Theme: Gender equality, youth and social inclusion
Gender and other social differences such as age, wealth and ethnicity, have an enormous influence upon the success of agricultural interventions. To ensure equitable impacts and benefits to rural people, CIMMYT emphasizes inclusive research and development interventions. Starting with the collection of data on gender and social differences, efforts are underway to address these gaps and ensure equitable adoption of technologies and practice. This includes working towards gender-equitable control of productive assets and resources; technologies that reduce women’s labor; and improved capacity of women and youth to participate in decision-making.
K.M. Zasim Uddin is an agricultural development officer with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program in Bangladesh. He has a masters in agronomy from Rajshahi University
He is part of projects including the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), Fall Armyworm R4D and Management (FAW), Big data analytics for climate-smart agricultural practices in South Asia (Big Data² CSA), and Climate Services for Resilient Development in South Asia (CSRD). His main responsibilities are research and development on agricultural mechanization for the CSISA Mechanization and Extension Activity (CSISA-MEA). He has participated in versatile training, workshops and conference programs across Asia.
Uddin has worked in different national and international non-government organizations and companies for more than 13 years, including in research and development at Syngenta Bangladesh Limited and on the Borga Chasi Unnayan Program at BRAC. He also worked as an agriculture officer under the Char Livelihood Program, funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development.
Bharathi Parupalli is a training coordinator with CIMMYT in Bangladesh, leading the training team on mechanization work. Her work is affiliated with the Innovation Science for Agroecosystems and Food Systems in Asia research theme in CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program.
She supports overall management of the mechanization activity within the SAS program and has developed partnerships with national public and private sector players in the agriculture mechanization value chain, with special focus on capacity building. The team’s work highlights real-time tracking of development needs contributing to the increased productivity and sustainability.
Parupalli has also published training modules and manuals on sustainable vegetable production suitable for South and Central Asia.
Rudriksha Rai Parajuli is a Technical Partnerships Manager with CIMMYT’s Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) project in Nepal. She has worked in the areas of farm-based agriculture research, extension, and adoption of sustainable soil management practices.
Parajuli’s professional experience is on building resilience of farmers in rural parts of Nepal whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and forest. She has worked on mainstreaming gender and social inclusion in development activities, and has extensive experience of leading policy influence and policy reform work with the Nepal Government and with non-government stakeholders.
At CIMMYT, Parajuli oversees implementation of the CSISA program, looking specifically at the adoption of mechanization, inclusion of poor and disadvantaged populations, and access to finance for individuals and small and medium agri-business who want to recover business lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For certified seed to reach a farmer’s field for cultivation, it passes through many hands – international and national breeding programs, government regulatory agencies, private seed companies, and retailers or agrodealers. These organizations each play an important role in the design, testing, production and distribution of improved maize and wheat varieties.
Together, these processes, actors, and the relationships between them form a seed system, which incorporates the production, conservation, exchange, and use of propagation materials for crops. As defined by the CGIAR Community of Excellence for Seed Systems Development (COE), seed systems are complex, involving arrangements between public and private sectors, layers of regulation, and years of research and development, and are specific to each crop, country, agroecological environment and market context.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) has extensively researched and worked with the facets and actors of cereal seed systems in Latin America, Asia and Africa, specifically in relation to cereal crops, and with maize and wheat in particular.
The role of CIMMYT scientists in supply and demand
Breeding teams use traditional and advanced techniques to identify improved maize and wheat breeding lines according to the desired traits determined by farmers and consumer markets. In addition to higher grain yields, other preferred traits include more and larger grains or fruit, resistance to pests and diseases, tolerance to environment pressures (such as drought or poor soils), better nutritional quality, or flavor and ease of processing.
These lines are used for further breeding, testing, seed multiplication by public and private sector partners. Others engage in varietal testing on farmers’ fields and support seed companies in production.
To foster smallholder farmers’ access to these improved varieties, CIMMYT implements a seed systems strategy divided into supply side development, concerning breeding and seed production, and demand side development, covering issues related to variety distribution and uptake. On the supply side, CIMMYT scientists’ work is carried out in three phases:
Product development phase: Breeders advance through CIMMYT’s breeding funnel (pipeline) the most promising materials from one improvement stage to the next. The best candidates are first tested in field trials at research stations and then in farmers’ fields. Afterwards, CIMMYT organizes field days to showcase the best performing materials to public and private sector partners.
Product allocation phase: Local partners request new CIMMYT products and sign licensing agreements that protect the new seed from private ownership claims and help accelerate marketing and distribution in target regions at affordable prices.
Release and commercialization phase: Farmers can obtain and benefit from seed of improved maize and wheat once national authorities register and release varieties that excel in national performance trials and public and private sector partners begin seedproduction and marketing or distribution.
On the demand side, CIMMYT scientists work to support seed systems development though its work on:
Farmer preferences and demand for varieties: Scientists look to understand current and future preferences and needs for varieties. This involves the use of innovative tools, such as product concept testing, on-farm testing and ranking, and participatory varietal evaluation.
Seed industry development: Small and medium sized seed businesses, as well as agrodealers, play a critical role in the distribution of seed. Our work looks to understand entry points for support to the seed industry for advancing faster uptake of new varieties by farmers.
Consumer demand for grain: The preferences of consumers and agroindustry for grain and grain-based foods provide an important source of demand for new varieties. CIMMYT scientists engage with consumers and agroindustry for innovation in food product design and testing consumer acceptance. Insights gains are reported back to breeding and seed production teams for design of future cereal varieties.
Gender-sensitive seed systems
A team of social scientists at CIMMYT with expertise in economics, gender and marketing works to understand the needs and preferences of farmers, consumers, and the agroindustry for new varieties. They develop retail strategies, such as targeted marketing, in-store seed assessment support and price incentives, promote the adoption of better policies in support of seed companies and seed markets.
CIMMYT explores mechanisms to help seed companies adapt their products to women’s preferences. Research shows that beyond yield potential, women seek different characteristics in seeds than men. For example, women are more inclined to favor a variety with a longer grain shelf life. Similarly, when women engage in participatory variety selections, they tend to make more objective evaluations of varieties than men.
Our experts advance strategies to promote inclusive and effective delivery systems, helping both female and male farmers obtain the seed that works best for their specific needs. This ongoing model gives CIMMYT feedback from farmers and public and private sector partners, which informs subsequent breeding research.
Why are cereal seed systems important?
CIMMYT contributes to new improved seeds getting to farmers, consumers and agroindustry, which ultimately leads to lasting positive impacts in terms of food security and economic development.
Cereals such as maize and wheat play a critical role in global food security. Increasing their productivity in the Global South remains a key developmental priority. Smallholders face increasing pressure to sustain and increase their yields in the face of three main issues: climate change, which increases the frequency of severe drought, floods, and pest and disease outbreaks; rapidly rising costs of inputs, such as land, labor, fertilizer; and unfavorable marketing conditions for their grain.
As a critical entry point for improved agricultural technology, seed systems are in urgent need of improvement and modernization. Since the onset of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, the discovery, development, and delivery of improved seed for smallholder farmers has remained an essential part of global and local initiatives to increase smallholder productivity.
What does a sustainable, inclusive, and productive seed system look like?
For the future, there are serious challenges for expanding and deepening the impact from investments in breeding. Market intelligence systems are urgently needed to support breeding teams in future product design and evidence-based prioritization. Innovation is needed in terms of how actors within the systems inform and support farmers to experiment with new seeds.
CIMMYT is working with CGIAR partners to implement a new, 10-year strategy. Effective seed systems achieve the widespread adoption of varieties that capture the gains from crop improvement and connect actors along the value chain so that all can benefit from a productive crop, from seedbank to soil. In close collaboration with national agricultural research systems (NARS), CGIAR has had historic success introducing improved cultivars to smallholder producers of staple crops, with high return on investment. However, there is still some standing criticism that large, public breeding programs take a technologically-biased and supply-pushed approach to agricultural innovation.
Cereal crop breeding programs can become more demand-oriented by employing more market segmentation strategies – breaking down target client markets into smaller, more geographically and demographically specific groups – and developing a more accessible description and profile of its products. Using similar approaches, CGIAR is likely to expand demand-oriented programs in genetic innovation and seed systems development in the new phase of operations.
Cover photo: Staff members bag maize at the Demeter Seeds warehouse. (Photo: Emma Orchardson/CIMMYT)
Michael Euler is a CIM-integrated expert and joined CIMMYT in June 2021. As Agriculture and Resource Economist, he analyzes the diffusion and impacts of agricultural innovations on smallholder farms. One focus of his work includes the assessment of opportunities and challenges of the use of DNA fingerprinting for varietal adoption and impact studies.
Before joining CIMMYT, Michael was with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the German Institute for Development Evaluation and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).
Michael holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics and a Master of Science in Agricultural Sciences from the university of Gottingen, Germany. Results of his research and evaluation work are published in peer-reviewed academic journals and evaluation reports.
Securing the Food Systems of Asian Mega-Deltas (AMD) for Climate and Livelihood Resilience aims to create resilient, inclusive and productive deltas — which maintain socio-ecological integrity, adapt to climatic and other stressors, and support human prosperity and wellbeing — by removing systemic barriers to the scaling of transformative technologies and practices at community, national and regional levels.
This objective will be achieved through:
Adapting deltaic production systems by identifying, synthesizing, evaluating, adapting and scaling interventions to ensure systems can adapt to and mitigate the effects of salinity, flooding, drought, terminal heat and sinking land.
Nutrition-sensitive deltaic agrifood systems, developed through the promotion of sustainable production and consumption of nutritious foods in Asian mega-deltas, by involving institutional stakeholders in the co-production of nutrition-sensitive interventions.
De-risking delta-oriented value chains by assessing the potential of digital climate advisory and complementing services to address climate risks among vulnerable groups, supporting development of improved and inclusive digital and bundled services, and identifying and developing financing models and partnerships to achieve scale.
Joined-up, gender equitable, inclusive deltaic systems governance, informed by transdisciplinary research evidence, local knowledge and political economy insights used to coordinate multi-stakeholder dialogues for more coherent water-agriculture-environment policies and strategies; collaborative, networked implementation practices; and gender-equitable and socially inclusive governance innovations.
Evidence-based delta development planning at the macro-level to ensure plans/policies incorporate inclusive and climate-proof approaches to food systems transformation.
Working across South Asia, the Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia (TAFSSA) Initiative will deliver a coordinated program of research and engagement across the food production to consumption continuum to improve equitable access to sustainable healthy diets, improve farmer livelihoods and resilience, and conserve land, air, and groundwater resources.
TAFSSA aims to propel evidence into impact through engagement with public and private partners across the production-to-consumption continuum, to achieve productive, environmentally-sound South Asian agrifood systems that support equitable access to sustainable healthy diets.
This objective will be achieved through:
Facilitating agrifood systems transformation through inclusive learning platforms, public data systems and partnerships: building new and enhancing existing learning platforms; improving the evidence base; increasing quality data availability and accessibility; and demonstrating the value of integrated agrifood systems datasets.
Transforming agroecosystems and rural economies to boost income, generate jobs and support diversified food production within environmental boundaries: generating linkages between farmers, landscapes and markets to diversify agricultural production, increase farmers’ incomes and foster rural entrepreneurship within environmental boundaries.
Improving access to and affordability of sustainably produced healthy foods through evidence and actions across the food system: creating favorable environments for diversification; improving access to inputs for and marketability of sustainable nutritious food; and improving access to healthy food for the poor through changes in food retail environments.
Understanding behavioral and structural determinants of sustainable healthy diets: studying dietary practices of food consumers; identifying determinants of food choices; and testing innovations to support consumption of sustainable healthy diets.
Building resilience and mitigating environmental impact: examining how South Asia can produce healthy diets within an environmentally safe and socially equitable operating space, and in consideration of ongoing climate change and farmers’ resilience to shocks.
Despite women’s essential role in agrifood systems, their contribution can be overlooked, with resources instead targeted towards their male counterparts.
However, advancements in technology now allow scientists to generate rich datasets that can aid analysis of the situational factors impacting women farmers’ participation in extension training services.
These developments have enabled scientists from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Michigan State University, and Agricultural Advisory Society, a local NGO, to understand barriers to access and recommend improvements that will benefit women in Bangladesh.
Using a large dataset of 131,073 farmers in Bangladesh, researchers worked to identify ways to tackle gender exclusion in extension training. Scientists used machine learning to understand preferences according to gender and applied optimization theory and identified actionable ways to increase the number of farmers participating in video- and multi-media mediated trainings, while simultaneously improving gender inclusivity in public training events.
The study discovered strong gender specific considerations, such as the training session’s day of the week and time and the gender of the trainer, which prevented women from or encouraged them to take part in educational events.
It also demonstrates the potential for big data to transform our understanding of unstructured and semi-structured data into statistically verifiable insights that can genuinely impact farmer’s lives. Optimizing women’s involvement in agrifood systems can additionally play an important part in efforts to enhance farm productivity, gender and social inclusion, and nutrition in Bangladesh and beyond.
Eva Marina Valencia Leñero is a Scaling Coordinator. She is an interdisciplinary professional focused on systems thinking and sustainability.
She has an Undergraduate degree in Law from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a MSc in Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management from the MESPOM Consortium with Lund University. She is interested in promoting sustainability in projects and policies, and has experience in the sectors of water, food, energy and climate change. She is interested in finding ways to scale impactful projects for food security.
Moreover, she has experience working at different levels in public organizations including the Mexican Energy Regulatory Commission, the Mexican Institute of Ecology and Climate Change, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. She is the Founder of the Tricolor Coalition, a platform for sustainability transition in Mexico City.
CIMMYT enumerators hold booklets with vignettes before their interaction with family farmers Kiran Devi (second from left) and Rishikesh Ram (third from left). (Photo: Nima Chodon /CIMMYT)
Researchers from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) are conducting a study in the state of Bihar, India, to improve our understanding of women’s and men’s contributions to decision-making around wheat crop management. The results will help reach women with new varieties that meet their needs and priorities.
The study seeks to overcome a big challenge for research organizations and national policymakers: to design a better framework for faster turnover of improved varieties and increased access to women and marginalized farmers.
Wheat is the second-largest crop grown in Bihar after rice, with a production of 5-6 million tonnes of it every year. Despite women’s contributions to farming activities, from sowing to harvesting, traditional gender norms can undermine their access to productive resources and influence household decisions. Additionally, women’s workload in wheat agriculture is increasing, due to men’s departure to non-agricultural jobs, but women are still not necessarily recognized as capable farmers.
Gender exclusion in agriculture
Given social norms and household-and-farm labor division based on gender, women are often confined to specific roles in the agricultural production system. In smallholder farming communities of South Asia like Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, men’s increasing involvement in non-agricultural activities has increased women’s workloads in every sphere of agricultural production. However, these long-held assumptions of their role can lead to exclusion from decision-making, limiting their control over what, how, and how much a crop is produced, their economic wellbeing, including household food security.
The CIMMYT study on “Intra-household gender dynamics in decision-making for wheat crop management in India (Bihar)” investigates women’s and men’s roles in production decisions. Led by Hom Gartaula, Gender, and Social Inclusion Specialist at CIMMYT, it covers eight villages — four in Darbhanga and four in Madhepura district — with 25 houses considered in each village.
As part of the Accelerating Genetic Gains in Maize and Wheat for improved livelihoods in Asia and Africa (AGG) project, the research study will help gain deeper insights into the intra-household gender dynamics. It will also help in untangling who does what, how wheat cultivation and management decisions are organized within the households and the perceptions of the male and female farmers around why decisions are made in such a way.
Farmer Devi points at the vignette that aligns with her household decision-making process. (Photo: Nima Chodon /CIMMYT)
Storytelling through household decision-making scenarios
In traditional rural societies, survey-based data collection might not be the best way to evaluate women’s agency, as the deeply rooted cultural restrictions might not allow them to talk openly about sensitive issues, like their relationship with a spouse. This study uses an innovative storytelling approach to data collection: using vignettes, farmers are given short stories to relate to their household circumstances. Stories are also easier to remember and help build a connection with the characters quickly.
The vignettes approach was first applied in the context of smallholder maize production in Kenya under the AGG project. According to Rachel Voss, the leader of the Kenyan study, “Using vignettes to explore decision-making in both East Africa and South Asia allows us to learn and compare across these regions and across crops. Gender relations in Indian wheat and Kenyan maize production might look similar in some ways, but very different in other ways, and our research and programming will need to respond to those differences.”
In this study, five vignettes with fictitious husband and wife characters are presented to participants to represent the different ways production and consumption decisions are made in the household. These vignettes describe how they engage in key decisions like seed procurement, labor hired, and harvest used for consumption or sale. With guidance from evaluators, respondents identify which scenario best aligns with the decision-making process in their household.
Researchers feel this qualitative data, gathered through a storytelling approach, could guide the reach of gender interventions in a more effective way. Gartaula and the team explained that the participants can build connections to a character in the story without biases, expressing their experiences in household decision-making through vignettes. They also observed that sometimes what the participant shared is the opposite of their assumption of women being excluded from decisions.
Rethinking gender roles
Traditional gender roles are deeply entrenched in the region. In the farming communities of rural Bihar, one might assume that who does what in wheat-rice cultivation is obvious, and it has been well studied in the past. However, investigating the stereotypes around gender to understand practices within households is an innovative aspect of this study.
For example, landless couple Pappu Paswan and Kamini Devi of village Kamtaul in Darbhanga district have been cultivating wheat on leased farm plots for many years. Devi is engaged in every aspect of decision-making. “We cultivate in leased plots of different sizes, spread across, requiring more effort and time in attending to them. We discuss additional labor during harvest and if there is money enough to pay them,” said Devi pointing her finger at the vignette illustrating ‘cooperation’ in household decision-making. They produce enough for their consumption, but when possible, “I advise my husband to sell some for income,” she added.
Despite contributing to decisions jointly with Pappu when it comes to farm labor and household finances, Devi has little or no knowledge of seed varieties and access. Her husband informs that it was UP262 (wheat seed variety) they have been cultivating for the last two years.
In Rishikesh Ram’s household, land ownership and livelihood specialization were factors in decision-making. He owns the land and makes all farming decisions, including how much will be saved for consumption at home. His wife, Kiran Devi, a nurse at the village primary health center, is hardly involved in any farming work. “As the income from her job contributes to expenses at home, decisions about loans or payment for labors on the farm are joint decisions,” Ram said.
“In these two households of the diverse decision-making process, different approaches to messaging and relevant extension services must be explored to address the issues of exclusion, access, and knowledge gaps in these households,” Gartaula observed.
Bridging the gender gap in agri-food systems
With the feminization of agriculture in the region, women’s contribution to agricultural production is likely to increase. Policy and research interventions must recognize this growing population and support their full economic and social contributions as cultivators, entrepreneurs, and laborers. However, whether women’s growing role in wheat production leads to increased decision-making authority and empowerment is still unknown. But hope is that AGG-supported gender research in South Asia and East Africa will help guide actions on gender and social inclusion in agri-food systems and support cross-learning between the regions.
National, regional, and international partners at the CGIAR Plant Health and Rapid Response to Protect Food Security and Livelihoods Initiative launch in Nairobi, Kenya, on May 12, 2022. (Credit: Susan Otieno)
CGIAR together with national, regional, and international partners kicked off the Plant Health and Rapid Response to Protect Food Security and Livelihoods Initiative also known as the Plant Health Initiative in Nairobi, Kenya, on May 12-13, 2022. The Initiative’s inception meeting was fittingly held on the first-ever International Day of Plant Health on May 12 and was attended by over 200 participants (both in-person and virtual), representing diverse institutions.
The Plant Health Initiative targets a broad range of pests and diseases affecting cereals (especially rice, wheat and maize) and legumes such as beans, faba bean, chickpea, lentil, and groundnut; potato; sweet potato; cassava; banana; and other vegetables.
Speaking at the meeting, CGIAR Plant Health Initiative Lead and Director of Global Maize Program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) noted that climate change, together with human activities and market globalization, is aggravating challenges to plant health, including outbreaks of devastating insect-pests and diseases. In addition, according to data from the African Union Partnership on Aflatoxin Control in Africa (AUC-PACA), 40 percent of commodities in local African markets exceed allowable levels of mycotoxins in food, causing adverse effects on diverse sectors, including agriculture, human health, and international trade.
“The CGIAR Plant Health Initiative is, therefore, a timely program for strengthening inter-institutional linkages for effective plant health management especially in the low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, said Prasanna. “This calls for synergizing multi-stakeholder efforts to improve diagnostics, monitoring and surveillance, prediction and risk assessment of transboundary pests and pathogens, and implementing integrated pest and disease management in a gender-responsive and socially inclusive manner.”
Demand-driven multistakeholder approach
CGIAR Global Science Director for Resilient Agrifood Systems Martin Kropff reiterated the importance of the Initiative, and emphasized the need for a global plant health research-for-development consortium. He mentioned that all the CGIAR Initiatives, including the Plant Health Initiative, are demand-driven and will work closely with national, regional, and international partners for co-developing and deploying innovative solutions.
The chief guest at the event, Oscar Magenya, Secretary of Research and Innovation at Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, pointed out the need for a well-coordinated, multisectoral and multistakeholder approach to managing invasive pests and diseases. He recognized CGIAR’s contribution and partnership with the Government of Kenya through CIMMYT, especially in combating maize lethal necrosis and wheat rust in Kenya.
“As government, we invite the CGIAR Plant Health Initiative to partner with us in implementing the Migratory and Invasive Pests and Weeds Management Strategy that was launched recently [by the Kenya Government],” said Magenya.
Implications of Plant Health in Africa and globally
Zachary Kinuya, Director of Crop Health Program at the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO) spoke on the importance of plant health management to African stakeholders, and observed that in addition to improved crop production, food and feed safety must be given adequate priority in Africa.
Director of the Plant Production and Protection Division at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Jingyuan Xia applauded CGIAR for launching the global Initiative. Through his virtual message, Xia stated that the goals of the two organizations are aligned towards supporting farmers and policy makers in making informed decisions and ultimately ending global hunger. He added that the CGIAR has strong research capacity in developing and disseminating new technologies.
CIMMYT Director General Bram Govaerts explained how negative impacts on plant health, combined with climate change effects, can lead to global production losses and food system shocks, including the potential to result in food riots and humanitarian crises. He challenged stakeholders in the meeting to resolve tomorrow’s problems today, through collective and decisive action at all levels.
Sarah M. Schmidt, Fund International Agriculture Research Advisor_GIZ Germany making a contribution during the Launch of the Plant Health Initiative. (credit Susan Otieno/CIMMYT)
The German development agency (GIZ) Fund International Agricultural Research (FIA) Advisor Sarah Schmidt said that GIZ supports the Initiative because of its interest in transformative approaches in innovations for sustainable pest and disease management. Recognizing women’s major involvement in farming in Africa, Schmidt said there is a need to empower and equip women with knowledge on plant health as this will result to greater productivity on farms in Africa. “We welcome that the Plant Health Initiative dedicated an entire crosscutting work package to equitable and inclusive scaling of innovations,” she added.
Participants at the launch were also reminded by Ravi Khetarpal, Executive Secretary of the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI), that the Initiative is now at the critical phase of Implementation and requires diverse actors to tackle different issues in different geographies. Ravi added that biosecurity and plant health are important subjects for the Asia-Pacific region, in view of the emergence of new pests and diseases, and therefore the need to save the region from destructive pest incursions.
Other online speakers at the launch included Harold Roy Macauley, Director General of AfricaRice & CGIAR Regional Director, Eastern and Southern Africa; Nteranya Sanginga, Director General of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and CGIAR Regional Director, West and Central Africa; and Joaquin Lozano, CGIAR Regional Director, Latin America & the Caribbean.
Reflecting on gender, social inclusion, and plant health
Panel discussions allowed for more in-depth discussion and recommendations for the Initiative to take forward. The panelists delved into the progress and challenges of managing plant health in the Global South, recommending a shift from a reactive to a more proactive approach, with strong public-private partnerships for sustainable outcomes and impacts.
Gender inequities in accessing the plant health innovations were also discussed. The discussion highlighted the need for participatory engagement of women and youth in developing, validating and deploying plant health innovations, a shift in attitudes and policies related to gender in agriculture, and recognition and deliberate actions for gender mainstreaming and social inclusion for attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
B.M. Prasanna speaking at the launch. (credit: Susan Otieno/CIMMYT)
Charting the course for the Initiative
The Plant Health Initiative Work Package Leads presented the Initiative’s five specific work packages and reiterated their priorities for the next three years.
“We are looking forward to taking bold action to bring all players together to make a difference in the fields of farmers all over the world,” said Prasanna.
The Initiative is poised to boost food security, especially in key locations through innovative and collaborative solutions.
“Plant Health Management in the Global South: Key Lessons Learnt So Far, and the Way Forward” moderated by Lava Kumar (IITA) with panelists: Florence Munguti [Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate (KEPHIS)], Maryben Chiatoh Kuo (African Union-Inter-African Phytosanitary Council), Roger Day (CABI) and Mark Edge (Bayer).
“Scaling Strategy, including Gender and Social Inclusiveness of Plant Health Innovations” moderated by Nozomi Kawarazuka (CIP), with panelists Jane Kamau (IITA), Alison Watson (Grow Asia), Sarah Schmidt (GIZ), Aman Bonaventure Omondi (Alliance Bioversity-CIAT) and Nicoline de Haan (CGIAR Gender Platform)
Work Package Title and Leads
Work Package 1: Bridging Knowledge Gaps and Networks: Plant Health Threat Identification and Characterization
Lead:Monica Carvajal, Alliance of Bioversity-CIAT
Work Package 2: Risk Assessment, data management and guiding preparedness for rapid response
Lead: Lava Kumar, IITA
Work Package 3: Integrated pest and disease management
Lead: Prasanna Boddupalli, CIMMYT
Work Package 4: Tools and processes for protecting food chains from mycotoxin contamination
Lead:Alejandro Ortega-Beltran, IITA
Work Package 5: Equitable and inclusive scaling of plant health innovations to achieve impacts Co-leads:Nozomi Kawarazuka, International Potato Center (CIP), Yanyan Liu, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Leon Jamann works for the CIMMYT Ethiopia office and promotes the scaling up of agricultural innovations in Mechanization in 13 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in India and Vietnam. As a facilitator, Jamann is involved in building capacities on how to do scalability assessments and overcome bottlenecks in the scaling of agricultural innovations. He is passionate about bringing stakeholders together in order to form a common vision for their projects and interventions.
Besides his work in scaling, Jamann works in project management, including the facilitation of procurement, contract management and operational planning.
There is growing awareness that not all rural women are alike and that social norms and technological interventions affect women from different castes in distinct ways. The caste system in South Asia, which dates back over 3,000 years, divides society into thousands of hierarchical, mostly endogamous groups. Non-marginalized castes are classified as “general caste” while those living in the social margins are categorized as “scheduled caste” and “scheduled tribe”. Scheduled caste and scheduled tribe farmers face both social and economic marginalization and limited access to information and markets, despite government efforts to level up social inequalities.
In India, women of all castes are involved in farming activities, although their caste identity regulates the degree of participation. General caste women are less likely to be engaged in farming than women of lower castes. Despite their level of participation across caste groups, women are rarely recognized as “farmers” (Kisan) in Indian rurality, which restricts their access to inputs, information and markets.
Gender experts from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and partners investigated caste-gender relations among wheat farmers in Madhya Pradesh, India’s second-largest state by area. The team conducted focus group discussions and interviews in a village community, and carried out a review of GENNOVATE research in the same area. The team also carried out a survey involving about 800 wheat farmers from 18 village communities across the state.
Women work in the fields in India’s Madhya Pradesh state. Our study found that women are involved in all aspects of agricultural work on family farms. (Photo: CIMMYT)
The study, published last month in Gender, Technology, and Development, revealed five key findings:
First, caste distinctions are sharp. There is little interaction between women and men farmers from the scheduled caste category — even between subcastes in this category — and other castes. They live in separate enclaves, and land belonging to scheduled caste farmers is less fertile than others.
Second, all women are fully involved in all aspects of agricultural work on the family farm throughout the year.
Third, despite their strong participation in farming activities, women across caste groups are normatively excluded from agricultural decision-making in the household. Having said that, the findings were very clear that some individual women experience greater participation than others. Although women are excluded from formal agricultural information networks, they share knowledge with each other, particularly within caste groups.
Fourth, about 20 years ago, women across caste groups were being employed as hired agricultural laborers. Over the past four years, increasing mechanization is pushing many women off the field. While scheduled caste women compensate for the employment loss to a certain degree by participating in non-farm activities, general caste women are not able to move beyond the village and secure work elsewhere due to cultural norms. Women therefore face a collapse in their autonomy.
Fifth, gender poses a greater constraint than caste in determining an individual’s ability to make decisions about farm and non-farm related activities. However, a significant difference exists across the caste groups, presenting a strong case for intersectionality.
Challenging social norms in agriculture
The results of the study show that caste matters in the gendered evaluations of agricultural technologies and demonstrates the importance of studying women’s contributions and roles in wheat farming in South Asia.
Agriculture in India is also considered to be broadly feminizing, with men increasingly taking up off-farm activities, leaving women to as primary cultivators on family fields and as hired laborers. However, rural advisory services, policy makers, and other research and development organizations are lagging behind in recognizing and reacting appropriately to these gendered changes. Many still carry outdated social norms which view men as the main decision-makers and workers on farms.
Funding for this study was provided by the Collaborative Platform for Gender Research under the CGIAR Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets as well as the International Development Research Center of the Government of Canada, the CGIAR Research Programme on Wheat (CRP WHEAT https://wheat.org/), CIMMYT and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). The paper additionally drew on GENNOVATE data collected in India in 2015–16 with financial support from CRP WHEAT. Development of the GENNOVATE research methodology was supported by the CGIAR Gender and Agricultural Research Network, the World Bank, and the CRP WHEAT and CRP MAIZE, and data analysis was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Cover photo: A woman harvests wheat in Madhya Pradesh, India. (Photo: CIMMYT)
Nilupa Gunaratna (right), statistician at the International Nutrition Foundation, helps a farmer and her daughter to fill in a survey form on quality protein maize (QPM) as part of the QPM Development (QPMD) project in Karatu, Tanzania. (Photo: CIMMYT)
Recently, I published the technical description of Ontology-Agnostic Metadata Schema (OIMS) in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, as part of a special issue on “Agile Data-Oriented Research Tools to Support Smallholder Farm System Transformation.”
CGIAR and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) are dedicated to providing research data information products (RDIP) in open access, following the FAIR data standards. FAIR stands for findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Organizations dedicated to open data have made massive progress in making data findable and accessible. A clear example is a free, open-access repository of research studies developed by CIMMYT scientists. Article 4.1.c.i. of the CGIAR data policy states that “Relevant data assets (e.g. datasets) and metadata shall be interoperable and fit for reuse.”
This is easier said than done. There are well-established standards for descriptive metadata such as the Dublin Core and the derived standard used widely across the CGIAR, aptly called CGcore, used in CIMMYT’s Dataverse research data repository. However, these standards are lacking in many domains for describing the actual content of data sets.
At best, idiosyncratic data dictionaries are developed for specific datasets, projects and sometimes even programs. Idiosyncratic data dictionaries help make data interoperable but, in many cases, require a lot of preprocessing before scientists can actually reuse the data. Having a standard for data dictionaries would be a huge leap forward, but is not likely to happen anytime soon.
The next best thing is to standardize the way that you describe data dictionaries. This was recognized by the community of practice on socioeconomic data of the CGIAR Platform for Big data in Agriculture. Over the past few years, efforts led by CIMMYT set to remedy that lack of a standard, resulting in the flexible, extensible, machine-readable, human-intelligible and ontology-agnostic metadata schema (OIMS).
The paper in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems describes a lightweight, flexible, and extensible metadata schema. It is designed to succinctly describe data collected for international agricultural research for development, facilitating interoperability. The schema is also meant to make it easier to store, retrieve and link different datasets stored in a data lake.
Agricultural research data comes to the surface
The paper discusses a need for this type of schema. Typically, agricultural research data comes in different formats and from different sources. For example, we can have structured surveys, semi-structured surveys, mobile phone records and satellite data. In the case of socioeconomic data, it can be particularly “messy.” To facilitate interoperability, we need to find methods to describe these datasets, which are machine readable — or actionable.
There have been other attempts to provide a standardized way to make data interoperable. Past approaches have been comprehensive but cumbersome. That could be the reason why they are typically only used by larger-scale projects. OIMS provides a framework that can be used by all data managers and scientists to enhance the interoperability for research data to ensure the data can be reused with much more ease.
The paper provides a detailed description of OIMS, including: the metadata schema, which describes the data dictionary; and the self-describing metadata, which describes the fields in the metadata. The paper then demonstrates the utility of this schema using a small segment of a household survey.
This paper presents an internally consistent approach to providing metadata for data files when standards are missing. It is flexible and extensible, so it will not be obsolete before it is implemented at scale. The approach is based on the concept of data lakes where data is stored as is. To ensure that data lakes do not become swamps, metadata is indispensable. The OIMS metadata schema approach can help to standardize the description of metadata and thus can be considered the fishing gear to extract data from the data lake.
As part of the on-going work started by the community of practice on socioeconomic data of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture, implementation of the OIMS metadata schema approach on datasets that can create indicators highlighted in the 100Q approach with linkages to the nascent socioeconomic ontology SEOnt is envisaged. This will provide datasets with enhanced interoperability.
With more and more datasets using the OIMS approach in the near future, it will become possible to turn what is currently a socioeconomic data swamp into a data lake. This will provide timely actionable information to support agri-food systems transformation — helping smallholders make a living while staying within planetary boundaries.
Implementing OIMS in practice requires data managers and scientists that collect the data to actively engage in providing the relevant metadata. As mentioned before, some of the metadata can be gleaned from the software solutions the scientists use already. As these are structured metadata, they can be extracted by machines. Often it does require curation by the scientist involved, especially when the software solution does not provide key information that the scientist has at hand but is not documented in a machine-readable way.
A recent portrait of Rosalind Morris. (Photo: Courtesy)
Rosalind Morris, a celebrated wheat cytogeneticist and professor, peacefully passed away on March 26, 2022, just a few weeks shy of her 102nd birthday. Morris fought a long battle with cancer in her 90s and, most recently, an infection of COVID-19, which proved fatal to her health.
According to her wishes, there was no funeral or memorial service. Morris’s body was cremated, and her ashes deposited in her family’s plot in Ontario, Canada.
Born in Ruthin, United Kingdom, in 1920 to schoolteacher parents, Morris pursued studies in agricultural sciences at the University of Guelph and earned a bachelor’s degree in horticulture. Morris would later earn a Ph.D. from Cornell University’s department of plant breeding, becoming one of the first two women to accomplish this feat, along with Leona Schnell.
Morris dedicated her life and career to understanding and developing wheat genes.
A pioneer in agricultural science and one of the first women scientists of her time, Morris dedicated her life and career to understanding and developing wheat genes. Her contributions include the development of wheat genetic stocks, or wheat populations generated for genetic studies, with far-reaching impact globally in explaining wheat genetics. The work of Morris provided a premier resource base for the emerging field of functional genomics, which explores how DNA is translated into complex information in a cell.
During World War II, Morris’s deep concern over the effects of atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led her to study and experiment with the effects of X-rays and thermal neutrons on crop plants. In 1979, Morris became the first woman honored as a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy.
While being an acclaimed scientist internationally, Morris was also known for her passion for teaching. In the same year Morris earned her doctoral degree from Cornell University, she was hired as the first female faculty member in the agronomy department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in 1947. This career would last 43 years: first as an assistant professor in 1947, becoming a professor in 1958 and remaining in that role until 1990, when she gained the title of emeritus professor of plant cytogenetics.
Morris was a trailblazer for women in agronomy during a point in history when few women were given the opportunity to pursue a career in the sciences. Morris is remembered by her peers not only for her lifelong contribution to agricultural sciences but also her immense kindness and patience.
