of an innovative, vital agenda.
CGIAR is a global research partnership for a food-secure future. CGIAR science is dedicated to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resources and ecosystem services. Its research is carried out by 15 CGIAR Centers in close collaboration with hundreds of partners, including research institutes, civil society organizations, academia, development organizations and the private sector. www.cgiar.org
Of the 6,000 plant species that have been cultivated by humans, just nine of them account for 66% of cultivated crops, according to the FAO’s 2019 report from the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Of the 7,774 local breeds of livestock worldwide, 26% are in danger of becoming extinct.
That poses dangers for the robustness of the environment, the safety of our food supply chain, and even our potential exposure to pandemics, due to diseases that jump from animals to humans. It also makes our food less nutritious, less interesting—and less unique.
The COVID-19 crisis could offer a chance to reassess the way we eat—to revamp the diversity of our diets and our food systems, revisiting local and forgotten foods, particularly when it comes to fruits and vegetables.
A series of coincidences led Sylvanus Odjo to study agronomy. It was only after finishing his first degree that he learned that his namesake, Silvanus, was the Latin deity of forests and fields.
Spurred by a curiosity about the natural world, he spent several years working at the National Institute of Agriculture in his native Benin, before pursuing advanced degrees in Belgium, where he developed his interest in cereals research.
“Obviously by that point I knew about the CGIAR centers and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center,” he explains. “If you’re working on maize, you’ll know about CIMMYT.”
He joined the organization as a postdoctoral researcher in 2017 and now works as a postharvest specialist. He coordinates a network of platforms which evaluates and validates potential solutions and transfers them to farmers across Mexico and Latin America.
“All the projects I’m working on now have the same objective: finding ways to avoid and reduce postharvest losses.” These, Odjo estimates, can be as high as 40% in some parts of Mexico, with dramatic consequences for smallholder farmers whose food security is directly linked to the amount of grain they have. They are also the most likely to be affected by the effects of climate change.
“A lot of people think postharvest just means storage,” he points out, “but it actually encompasses everything from the moment of harvest and includes processes like drying, shelling, technical and economic activities.”
A drying specialist by training, Odjo now works across the entire postharvest system. There are two central components to his work. The first involves testing postharvest technologies to develop recommendations for farmers, conducting trials under controlled conditions on CIMMYT research stations and with local collaborators across Mexico and assessing how drying and storage technologies fare under different conditions. The second, and perhaps more challenging, is promoting the successful ones, such as hermetic grain storage bags, among farmers and providing training on how to use them appropriately.
“We see a lot of publications agreeing that we need to promote hermetic technologies, which is true.” The question, Odjo asks, is how to do it. “How can we succeed in making a solution available to farmers? And once that has happened, how do we convince them to use it? Those are big questions which people were asking 50 years ago but they’re still being discussed today.”
Odjo demonstrates the use of a handheld grain moisture tester in Comitán de Dominguez, Chiapas, Mexico. (Photo: Juan Carlos Reynoso)
Finding answers to the big questions
“The potential solutions sound so simple, but when you actually try to implement these things it can be very complex.”
Odjo can reel off a list of postharvest interventions which seem straightforward initially but fail at the moment of implementation. Farmers might be instructed to harvest their grain at a particular time, which turns out to conflict with the timing of an important traditional ceremony, which cannot be rescheduled. Elsewhere they may be encouraged to avoid reducing moisture levels by purchasing a dryer but lack the resources to do so.
Much of Odjo’s work involves conducting research into the process of technology transfer and the scaling of postharvest technologies, working with a number of projects in Mexico to find the most efficient ways of training farmers and providing them with the tools they need to use improved practices and technologies.
“What we’re looking for is the right technology for each farmer,” he explains. “Because the conditions in the highlands of Guanajuato are not the same as in coastal Yucatán, or any of the other locations we work in.” Hermetic technology has been proven to be effective in most conditions, but the choice to use hermetic silos, hermetic bags, or a cocoon storage container ultimately depends on farmer preferences and the specific conditions in their local area. “We noticed, for example, that in the highlands pests tend to pose less of a threat to stored grain, so we need to use a different strategy than we would at sea level, where humidity can significantly increase the risk of grain becoming contaminated.”
Odjo and his team have also noted that in Mexico, although many postharvest activities such as shelling are led by women, men are more likely to attend farmer trainings, which makes it harder to ensure that they are reaching their target demographic. “Gender has emerged as a key parameter that we need to take into account, so we’re working with an excellent gender specialist at CIMMYT to find ways of making sure we transfer knowledge and technologies efficiently.”
While it can be challenging coordinating with so many different stakeholders, each with their distinct priorities and interests, Odjo is adamant that postharvest research can only be successful when it is fully interdisciplinary and collaborative. Though farmers are their core audience, he and his team make sure they work with extension agents, government actors, researchers and development practitioners to find solutions. “I can’t do anything alone so I’m open to collaboration,” he adds. “We always need fresh ideas.”
“A lot of people think postharvest just means storage, but it actually encompasses everything from the moment of harvest and includes processes like drying, shelling, technical and economic activities,” Odjo explains. (Photo: Francisco Alarcón/CIMMYT)
Sharing knowledge in 140 characters
Up until quite recently, Odjo was reluctant to join Twitter because he felt that he had nothing to share. It was only when colleagues encouraged him to use social media as a platform for discussing postharvest issues that he discovered the app is an effective way of sharing recommendations directly with farmers and agricultural service providers. “One of my lecturers used to say that you can understand something if you’re capable of explaining it to a kindergarten-aged child. If you don’t succeed, it means you haven’t understood.”
“That’s become a part of my job that I really enjoy: figuring out how to share research and results of investigations with different audiences in a simple manner.”
His newfound social media presence has also proved useful for connecting with researchers on a global level. In late 2019, researchers in Laos interested in learning about postharvest technologies reached out to Odjo, who was able to arrange for colleagues to travel to the country and share practices developed with local extension agents and blacksmiths in Mexico. “And do you know how they found me? Through my Twitter account.”
Moving forward, Odjo hopes to extend the scope of his activities beyond Latin America and carry out more knowledge exchange with his peers across the world. “In research, a lot of people are working on the same topics, but we don’t always share the information. I’m open to sharing my experience, because I’m sure I can learn a lot from others that will be useful for my job.”
Kenya in particular stands out as a case study he can learn from, where a high incidence of aflatoxins in maize, heavy government intervention and fierce market competition among providers of hermetic bags have allowed for the successful scaling of postharvest technologies. “It would be great to be able to analyze their scaling process and learn from it. Not to replicate it entirely, because obviously the conditions aren’t the same, but there will undoubtedly be lessons we can take and apply here in Mexico and Latin America.”
Crop pest outbreaks are a serious threat to food security worldwide. Swarms of locusts continue to form in the Horn of Africa, threatening food security and farmer livelihoods ahead of a new cropping season. The devastating fall armyworm continues cause extensive damage in Africa and South Asia.
With almost 40% of food crops lost annually due to pests and diseases, plants resistance to insects is more important than ever. Last month, a group of wheat breeders and entomologists came together for the 24th Biannual International Plant Resistance to Insects (IPRI) Workshop, held at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) global headquarters outside Mexico City.
Watch Mike Smith, entomologist and distinguished professor emeritus at Kansas State University explain the importance of working with economists to document the value of plant insect resistance research, and why communication is crucial for raising awareness of the threat of crop pests and insect resistance solutions.
A farmer weeds a maize field in Pusa, Bihar state, India. The productivity and food security of small-scale farmers requires their presence and activity in the field and in markets, both of which could be off-limits under the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: M. DeFreese/CIMMYT)
Alarmed by the risk of global and regional food shortages triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, a coalition of businesses, farmers’ groups, industry, non-governmental organizations, and academia has called on world leaders urgently to maintain open trade of their surplus food products.
Published by the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) on April 9, 2020, and signed by 60 experts, the call to action urges world leaders to keep food supplies flowing, specially support vulnerable people, and finance sustainable, resilient food systems.
Covered by major world media, the declaration encourages governments to treat food production, processing, and distribution as an essential sector — similar to public health care — and thus to support continued, safe, and healthy activities by farmers and others who contribute to the sector, according to Martin Kropff, director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and a signatory of the call to action.
“Consumers in low-income countries face the greatest threat of food insecurity,” said Kropff. “Their tenuous access to nutritious food is jeopardized when surplus food-producing nations choose to close trade as a defensive measure.”
Kropff added that many households in low-income countries depend on agriculture or related activities for their food and livelihoods. Their productivity and food security are compromised by illness or restrictions on movement or working.
“The call to action resonates with the findings of a landmark 2015 study by Lloyd’s of London,” he explained. “That work highlighted the fragility of global food systems in the event of coinciding shocks, an outcome that seems entirely possible now, given the health, cultural, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
At the same time, the work of CIMMYT, other CGIAR centers, and their partners worldwide helps to stabilize food systems, according to Kropff.
“Our research outputs include high-yielding, climate-resilient crop varieties and more productive, profitable and sustainable farming methods,” he said. “These give farmers — and especially smallholders — the ingredients for more efficient and effective farming. They are grounded in reality through feedback from farmers and local partners, as well as socioeconomic studies on markets and value chains for food production, processing, and distribution.”
“Today, 7.8 billion humans exploit almost each and every ecosystem of the planet. Livestock have followed humans in most of these ecosystems and are now far more numerous than wild vertebrates,” Frederic Baudron, a systems agronomist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, said in an interview. For example, there are 4.7 billion cattle, pigs, sheep and goats and 23.7 billion chickens on Earth. “We live on an increasingly ‘cultivated planet’, with new species assemblages and new opportunities for pathogens to move from one species to another.”
However, the biodiversity crisis is seldom considered a global issue and often not a pressing one, and conservationists say it isn’t written about as often as it should be. “Media coverage for the biodiversity crisis is eight-times lower than for the climate crisis”, according to Baudron. “We need to reduce the frequency of pandemics like COVID-19 by conserving and restoring biodiversity globally, most crucially in disease hotspots.”
A woman sells maize at the market in Sidameika Tura, Arsi Negele, Ethiopia. (Photo: Peter Lowe/CIMMYT)
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views or position of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
While all eyes are on Lombardy, Madrid, New York and Wuhan, what do we know about the impact of COVID-19 on the rural poor and on food security in developing countries? How can the impact of the crisis be moderated? What positive breakthroughs could be provoked by this shock to move us into a better “new normal”? What can donors and implementing organizations do to support low- and middle-income countries during and beyond this crisis?
Members of the Agriculture and Rural Development working group of the international Scaling Up community of practice held a virtual meeting to discuss these questions and how scaling-up innovations could help to recover from the current crisis and mitigate future ones.
Poor rural communities are particularly vulnerable
When it comes to a highly contagious disease, being in a rural area sounds better than being in a busy city, but that is a deceptive impression. Smallholder farmers often are older than average and hence more vulnerable to the virus, and they have less access to health services.
They also depend on field laborers that are not able to travel from surrounding villages to help with planting, weeding and harvesting. To process crops, smallholder farmers need to transport crops to processing centers, which may be closed, as are the markets where they obtain agricultural inputs or sell farm products. Large international agrobusiness firms, which supply inputs and purchase local famers’ products may withdraw, at least temporarily, from the rural economies. There are already reports of farmers feeding cattle strawberries and broccoli in India, as they are unable to get their goods to the market.
Most farmers also depend on non-farm and off-farm activities for their livelihoods, as they may be field laborers for other farmers, work in the processing industry or work in construction. Interrupted transportation and closures pose serious challenges to maintain safe business continuity throughout the rural economy. The risk is not only that immediate rural production, food deliveries, exports, employment and incomes will collapse, but also that planting for next year’s crops will be disrupted.
It is key to differentiate between global and local supply chains, which will suffer in different ways. For example, in Uganda, supermarkets are open but small, informal markets are closed. In past crises, governments have focused on the survival of global value chains over local ones. Small, rural businesses are more likely to close permanently than large international ones.
Globally, international support for agriculture and rural development has been lagging in recent years. Today, the international support from aid agencies and NGOs is interrupted, as travels are restricted and community meetings are prohibited. With increased donor attention to a domestic and international health crisis, aid for rural communities may drop precipitously.
Men transport wheat straw on donkey karts in Ethiopia’s Dodula district. (Photo: Peter Lowe/CIMMYT)
Opportunities for an improved “new normal” as we respond to the crisis
The short-term response to help minimize the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the rural poor is critical, but we also need to support the shaping of a “new normal” where rural food systems are resilient, profitable and inclusive for poor rural communities. Members of the Scaling Up community of practice explored various ideas.
First, the COVID-19 pandemic could present opportunities to break silos and show how closely health and agriculture are related.
“COVID-19 cuts across sectors and jurisdictions in ways that single organizations and established governance structures are ill-equipped to accommodate,” said Larry Cooley, Scaling Expert and Founder and President Emeritus of Management Systems International (MSI)
For example, rural agricultural extension networks could be used to disseminate information on health awareness and education around COVID-19 and collect data on local impacts. This may cause and provide relief in the short term, but may also provide opportunities for collaboration in the long run.
“Our agricultural networks go deep into the rural areas and we are training our agri-entrepreneurs in India to disseminate health messages, products and services to help address COVID-19,” said Simon Winter, Executive Director of the Syngenta Foundation.
“At the African Development Bank we are providing emergency relief finance and re-purposing funding to have a link with COVID-19,” said Atsuko Toda, the bank’s Director of Agricultural Finance and Rural Development.
Second, a “new normal” could also mean an even stronger independence from externally funded projects, experts and solutions to more local ownership and expertise in rural areas, something that the community of practice has been promoting strongly. We could help to support more autonomy of the farmer, a strong local market and scale-up local value chains. Strengthening the capacity of small and medium enterprises linking farmers to urban markets could help ensure stability in future economic shocks.
“Governments and donor ‘projects’ looked too much at export and global value chains. I see great opportunities to scale up local and regional input and output value chains that benefit local farmers and small and medium enterprises,” said Margret Will, expert on value chains.
Third, the COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to accelerate the scaling of innovations.
“Lack of access to labor could be disrupting harvesting and planting in our Feed the Future countries, accelerating an already predominant trend of migration, especially among the young, to urban areas. We see a looming need for mechanization of farms at scale, using mini-tillers, planters, harvesters and other time- and labor-saving equipment,” said Mark Huisenga, Senior Program Manager for the USAID Bureau for Resilience and Food Security.
Masimba Mawire collects bare maize cobs after removing the grain using a mechanized maize sheller in Zimbabwe. (Photo: Matthew O’Leary/CIMMYT)
Rural communities that use more ecological intensive practices, such as conservation agriculture and push-pull farming or safe storage practices are less dependent on external inputs and labor.
The current crisis forces us to use digital communication systems, replace human work with digital tools where possible and use technology to help target interventions. Both the public and private sector could build on this opportunity to invest in increased access to internet, electricity and other digital resources, including in impoverished areas. All these technological innovations can help farmers to better cope with the constraints of COVID-19 and any future crises or stresses to the food system, while also making agriculture more productive and more attractive to the young.
“The pandemic creates an opportunity to accelerate the use of digital technologies in smallholder agriculture, not only for extension advice but to crowdsource information about COVID-19 impacts,” said Julie Howard, Senior Advisor for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Finally, COVID-19 will change our global governance system, and the agriculture, research and development sector has a role to play in this transformation. A systems change must focus on dietary diversity and food safety and security, paying attention to the rural poor in low- and middle-income countries. We can work together to scale cross-sector platforms to build solid networks and scale-up innovations to strengthen sustainable and resilient food systems.
Systems change beyond the agricultural sector, sustainability through local ownership and uptake of innovations that support profitable and resilient agricultural and related rural activities are key components of how the Scaling Up Community of Practice approaches scaling. A systems change is imminent, and it is important to support a transformation in a direction where local markets, rural labor and regional economies come out stronger in the long term. This requires vision, expertise, mobilization of resources, information sharing and crowdsourced leadership, and the network of scaling experts can contribute to this.
The Agriculture and Rural Development working group of the international Scaling Up community of practice is made up of individuals from more than 100 official donors, foundations, think tanks, research and development organizations united by their interest in scaling the impact of innovations on food security and rural poverty. Areas of particular interest for the group include designing for scale, using scaling frameworks, learning about scaling, responsible scaling, sustainability and system thinking. Members of the working group include professionals with vast experience from the field, and the group explicitly tries to learn from the application of complex concepts such as sustainability, systems change and scaling in real world settings by local actors. In addition to quarterly virtual meetings, the working group encourages and supports exchanges among its members on a variety of subjects. Participation in, and management of, the Agriculture and Rural Development working group is done on a purely voluntary basis.
About the Authors:
Lennart Woltering — Scaling catalyst at CIMMYT and chair of the Agriculture and Rural Development working group.
Johannes Linn — Non-resident Senior Fellow at Brookings and former Vice President of the World Bank.
Maria Boa — Scaling coordinator at CIMMYT and secretary of the Agriculture and Rural Development working group
Mary Donovan — Communications Consultant at CIMMYT.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views or position of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
While the world’s attention is focused on controlling COVID-19, evidence points at the biodiversity crisis as a leading factor in its emergence. At first glance, the two issues might seem unrelated, but disease outbreaks and degraded ecosystems are deeply connected. Frédéric Baudron, systems agronomist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and Florian Liégeois, virologist at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) share their insights on the current COVID-19 crisis and the link between biodiversity loss and emerging infectious diseases.
What trends are we seeing with infectious diseases like COVID-19?
We see that outbreaks of infectious diseases are becoming more frequent, even when we account for the so-called “reporting bias”: surveillance of such events becoming better with time and surveillance being better funded in the North than in the South.
60% of infectious diseases are zoonotic, meaning that they are spread from animals to humans and 72% of these zoonoses originate from wildlife. COVID-19 is just the last in a long list of zoonoses originating from wildlife. Other recent outbreaks include SARS, Ebola, avian influenza and swine influenza. As human activities continue to disturb ecosystems worldwide, we are likely to see more pathogens crossing from wildlife to humans in the future. This should serve as a call to better manage our relationship with nature in general, and wildlife in particular.
Researchers in Zimbabwe enter the cave dwelling of insectivorous bats (Hipposideros caffer) to conduct fecal sampling for viral research. (Photo: Florian Liégeois/IRD)
Why are we seeing more cases of diseases crossing from animals to humans? Where are they coming from?
Evidence points to bushmeat trade and consumption as the likely driver for the emergence of COVID-19. The emergence of SARS and Ebola was also driven by bushmeat consumption and trade. However, when looking at past outbreaks of zoonoses caused by a pathogen with a wildlife origin, land use changes, generally due to changes in agricultural practices, has been the leading driver.
Pathogens tends to emerge in well known “disease hotspots,” which tend to be areas where high wildlife biodiversity overlaps with high population density. These hotspots also tend to be at lower latitude. Interestingly, many of these are located in regions where CIMMYT’s activities are concentrated: Central America, East Africa and South Asia. This, in addition to the fact that agricultural changes are a major driver of the emergence of zoonoses, means that CIMMYT researchers may have a role to play in preventing the next global pandemic.
Smallholders clear forests for agriculture, but they also have an impact on forests through livestock grazing and fuelwood harvesting, as on this picture in Munesa forest, Ethiopia. (Photo: Frederic Baudron/CIMMYT)
How exactly does biodiversity loss and land use change cause an increase in zoonotic diseases?
There are at least three mechanisms at play. First, increased contact between wildlife and humans and their livestock because of encroachment in ecosystems. Second, selection of wildlife species most able to infect humans and/or their livestock — often rodents and bats — because they thrive in human-dominated landscapes. Third, more pathogens being carried by these surviving wildlife species in simplified ecosystems. Pathogens tend to be “diluted” in complex, undisturbed, ecosystems.
The fast increase in the population of humans and their livestock means that they are interacting more and more frequently with wildlife species and the pathogens they carry. Today, 7.8 billion humans exploit almost each and every ecosystem of the planet. Livestock have followed humans in most of these ecosystems and are now far more numerous than wild vertebrates: there are 4.7 billion cattle, pigs, sheep and goats and 23.7 billion chickens on Earth! We live on an increasingly “cultivated planet,” with new species assemblages and new opportunities for pathogens to move from one species to another.
Wildlife trade and bushmeat consumption have received a lot of attention as primary causes of the spread of these viruses. Why has there been so little discussion on the connection with biodiversity loss?
The problem of biodiversity loss as a driver of the emergence of zoonoses is a complex one: it doesn’t have a simple solution, such as banning wet markets in China. It’s difficult to communicate this issue effectively to the public. It’s easy to find support for ending bushmeat trade and consumption because it’s easy for the public to understand how these can lead to the emergence of zoonoses, and sources of bushmeat include emblematic species with public appeal, like apes and pangolins. Bushmeat trafficking and consumption also gives the public an easy way to shift the blame: this is a local, rather than global, issue and for most of us, a distant one.
There is an inconvenient truth in the biodiversity crisis: we all drive it through our consumption patterns. Think of your annual consumption of coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar, textiles, fish, etc. But the biodiversity crisis is often not perceived as a global issue, nor as a pressing one. Media coverage for the biodiversity crisis is eight times lower than for the climate crisis.
The Unamat forest in Puerto Maldonado, Madre de Dios department, Peru. (Photo: Marco Simola/CIFOR)
Agriculture is a major cause of land use change and biodiversity loss. What can farmers do to preserve biodiversity, without losing out on crop yields?
Farming practices that reduce the impact of agriculture on biodiversity are well known and form the foundation of sustainable intensification, for which CIMMYT has an entire program. A better question might be what we can do collectively to support them in doing so. Supportive policies, like replacing subsidies by incentives that promote sustainable intensification, and supportive markets, for example using certification and labeling, are part of the solution.
But these measures are likely to be insufficient alone, as a large share of the global food doesn’t enter the market, but is rather consumed by the small-scale family farmers who produce it.
Reducing the negative impact of food production on biodiversity is likely to require a global, concerted effort similar to the Paris Agreements for climate. As the COVID-19 pandemic is shocking the world, strong measures are likely to be taken globally to avoid the next pandemic. There is a risk that some of these measures will go too far and end up threatening rural livelihoods, especially the most vulnerable ones. For example, recommending “land sparing” — segregating human activities from nature by maximizing yield on areas as small as possible — is tempting to reduce the possibility of pathogen spillover from wildlife species to humans and livestock. But food production depends on ecosystem services supported by biodiversity, like soil fertility maintenance, pest control and pollination. These services are particularly important for small-scale family farmers who tend to use few external inputs.
How can we prevent pandemics like COVID-19 from happening again in the future?
There is little doubt that new pathogens will emerge. First and foremost, we need to be able to control emerging infectious diseases as early as possible. This requires increased investment in disease surveillance and in the health systems of the countries where the next infectious disease is most likely to emerge. In parallel, we also need to reduce the frequency of these outbreaks by conserving and restoring biodiversity globally, most crucially in disease hotspots.
Farming tends to be a major driver of biodiversity loss in these areas but is also a main source of livelihoods. The burden of reducing the impact of agriculture on biodiversity in disease hotspots cannot be left to local farmers, who tend to be poor small-scale farmers: it will have to be shared with the rest of us.
Cover photo: Forests in the land of the Ese’eja Native Community of Infierno, in Peru’s Madre de Dios department. (Photo: Yoly Gutierrez/CIFOR)
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