Nancy Wawira stands among ripening maize cobs of high yielding, drought-tolerant maize varieties on a demonstration farm in Embu County, Kenya. Involving young people like Wawira helps to accelerate the adoption of improved stress-tolerant maize varieties. (Photo: Joshua Masinde/CIMMYT)
Since the 1980s, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) have spearheaded the development and deployment of climate-smart maize in Africa.
This game-changing work has generated massive impacts for smallholder farmers, maize consumers, and seed markets in the region. It also offers a blueprint for CGIAR’s new 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy, which proposes a systems transformation approach for food, land and water systems that puts climate change at the center of its mission.
Over the course of the 10-year run of the first iteration of this collaborative work on climate-adaptive maize, the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) project, CIMMYT and IITA partnered with dozens of national, regional, and private sector partners throughout sub-Saharan Africa to release around 160 affordable maize varieties. This month, CGIAR recognizes climate-smart maize as one of the standout 50 innovations to have emerged from the institution’s first half-century of work.
Game changer
Maize’s importance as a food crop in sub-Saharan Africa is hard to overstate. So are the climate change-driven challenges it faces.
It accounts for almost one third of the region’s caloric intake. It is grown on over 38 million hectares, primarily under rainfed conditions. Around 40% of this area faces occasional drought stress. Another 25% suffers frequent drought and crop losses reaching 50%.
Drought-tolerant maize stabilized production under drought-stress conditions. Recent studies show that farmers growing drought-tolerant maize varieties in dry years produced over a half ton more maize per hectare than those growing conventional varieties — enough maize to support a family of six for nine months.
Such drastic results fed increased demand for improved, climate-adaptive maize seed in sub-Saharan Africa, thus strengthening local commercial seed markets and helping drought-tolerant maize varieties reach an increasing share of climate-vulnerable farmers.
Today, approximately 8.6 million farmers have benefitted from CIMMYT- and IITA-derived climate-adaptive maize varieties in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions have risen above the poverty line.
In addition to drought-tolerance, CIMMYT- and IITA-derived climate-adaptive maize varieties have been developed to tolerate multiple climate-driven stresses and to provide improved nutritional outcomes through biofortification with essential nutrients such as provitamin A and zinc.
The task ahead
In his recently published book, How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe, Bill Gates says “no other organization has done more than CGIAR to ensure that families — especially the poorest — have nutritious food to eat. And no other organization is in a better position to create the innovations that will help poor farmers adapt to climate change in the years ahead.”
CGIAR’s new strategic orientation is an important step towards making good on that potential. CIMMYT and IITA’s longstanding work on climate-smart maize offers an important blueprint for the kinds of bold, comprehensive, and collaborative research for development initiatives such a strategy could empower.
As CIMMYT and IITA directors general Martin Kropff and Nteranya Sanginga note in a recent op-ed, “The global battle against climate change and all its interconnected impacts requires a multisectoral approach to formulate comprehensive responses.”
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of Philip Pardey and do not necessarily reflect the official views or position of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
Working with national agricultural research centers (NARS), CGIAR centers, including the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), have played a pivotal role in staving off the last global food crisis, mainly through enhancing the yields of staple food crops like cereals.
A new report, commissioned by the Supporters of Agricultural Research (SoAR) Foundation and authored by experts from the University of California, Davis, the University of Minnesota and North Dakota State University shows that over the past five decades, CGIAR investment has generated returns of 10 times the amount invested.
We caught up with co-author Philip Pardey, a professor at the University of Minnesota and Director of the university’s GEMS Informatics Center, to discuss the report’s implications, the importance of collaboration between NARS and CGIAR, and why investment in agricultural research and development (R&D) is needed now more than ever.
According to the report, CGIAR investment has returned a benefit-cost ratio of 10:1. How does this compare to other government investments?
A benefit-cost ratio of 10:1 means that on average, a dollar invested today brings a future return equivalent to $10 in present-day value. This is high: any ratio over the threshold of 1:1 justifies investment.
This indicates that governments — and others who invest in CGIAR and related public food and agricultural R&D — would have profited society by doing more agricultural R&D compared with the investment opportunities normally available to them. Opportunities for investment in other national and global public goods, like education and infrastructure, might also have yielded very high returns, but there is no comparable evidence that those other opportunities yielded similar return on investments.
Drawing on the findings of this report, and other related work, we conclude that the economic evidence justifies at least a doubling of overall investments in public food and agricultural R&D.
The report shows evidence of massive underinvestment in agricultural research and development (R&D) in past years. Why is that?
As we show in the report, inflation adjusted CGIAR funding has declined sharply by around 25% in the past few years. There is nothing in the economic evidence that justifies this scaling back.
Some commentators have suggested that the easy gains from agricultural R&D have already been made and that the historical returns-to-research evidence is no longer representative of the returns to more recent R&D. However, the empirical evidence refutes that notion. For example, a 2019 study from Rao et al. showed that the contemporary returns of agricultural R&D are as high as ever.
What are the risks of continuing on this path of underinvestment in agricultural R&D?
In the second half of the 20th century, global food supply grew faster than demand and real food prices fell significantly, alleviating hunger and poverty for hundreds of millions around the world. Whether or not that pattern can be repeated in the first half of the 21st century will depend crucially on investments in agricultural R&D, including investments made through CGIAR.
Global demand for food is projected to grow by 70% from 2010 to 2050. Simply meeting that increased demand will call for transformative innovations in agriculture to adapt to a changing climate, combat co-evolving pests and diseases, and increase productivity of a fairly fixed land base and a shrinking supply of agricultural water. To make food abundant and affordable for the increasingly urban, poorest of the poor demands doing much more — and much better — than simply keeping up. If adequate investments in agricultural R&D are absent, even the odds of keeping up look increasingly questionable.
Your report shows that returns are a joint effort between NARS and CGIAR. Can you elaborate on that?
The impact evidence we reviewed for our study made clear that the success of CGIAR research is inextricably intertwined with research undertaken by national programs. In fact, this national-international R&D connectedness makes it difficult to figure out what share of the overall benefits from research are attributable to CGIAR or national innovation systems.
CGIAR has appropriately shifted its attention to low-income countries that are still heavily dependent on agriculture for livelihoods and food security. These also tend to have lower national R&D capacities and more fragile innovation systems, as well as limited, albeit emerging, private sector capabilities to support their food and agricultural sectors.
Supporting the evolution of agricultural innovation systems within CGIAR’s target economies requires doubling down on technology discovery, adaptation and delivery activities.
Philip Pardey at the University of Minnesota, USA. (Photo: InSTePP/University of Minnesota)
How can CGIAR better meet current global food challenges?
CGIAR has been demonstrably successful as an international instrument of technology discovery and in enhancing the international transfer, or spillover, of these new technologies. Tackling longer term agricultural technology challenges has been a key part of past successes.
However, a significant share of the funding for the CGIAR appears to have shifted away from the more strategic development of international public innovation goods to more localized economic development activities with a technology component. For example, the share of unencumbered CGIAR funding shrank from around 80% in 1971 to 50% in 2000, and since 2010 has plummeted to very low levels. The impact evidence provides little support for the notion that this shift in funding, which often implies a greater emphasis on more localized and shorter-term activities, is a high payoff strategy that best leverages CGIAR’s comparative advantages.
As it continually repositions its role as a source of international public innovation goods targeted to agriculturally dependent low-income countries, CGIAR will need to rethink how it partners with the public agencies, universities and private research entities that are the major source of innovations in food and agriculture.
When CGIAR was founded, a large share of the world’s agricultural R&D was done by public agencies in rich countries. Now the agriculturally large, middle-income countries spend on par with the rich countries, and the innovation landscape in rich and many middle-income countries is increasingly dominated by private firms. This comes with new partnership opportunities for CGIAR, but also new challenges, not least given the increasingly proprietary nature of the innovations and data that are driving developments in the food and agricultural sectors.
In your report you have documented clear evidence to support investment in agricultural R&D. What are the next steps in engaging national governments and decision makers to get agricultural R&D back on their agendas?
Today, as in the past, funding streams for CGIAR research are in decline and under threat. This mirrors a pattern of declining public support over recent decades for agricultural R&D conducted by national programs in many of the world’s richer countries.
However, public expectations about the roles of government to address glaring market failures may be realigning. For instance, the COVID-19 crisis exposed weakness in many public health systems, with calls for renewed and hopefully sustained, long-term investments in these public programs. COVID has also revealed the fragility of food supply systems, even in rich countries. The tide of public opinion also seems to be turning regarding the growing risks associated with climate change.
Evidence-based efforts to communicate the inter-relatedness between climate, public health and agriculture risks, and the role of innovation in reducing these growing risks over the decades ahead is critical to right-sizing and realigning the public roles in agricultural R&D.
Just as strong public investments play a crucial and complimentary role regarding significant private investments in health research, so too does the basic and pre-competitive research, undertaken with public funding, prime the pump for the growing private roles in agricultural innovation.
And even as the worldwide demand for more diversified diets continues to increase, demand for staple crops such as wheat and maize will also continue to grow and will remain crucial to securing favourable nutrition and food security outcomes in the decades ahead. Innovations in agriculture are hard won, and there are long lags (often a decade or more) between spending on agricultural R&D and getting new crop technologies in the hands of farmers. Thus there is a real sense of urgency to revitalize the investments in agricultural R&D required to produce the innovations that are needed now more than ever to sustainably feed the world.
Philip Pardey is a Professor of Applied Economics and Director of the GEMS Informatics Center, a joint venture of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS) and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI), both at the University of Minnesota.
Post-harvest losses — which can range between 10-20% in major cereals — cause not only the loss of economic value of the food produced, but also the waste of scarce resources such as labor, land, and water, as well as non-renewable resources such as fertilizer and energy.
“High postharvest losses imply reduced grain yield, but with the same total greenhouse gas emission,” says Rabé Yahaya, a CIM/GIZ Integrated Expert working at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). “Reducing these losses reduces the yield-scaled global warming potential — total greenhouse gas emission per kilogram of grain — and contributes to climate change mitigation, as well as food security.”
A significant proportion of these losses are caused by late harvest due to labor shortages, with crops languishing in the field before farmers can retrieve them. Small and medium-sized machinery may seem like the answer, but many one or two-axe machines are often unable to reach the inner sections of rice and wheat fields because of limited road access, or the fact that they are simply too heavy to carry.
“As mechanized land preparation works outwards, inner fields get ready for harvest first, but without any applicated technical solution,” he explains.
Could motorized scythes be the answer? Yahaya thinks so.
The other scythe
Motorized scythes are hand-operated tools used for mowing grass or reaping crops. Though largely replaced by horse-drawn and tractor-mounted implements, they are still commonly used in some areas of Asia and Europe.
Models specifically adapted for harvesting rice and wheat have been commercially available in Africa for over two decades and currently sell for $150-350, presenting the lowest initial investment cost of all engine-driven solutions on the market. The motor scythe also boasts the lowest harvest cost per hectare and is portable enough to reach inner fields.
Despite its relative affordability, uptake in much of West Africa has been slow, as many farmers have found the 10kg machinery too heavy for sustained use.
“Studies carried out in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire and Mali show that this rapid fatigue is caused by incorrect handling of the machinery, including flawed posture,” Yahaya explains. “This is simply because most operators have never undertaken official training for operating the tool.”
In a bid to address this challenge, Yahaya has been collaborating with Elliott Dossou, Sali Atanga Ndindeng and Ernst Zippel — all scientists at AfricaRice — to design and test potential solutions. Their proposal for the development of a Service Provider Harvest (SPH) model has been shortlisted for the GIZ Innovation Fund 2020 award, from a GIZ/BMZ-supported Innovation Fund.
Ernst Zippel, CIM/GIZ Integrated Expert at AfricaRice, presents on the reduction of postharvest losses through correct usage of motor scythes. (Video: AfricaRice)
Cut for service
The approach focuses heavily on capacity development, with an initial nucleus group of trainers taking the lead on activities such as recruiting and contracting service providers, providing training on harvesting and threshing, supporting aftersales services such as machine maintenance and repair, and helping to determine the optimum harvest time.
Under the proposed model, each trainer will be responsible for a group of around 50 service providers, who will receive guidance on understanding their role, finance, creating a network of client farmers, machine maintenance and use.
In addition to the financial rewards and aftersales services, the training opportunities will make this technology accessible to young entrepreneurs in rural areas. Earning up to $18 a day for harvesting and weeding services, those using the tool can expect to see a return on their initial investment in one to two months.
“Young people are the main prospective clients for this initiative,” says Yahaya. “With the motor scythe and related training, they can start earning serious money.” He stresses, however, that all farmers – regardless of age or gender – will be able to benefit from the job creation opportunities this initiative provides.
The initiative has been shortlisted for the GIZ Innovation Fund 2020. If selected, funding from the accelerator program would support testing, the integration of GPS sensors into the tools, creation of a platform for bank security and Carbon Credit earning, other technical activities.
One of the researchers behind the study, Yoseph Alemayehu, carries out a field survey in Ethiopia by mobile phone. (Photo Dave Hodson/CIMMYT)
TEXCOCO, Mexico — Using field and mobile phone surveillance data together with forecasts for spore dispersal and environmental suitability for disease, an international team of scientists has developed an early warning system which can predict wheat rust diseases in Ethiopia. The cross-disciplinary project draws on expertise from biology, meteorology, agronomy, computer science and telecommunications.
Reported this week in Environmental Research Letters, the new early warning system, the first of its kind to be implemented in a developing country, will allow policy makers and farmers all over Ethiopia to gauge the current situation and forecast wheat rust up to a week in advance.
The system was developed by the University of Cambridge, the UK Met Office, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). It works by taking near real-time information from wheat rust surveys carried out by EIAR, regional research centers and CIMMYT using a smartphone app called Open Data Kit (ODK).
This is complemented by crowd-sourced information from the ATA-managed Farmers’ Hotline. The University of Cambridge and the UK Met Office then provide automated 7-day advance forecast models for wheat rust spore dispersal and environmental suitability based on disease presence.
All of this information is fed into an early warning unit that receives updates automatically on a daily basis. An advisory report is sent out every week to development agents and national authorities. The information also gets passed on to researchers and farmers.
Example of weekly stripe rust spore deposition based on dispersal forecasts. Darker colors represent higher predicted number of spores deposited. (Graphic: University of Cambridge/UK Met Office)
Timely alerts
“If there’s a high risk of wheat rust developing, farmers will get a targeted SMS text alert from the Farmers’ Hotline. This gives the farmer about three weeks to take action,” explained Dave Hodson, principal scientist with CIMMYT and co-author of the research study. The Farmers’ Hotline now has over four million registered farmers and extension agents, enabling rapid information dissemination throughout Ethiopia.
Ethiopia is the largest wheat producer in sub-Saharan Africa but the country still spends in excess of $600 million annually on wheat imports. More can be grown at home and the Ethiopian government has targeted to achieve wheat self-sufficiency by 2023.
“Rust diseases are a grave threat to wheat production in Ethiopia. The timely information from this new system will help us protect farmers’ yields, and reach our goal of wheat self-sufficiency,” said EIAR Director Mandefro Nigussie.
Wheat rusts are fungal diseases that can be dispersed by wind over long distances, quickly causing devastating epidemics which can dramatically reduce wheat yields. Just one outbreak in 2010 affected 30% of Ethiopia’s wheat growing area and reduced production by 15-20%.
The pathogens that cause rust diseases are continually evolving and changing over time, making them difficult to control. “New strains of wheat rust are appearing all the time — a bit like the flu virus,” explained Hodson.
In the absence of resistant varieties, one solution to wheat rust is to apply fungicide, but the Ethiopian government has limited supplies. The early warning system will help to prioritize areas at highest risk of the disease, so that the allocation of fungicides can be optimized.
Example of weekly stripe rust environmental suitability forecast. Yellow to Brown show the areas predicted to be most suitable for stripe rust infection. (Graphic: University of Cambridge/UK Met Office)
The cream of the crop
The early warning system puts Ethiopia at the forefront of early warning systems for wheat rust. “Nowhere else in the world really has this type of system. It’s fantastic that Ethiopia is leading the way on this,” said Hodson. “It’s world-class science from the UK being applied to real-world problems.”
“This is an ideal example of how it is possible to integrate fundamental research in modelling from epidemiology and meteorology with field-based observation of disease to produce an early warning system for a major crop,” said Christopher Gilligan, head of the Epidemiology and Modelling Group at the University of Cambridge and a co-author of the paper, adding that the approach could be adopted in other countries and for other crops.
“The development of the early warning system was successful because of the great collaborative spirit between all the project partners,” said article co-author Clare Sader-Allen, currently a regional climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey.
“Clear communication was vital for bringing together the expertise from a diversity of subjects to deliver a common goal: to produce a wheat rust forecast relevant for both policy makers and farmers alike.”
This study was made possible through the support provided by the BBSRC GCRF Foundation Awards for Global Agriculture and Food Systems Research, which brings top class UK science to developing countries, the Delivering Genetic Gains in Wheat (DGGW) Project managed by Cornell University and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Department for International Development (DFID). The Government of Ethiopia also provided direct support into the early warning system. This research is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.
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.
ABOUT THE ETHIOPIAN INSTITUTE OF AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH (EIAR):
The Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) is one of the oldest and largest agricultural research institutes in Africa, with roots in the Ethiopian Agricultural Research System (EARS), founded in the late 1940s. EIAR’s objectives are: (1) to generate, develop and adapt agricultural technologies that focus on the needs of the overall agricultural development and its beneficiaries; (2) to coordinate technically the research activities of Ethiopian Agricultural Research System; (3) build up a research capacity and establish a system that will make agricultural research efficient, effective and based on development needs; and (4) popularize agricultural research results. EIAR’s vision is to see improved livelihood of all Ethiopians engaged in agriculture, agro-pastoralism and pastoralism through market competitive agricultural technologies.
Over the last few years, the research and development communities have deemed “scaling” a priority in order to help contribute to and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). On smaller scales, there has been great success in reducing hunger and poverty, but it has rarely expanded to regional or national levels.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) scaling head Lennart Woltering, in collaboration with colleagues Kate Fehlenberg and Bruno Gerard, as well as with international development experts Jan Ubels of SNV and Larry Cooley of Management Systems International, have been studying the process of scaling to understand why successful pilot projects are no guarantee for success at scale.
In a new paper published in Agricultural Systems, they argue that pilot projects are usually set up and managed in heavily controlled environments that do not reflect the reality at scale. Furthermore, confusion of what scaling is and how it can be executed often results in a narrow focus on solely reaching numbers.
“Counting household adoption of a practice at the end of a project is a poor metric of whether these people can and will sustain adoption after the project ends, let alone if adoption will reach others and actually contributes to improved livelihoods,” Woltering states.
According to Woltering, “This paper is a call for a new scaling narrative, from one that is short-term and piecemeal, to one that recognizes the systemic nature of problems and solutions to achieve sustainable change at scale.”
This requires a change in mindset, skills and ways of collaborating than what we currently consider normal. “Meaningful impact at scale hardly occurs within a project context, but when new ways of working are becoming ‘the new normal’ by a critical mass of actors ‘in the real world’,” Woltering explained.
The authors present a number of frameworks that help to assess the scalability of innovations and the design of scaling strategies from the onset of projects and how to systematically think through key elements needed for scaling success. This includes CIMMYT’s very own Scaling Scan. Reaching the SDGs requires scaling interventions to be seen as building blocks within a system of other initiatives with the same goals.
MARPLE team members Dave Hodson and Diane Saunders (second and third from left) stand for a photograph after receiving the International Impact award. With them is Malcolm Skingle, director of Academic Liaison at GlaxoSmithKline (first from left) and Melanie Welham, executive chair of BBSRC. (Photo: BBSRC)
The research team behind the MARPLE (Mobile And Real-time PLant disEase) diagnostic kit won the International Impact category of the Innovator of the Year 2019 Awards, sponsored by the United Kingdom’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
The team — Diane Saunders of the John Innes Centre (JIC), Dave Hodson of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and Tadessa Daba of the Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research (EIAR) — was presented with the award at an event at the London Science Museum on May 15, 2019. In the audience were leading figures from the worlds of investment, industry, government, charity and academia, including the U.K.’s Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, Chris Skidmore.
The BBSRC Innovator of the Year awards, now in their 11th year, recognize and support individuals or teams who have taken discoveries in bioscience and translated them to deliver impact. Reflecting the breadth of research that BBSRC supports, they are awarded in four categories of impact: commercial, societal, international and early career. Daba, Hodson and Saunders were among a select group of 12 finalists competing for the four prestigious awards. In addition to international recognition, they received £10,000 (about $13,000).
“I am delighted that this work has been recognized,” Hodson said. “Wheat rusts are a global threat to agriculture and to the livelihoods of farmers in developing countries such as Ethiopia. MARPLE diagnostics puts state-of-the-art, rapid diagnostic results in the hands of those best placed to respond: researchers on the ground, local government and farmers.”
On-the-ground diagnostics
The MARPLE diagnostic kit is the first operational system in the world using nanopore sequence technology for rapid diagnostics and surveillance of complex fungal pathogens in the field.
In its initial work in Ethiopia, the suitcase-sized field test kit has positioned the country — one of the region’s top wheat producers — as a world leader in pathogen diagnostics and forecasting. Generating results within 48 hours of field sampling, the kit represents a revolution in plant disease diagnostics. Its use will have far-reaching implications for how plant health threats are identified and tracked into the future.
MARPLE is designed to run at a field site without constant electricity and with the varying temperatures of the field.
“This means we can truly take the lab to the field,” explained Saunders. “Perhaps more importantly though, it means that smaller, less-resourced labs can drive their own research without having to rely on a handful of large, well-resourced labs and sophisticated expertise in different countries.”
In a recent interview with JIC, EIAR Director Tadessa Daba said, “we want to see this project being used on the ground, to show farmers and the nation this technology works.”
The MARPLE team uses the diagnostic kit in Ethiopia. (Photo: JIC)
Development of the MARPLE diagnostic kit was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture’s Inspire Challenge. Continued support is also provided by the BBSRC’s Excellence with Impact Award to the John Innes Centre and the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat project, led by Cornell University and funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
For small-scale farmers, mechanization and other appropriate technologies have a big impact in agricultural production and yield. However, they might lack the resources to buy these tools. Hello Tractor is trying to improve this.
Dubbed the “Uber for the farm”, the company’s app easily allows tractor owners to rent their machinery to farmers and includes features that can help enhance a tractor owner’s business and operations. In this episode, we’re talking to Martha Haile, Chief Operations Officer at Hello Tractor, about the company’s success and social innovation in agriculture.
Samjhana Khanal surveys heat-tolerant maize varieties in Ludhiana, India, during a field day at the 13th Asian Maize Conference. (Photo: Manjit Singh/Punjab Agricultural University)
KATHMANDU, Nepal — I feel humbled and honored to have been chosen for the 2018 MAIZE-Asia Youth Innovators Award. I want to thank my father and brother for never clipping my wings and letting me fly high. I want to thank my mother, who despite having no education, not being able to read or write a single word, dreamed of having a scientist daughter. Everyone has a story and this is mine.
Due to my family’s poverty and the hardships faced during the civil war in Nepal, I had to leave school at grade 5 and was compelled to work as child labor in a local hotel to meet my family’s daily needs. I remember those difficult months where I used to cry every day, as the hotel was right across from the school and I wanted to study so badly but I was deprived from education due to my family’s condition. My life changed when a mountain climber staying at the hotel heard my story and generously decided to pay my school fees. I would go on to graduate top of my class.
Everyone has challenges. It is my dream to dedicate my life to fight the greatest challenge of all: hunger.
The amount of undernourished people in the world has been increasing. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), over 820 million people face chronic food deprivation. Many of these people live in developing countries, including my home country, Nepal. About 6 million people, which is about 23% of Nepal’s population, are undernourished. Moreover, half of children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition in Nepal.
Increasing agricultural production, gender equity and awareness is crucial to meet sustainable development goals by 2030. As an agricultural student, I chose to focus on maize-based systems, as maize is a staple food crop and a major component of feed and fodder for farm animals. It is the second major crop in Nepal after rice — first in the hill region of Nepal — and can be a backbone for food security and a good source of income for resource-poor farmers.
Demand for maize is growing in Nepal, but production has remained stagnant. This is partly due to lack of knowledge on proper nutrient management and fertilizer use. In addition, due to the economic situation in Nepal, many men have been forced to migrate to find work and support their families, which has led to an increased “feminization” of agriculture. However, female farmers frequently have less access to information and resources that would help them to increase yields.
Since my undergraduate degree, I have carried out research on nutrient management in maize in the Eastern Terai region of Nepal, particularly focusing on women, to increase the maize production and income of smallholder farmers. My research involved the use of Nutrient Expert, a dynamic nutrient management tool based on site-specific nutrient management principles, to increase maize production and enhance soil quality without negatively affecting the environment. Regional fertilizer recommendations are often too broad and cannot take into account the soil quality of individual farmers’ field, as it varies greatly among fields, seasons and years. Applying the incorrect amount of fertilizer is costly to farmers and can negatively affect the environment and crop yields.
The Nutrient Expert app rapidly provides farm-specific fertilizer recommendations for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium for crops in the presence or absence of soil testing results, contributing to dynamic nutrient management, increased productivity and net returns from crops for farmers. In the meantime, it helps to decrease the nitrogen and phosphorous leaching from the soil into rivers, which protects the water ecosystem both in wetlands and oceans. This technology is sustainable because it optimizes the use of nutrients in the soil for higher productivity and prevents the overuse of fertilizer. It decreases the farmer’s cost of production and is environmentally friendly. Further, my research showed that Nutrient Expert helped farmers to produce 86.6% more maize grain than their previous fertilizer practice.
Proper nutrient management is just one of the challenges facing agriculture today. To address these challenges and to create a world without hunger it is extremely important to work with and include young people. Effective extension tools to train and motivate young minds in research and create more interest in maize-based systems and farming is necessary for the overall adoption and proper utilization of improved varieties and technologies.
Samjhana Khanal was recently awarded the 2018 MAIZE-Asia Youth Innovators Award from the CGIAR Research Program on Maize (MAIZE) in the category of “Change Agent” for her research on the productivity and profitability of hybrid maize in Eastern Terai, Nepal. Using Nutrient Expert, a decision support tool, individual maize farmers can get specific soil nutrition and fertilizer recommendations, resulting in higher grain yield, productivity and profits.
An agricultural graduate, Khanal has founded and co-founded several local social organizations in Nepal to involve young minds in the development of innovative strategies to work towards sustainable agriculture and zero hunger. Her organizations support more than 285 households with community microfinance, help resource-poor farmers and assist women farmers.
The MAIZE-Asia Youth Innovators Awards aim to celebrate youth participation in maize-based agri-food systems and are sponsored by the CGIAR Research Program on Maize (MAIZE) in collaboration with Young Professionals for Agricultural Development (YPARD).
The Director General of CIMMYT, Martin Kropff (left), and the Chair of the MAIZE Independent Steering Committee, Michael Robinson (right), present Samjhana Khanal with the 2018 MAIZE-Asia Youth Innovator Award in the category of Change Agent. (Photo: Manjit Singh/Punjab Agricultural University)
NAIROBI (Kenya) — More than 20 representatives of eastern and southern African seed companies and regulatory agencies recently took part in the demonstration of a new seed certification application that can help get quality seed to market more quickly and curb sales of counterfeit seed.
As part of an event organized by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Program (CIMMYT) at the Kiboko research station of the Kenya Agricultural & Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) on September 17, 2018, participants field-tested a beta version of SeedAssure, a digital platform that gives automatic feedback on compliance and seed production management, along with remedy options.
SeedAssure was developed by Cellsoft, a supply chain management software company, with input from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Qualibasic Seed Company, the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS) and CIMMYT.
“This is very useful for companies like ours, spread as we are over different countries, to manage at a distance our seed growers,” said Andy Watt of QualiBasic Seed Company, who has been testing SeedAssure on the company’s farms. “The application’s dashboard will point out which farms to visit quickly for corrections.”
Mobile innovations enhance quality and speed
For over a decade, the region’s seed sector has sought fast, cost-effective and transparent seed quality control and certification approaches for use across the value chain and the region. Seed companies often rely on under-staffed national certification agencies that may miss critical inspections or give inaccurate reports. Registration of new varieties can take many years, discouraging investment in improved seed and impeding regional trade.
The seed sector has sought mobile innovations such as tablet-based field inspections whose data load to centralized, cloud-based dashboards.
With SeedAssure’s “traffic light” system, field inspection results for factors such as plant population will score green (complied – good quality), amber (needs improvement) or red (reject) and be readily visible to key actors in the seed certification and supply chain, according to David Laurence-Brown, SeedAssure co-developer.
“This quality assurance system can help seed companies get licenses faster, speeding product to market and greatly reducing the financial risk of getting new varieties to farmers,” said Laurence-Brown. “The vision is that all actors have access to timely and accurate data on products, licensing and trade movements, with quality control checks along the value chain.”
He said that SeedAssure features 260 critical questions in 13 seed production checklists. “Putting the right questions in the right order is crucial to determine how sustainable your seed production is,” Laurence-Brown explained.
Partners test the SeedAssure app on a tablet during a field visit in Kiboko, Kenya. (Photo: Jerome Bossuet/CIMMYT)
Fixing the bugs
Participants emphasized that national and regional regulatory bodies needed to be on board.
“Advocacy has to be done at different levels, from COMESA, national plant protection organizations, big and small seed companies, and research institutes and donors,” said Kinyua Mbijjewe, a well-known figure in the African seed industry and co-creator of SeedAssure, adding that this has been underway for a year now with a positive response, and public engagement is now ramping up with partners like AGRA and USAID.
Participants also suggested simplifying SeedAssure by reducing the number of questions and the subjectivity of certain data fields. For example, they observed that a more objective method was needed for scoring pest infestations, rather than SeedAssure’s current approach of rating infestations as low, moderate or intense via visual estimation.
“This will not be adopted if it’s too complex,” said Nicolai Rodeyns, NASECO seed company, Uganda.
Developers are addressing these issues, as well as comments that the application should not mix compliance and seed production management features.
CIMMYT announced that it would offer members of the International Maize Improvement Consortium (IMIC) a one-year trial subscription to SeedAssure.
Finally, AFSTA, AGRA, CIMMYT, COMESA, USAID, and other partners are forming a SeedAssure Alliance to support testing and rollout with companies and public organizations in eastern and southern Africa.
A farm landscape in Ethiopia. (Photo: Apollo Habtamu/ILRI)
Despite her unassuming nature, the literary character Miss Marple solves murder mysteries with her keen sense of perception and attention to detail. But there’s another sleuth that goes by the same name. MARPLE (Mobile And Real-time PLant disEase) is a portable testing lab which could help speed-up the identification of devastating wheat rust diseases in Africa.
Rust diseases are one of the greatest threats to wheat production around the world. Over the last decade, more aggressive variants that are adapted to warmer temperatures have emerged. By quickly being able to identify the strain of rust disease, researchers and farmers can figure out the best course of action before it is too late.
The Saunders lab of the John Innes Centre created MARPLE. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), researchers are testing the mobile diagnostic kit in Holeta, central Ethiopia.
“These new pathogen diagnostic technologies … offer the potential to revolutionize the speed at which new wheat rust strains can be identified,” says Dave Hodson, a CIMMYT rust pathologist in Ethiopia. “This is critical information that can be incorporated into early warning systems and result in more effective control of disease outbreaks in farmers’ fields.”
Nominations are open for the 2018 Maize-Asia Youth Innovators Awards. The first edition of these awards recognizes the contributions of young women and men below 35 years of age who are implementing innovations in Asian maize-based agri-food systems.
The awards aim to identify young innovators who can serve to inspire other young people to get involved in maize-based agri-food systems.
Winners will be given the opportunity to present their work at the 13th Asian Maize Conference in Ludhiana, India (October 8-12, 2018). They will also join a platform for young innovators from around the world to network and share their experiences.
MAIZE invites CGIAR researchers and partners to nominate young innovators for any of the following three categories:
a) Researcher: Maize research-for-development (in any discipline)
b) Farmer: Maize farming systems in Asia
c) Change agent: Maize value chains (i.e., extension agents, input and service suppliers,
transformation agents).
CIMMYT staff share lessons learned at UNLEASH innovation labs with colleagues
Jennifer Johnson (first from right) and her team at UNLEASH 2018 work on solutions to improve nutrition for adolescent girls in Nepal. (Photo: Jennifer Johnson)
Four young staff members from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) are working to bring home lessons learned at UNLEASH to foster innovation across CIMMYT programs. UNLEASH is a global innovation lab that brings together people from all over the world to transform personal insights into hundreds of ideas and build lasting global networks around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The annual event, which began in 2017 and is scheduled to occur each year until 2030, brings together 1,000 selected young talents for 10 immersive days of co-creation and problem solving.
Innovation is key to finding solutions to major global challenges such as hunger, climate change and sustainability. However, innovation cannot occur in a vacuum – the strongest and most inclusive solutions are often interdisciplinary approaches developed by a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. What sets UNLEASH apart from other innovation labs and processes is this commitment to diversity, as well as its focus on the Sustainable Development Goals.
While at UNLEASH 2017 in Denmark, CIMMYT staff Aziz Karimov, Daniela Vega and David Guerena were part of 200 teams that were split across 10 ‘folk high schools’ in the Danish countryside. There, they worked through an innovation process with facilitators and experts, refined their ideas to contribute to the SDGs and finally reconvened in the city of Aarhus to pitch the solutions they had developed.
Jennifer Johnson, Maize Communications Officer at CIMMYT, attended the UNLEASH Innovation Lab 2018 in Singapore last June. She worked alongside a diverse team of young people to develop solutions to improve nutrition for adolescent girls in Nepal.
The UNLEASH innovation process has five main phases: problem framing, ideation, prototyping, testing and implementing. “UNLEASH is really about finding and framing the problem,” said Vega, a projects coordinator and liaison officer for the Americas at CIMMYT and UNLEASH 2017 alumna. “Innovation is 90 percent about understanding the problem. Once you get that right, everything that follows becomes easier,” she explained.
Daniela Vega (third from left), UNLEASH 2017 alumna, leads CIMMYT colleagues in a breakout session on innovation during Science Week. (Photo: Alfonso Arredondo/CIMMYT)
Johnson, Guerena and Vega held a session on innovation and lessons learned at UNLEASH at CIMMYT’s Science Week 2018. Participants were walked through an abridged version of the UNLEASH innovation process to develop creative solutions to real-world problems relating to agriculture. The session emphasized diversity, respect and creativity, which are central tenets of both CIMMYT and UNLEASH.
“One of the key takeaways I got from UNLEASH was the power of diversity and collaboration,” said Guerena, a soil scientist and systems agronomist at CIMMYT who participated in UNLEASH 2017. “The diversity of the participants and collaboration lead to better solutions.”
Vega agreed. “People come from different backgrounds, geographically and professionally, and the level of cooperation and openness with no judgement is essential. We all share a similar value set, we are here because we want to make the world a better place by solving problems on a very hands-on level.”
In just one hour, participants of the CIMMYT session formed diverse teams, developed problem framings, brainstormed potential solutions and gave a three-minute pitch presenting their solution to the audience. Participants expressed extreme satisfaction with what they had learned and the innovation process they had been guided through, as well as interest in participating in similar programs in the future.
“This is a great idea, a very good experience. Often creativity doesn’t get enough attention,” said Lennart Woltering, CIMMYT scaling expert.
“This is fantastic and I’m going to adopt it. This is a great way to introduce concepts such as gender,” said Rahma Adam, CIMMYT gender and development specialist.
In the future, CIMMYT’s UNLEASH alumna hope to continue sharing their experience with colleagues and implementing lessons learned within their work.
“Unleash helps young people to think freely and differently,” said Karimov, a CIMMYT development economist whose team won second place in UNLEASH 2017’s ‘Sustainable Consumption & Production’ category which targeted Goal 12 of the SDGs. “We think innovation is something very complicated but by attending UNLEASH I realized that very simple moves can make a big change. You start believing that what is not possible is actually very possible. You just have to have will and strong desire.”
Agricultural and development economist Aziz Karimov (left photo, fifth from left) and soil scientist and systems agronomist David Guerena (right photo, fifth from left) represented CIMMYT at UNLEASH Innovation Lab 2017. (Photos: UNLEASH)