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 womenâs labor; and improved capacity of women and youth to participate in decision-making.
CIMMYT is set to implement a series of training courses to sharpen skills in gender and agricultural research for development. Photo: CIMMYT/P. Lowe
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) â In a move to bolster gender equity in agriculture, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) will launch a series of training courses promoting the integration of gender awareness and analysis in research for development.
âGender is a defining factor in farming and influences many areas, for example, resource ownership and adoption of new technologies,â said Marion BĂŒttner, a gender specialist at CIMMYT. âThese courses will help researchers understand the importance of gender roles, relations and norms in agriculture and integrate gender analysis into their work, strengthening agricultural research for development outcomes.â
Although women account for 43 percent of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, they are 30 percent less productive than men, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This is due mainly to unequal access to extension services and resources, such as land and improved seed.
Despite such trends, agricultural research often fails to include gender analysis in projects, opting instead for a gender-unaware approach that neglects womenâs and menâs important roles and their different needs and opportunities in agriculture, BĂŒttner said. âThe trainings are an important step to address this gap,â she said.
The Gender Capacity Strengthening Program was developed in partnership with the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT in its Dutch acronym) gender training team and Cultural Practice, LLC. The sessions will be rolled out from April for researchers and support staff at CIMMYT offices in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The main focus of agriculture for development is to research the biophysical aspects of introducing new agriculture technologies and management practices. This often diverts attention from the social analysis that reveals the human context in which new technologies and practices are introduced, said Franz Wong, a senior gender advisor at KIT who will be one of the training facilitators.
Failing to understand gender issues in a specific local context may cause contrary results to what researchers set out to accomplish, BĂŒttner said. For example, the mechanization of an agricultural activity may lead to reduced drudgery for women. However, the same process may also result in men taking over these now successful activities, which could shift power dynamics between men and women and potentially increase already existing inequalities between genders.
âTo gain the most knowledge and impact from agriculture for development initiatives, researchers should consider what impact interventions will have on both men and women,â BĂŒttner said. âThe concept of gender is often confused with simply adding women to strategy development, but itâs not that straightforward. Itâs about addressing the needs and constraints of both men and women and changing relations to improve the situation for all.â
BĂŒttner refers to gender-responsive research, which is designed to ensure that both women and men benefit from research interventions. It analyzes and takes into account how gender relations influence men and womenâs ability to access and adopt improved agricultural technologies, including new knowledge and practices, as well as how policies and other interventions affect women and men differently.
The program aims to position gender analysis as a routine process at all stages of the research cycle. Different training modules offer insight into gender-responsive research, including developing and implementing projects with gender integration and setting indicators to measure gender outcomes.
âRaising awareness of the benefits gender analysis has on the impact of agriculture for development projects is the best promoter of its inclusion in research,â said Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, a senior gender advisor at KIT who aided in the development of the program.
âMany agriculture for development researchers do not see the relevance of gender for their work because they lack adequate training and exposure to gender analysis and knowledge,â she added.
Pilot workshops of the program were delivered last October at CIMMYTâs headquarters and gained strong reviews, with participants reporting increased gender awareness and knowledge of practical methods to integrate gender into projects.
Researchers are keen to integrate gender once they become aware of how gender-responsive research helps to make an assessment of how agriculture is organized in a community, and how it aids the design and delivery of relevant agricultural technologies that complement gender roles or transform them to increase equality, Wong added.
Both BĂŒttner and Wong said the gender training was purposely designed to be practical and interactive so that participants could apply methods to their areas of expertise.
The program will begin in April in Ethiopia, followed by sessions in other CIMMYT offices in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Mexico.
BĂŒttner is one of five experts working at CIMMYT as part of the GIZ sponsored CIM Integrated Experts program. The CIM program aims to strategically place managers and technical experts in public and private organizations in the developing world to pass on their professional knowledge and contribute to capacity building.
Farmer Sunita Baineya checking her maize as it comes out of a shelling machine powered by 4WT in Sirkohiya, Bardiya. Photo: P. Lowe/CIMMYT
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) â Small-scale mechanization is becoming more important on smallholder farms in Nepal as young people, particularly men, migrate away from rural areas in large numbers, leaving women to take on even bigger responsibilities.
Some 13 million people â about 50 percent of Nepalâs population â live in the hills and mountains where most subsistence farming takes place. Women traditionally contribute more agricultural labor than men in these rural areas, typically undertaking time-consuming tasks such as weeding, harvesting, threshing and milling in addition to household chores. Two-thirds of women in Nepal are self-employed or engaged in unpaid family labor.
Nepal has the lowest ratio of men to women in all of South Asia and the proportion of rural households headed by women jumped from 15 to 25 percent between 2001 and 2011. As a result, rural women face many challenges, their potential curtailed in part due to the difficulty accessing credit. Despite a 2002 amendment to the countryâs Land Act, the practice of male succession means that women only own property in a fifth of rural households.
âAlmost everywhere there are changes, but maybe particularly so in the mountains,â said Scott Justice, a rural mechanization specialist with the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia project in Nepal (CSISA-NP), who works with smallholders as part of efforts to help improve livelihoods. âTasks like the upkeep of terraces, plowing or service hiring are getting delayed or passed on to women, at the same time as the prices of hiring are going up.â
Following the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal, CSISA-NP was contracted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to help affected farming communities recover by providing grain storage tools, farm machinery and training, reaching 33,150 earthquake-affected households.
CSISA-NP, a project led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) with the International Rice Research Institute and the International Food Policy Research Institute and funded by USAID, aims to address the gender imbalance by increasing access to affordable machinery options to increase farm income while reducing drudgery for women.
An as yet unpublished study on the spread of mini-tillers has shown approximately 7,000 mini-tillers sold in hill districts, Justice said.
âA key priority for the government and projects like ours is getting owners to use the [mini-tiller] engine to power other machinery like wheat and rice threshers, mini-maize shellers, pumps and maybe even reapers and planter-seeder attachments,â said Justice.
âA small cadre of machinery importers who, along with CIMMYTâs market development efforts, are increasingly attuned to small farmersâ needs, bringing in a new generation of small and inexpensive machinery ideas and products emerging from China,â he said. âThese qualities make it easier for women and their households to access and use such technologies.â
One of the technologies identified by CSISA-NP is a small, lightweight, precision hand cranked fertilizer spreader, which is growing in popularity because it can increase rice and wheat yields by 5 to 10 percent while cutting labor by half or more. CSISA has trained 150 service providers to use the fertilizer spreader, while cooperating private sector partners have imported over 500 of these spreaders in advance of the 2016-2017 wheat season.
CSISA focuses on the creation of a sustainable private machinery and service sector that serves farmersâ needs. A core group of approximately 15 to 20 (mostly) small businesses are constantly traveling and scouring the markets in China for new machinery and new ideas. One challenge is to encourage them to look more broadly in Asia for innovative scale appropriate technologies that meet the needs of both women and men in Nepal.
âOur activities are based on more than two decades of CIMMYT experience of small-scale mechanization in Nepalâs Terai area â rather than joining farmersâ experiments, we join in small and mid-sized machinery importersâ marketing experiments,â explained Justice.
CSISA is led by CIMMYT with the International Rice Research Institute and the International Food Policy Research Institute and funded by USAID. It was established in 2009 to promote durable change at scale in South Asiaâs cereal-based cropping systems.Â
CIMMYT maize breeder, Thokozile Ndhlela (left), inspects a maize trial field with smallholder farmer, Otilia Chirova, in Mashonaland East, Zimbabwe. Photo: Johnson Siamachira/CIMMYT
HARARE, Zimbabwe (CIMMYT) – Little did 47-year-old Thokozile Ndhlela know that growing up in a rural area in Zimbabwe would inspire her to become a well-respected agricultural scientist, helping to transform agriculture by developing science-based solutions to some of the complex issues facing African farmers.
Currently a postdoctoral staff member with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT)in Zimbabweâs capital Harare, Ndhlela encourages girls to choose options that lead to careers in agriculture. Most farmers worldwide average an age of over 60, so Ndhlelaâs work is also helping to encourage young people to get involved in agriculture.
“There are many exciting opportunities to further improve agricultural productivity and improve food and nutritional security in my country, and beyond,” she said with a chuckle.
She comes from humble beginnings â growing up on a small farm, through primary and secondary school, and universities â and now she has begun to reap the rewards of her hard-won endeavors.
She credits her farmer father as her inspiration to pursue agricultural science.
âMy father was my greatest source of inspiration for me to venture into agriculture,â Ndhela said. âFrom high school, he encouraged me to study sciences. He used to boast, saying his daughter would be studying agriculture and that Iâd come back and assist him in his plot.â
His dream came true.
âIâm proud now since he is growing improved maize varieties that lâm providing him,â she said, adding that he proudly tells his friends that the varieties are being bred by his daughter.
Thokozile Ndhlela shows pro-vitamin A maize to visiting scientists at CIMMYT southern Africa regional office in Harare, Zimbabwe. Photo: Johnson Siamachira/CIMMYT
For Ndhlela, the journey has at times been long and winding. She has had to burst age-old stereotypes, which doubt womenâs capacity to engage in science and balance career aspirations with family commitments. She started her journey in pursuit of her first desire to become a teacher, but, she changed course to become an agricultural scientist.
She believes making agricultural research a high priority will also attract more skilled professionals to the field — especially women and young people.
âIâm happy to see farmers in my region using results of my research work,” she said.
Her scientific ambition was nurtured by her female secondary school teachers. After finishing secondary school in 1989, she enrolled at Gwebi College of Agriculture outside Harare to study for a national diploma in agriculture. Afterwards, she worked at the Zimbabwe Crop Breeding Institute in the Ministry of Agricultureâs Department of Research and Specialist Services (DRSS). While at DRSS she earned her Bachelor of Science in agriculture at the Zimbabwe Open University and subsequently enrolled for a masterâs degree in plant breeding at the University of Zambia. While at the DRSS, she began her research and earned a doctoral degree at the University of the Free State in South Africa in 2012, with a thesis entitled, âImprovement strategies for yield potential, disease resistance and drought tolerance of Zimbabwean maize inbred lines.â
âMy greatest passion is to see farmers in Zimbabwe and beyond grow improved maize varieties to step up food security and improve their livelihoods,â she said. âAfter becoming qualified, I was thrilled to put my skills to work and worked hard in breeding maize for drought, disease, heat and other stresses.â
Ndhlela has had the good fortune to implement the results of her work. While working for the national research system, she led the crop breeding program and won CIMMYT’s Best Breeding Program Award in southern Africa five years in succession. This success later culminated in winning the Zimbabwe Presidential Award for excellence in agricultural research in 2015. Under her guidance, the program saw the release of seven high yielding, drought tolerant hybrids and two open pollinated varieties in five years.
âThis was no easy feat since it involved a lot of hard work, tolerance,â Ndhlela said. âI used to spend most of the time in the field since plant breeding is done in the field, and not in the office.ââ
CONFRONTING CHALLENGES
Out in the field with other researchers, Thokozile Ndhlela (far right), demonstrates maize breeding work at a CIMMYT southern Africa partner days in Harare, Zimbabwe. Photo: Johnson Siamachira/CIMMYT
In Africa, food and nutritional security remain a major concern. Declining soil fertility is a significant issue in the region, leading to poor crop performance. Climate change could also result in the number of malnourished people in sub-Saharan Africa increasing by 40 percent by 2050 â from 223 million to 355 million people, according to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. This challenge will require a great deal of innovation and focused scientific effort.
Ndhlela said smallholder farmers should shift agriculture from its current largely informal status in the economy into the formal business sector with a more structured system that targets young women. As a result, women in agriculture will play critical roles in agricultural incomes and employment development. When treated appropriately, added Ndhlela, agriculture can be moulded into an attractive career, especially for youth. In addition, she said, Africa needs more scientists, and especially women scientists.
A mother of four boys, Ndhlela believes she can make a difference to peopleâs lives through her agricultural research in development work. She shares her views on women in agricultural research in the following interview.
Q: Tell us about your early childhood.
A: I was born in Matobo District in Matabeleland South province of Zimbabwe. Iâm the second born in a family of three boys and two girls. I spent most of my early childhood with my paternal grandparents in Matobo rural area. My grandparents earned a living off farming, growing horticultural crops commercially. They were passionate about farming, and l remember when l was in Grade One I would be woken up very early to go and work in the field before going to school. After school, or during weekends, l would also take the responsibility of herding goats. My parents were also passionate farmers and during school holidays we would all help my grandparents with farm work.
Q: What was one of your childhood dreams?
A: My childhood dream was to become a teacher. I was being inspired by my parents, and my many relatives who were in that profession.
Q: Was there any particular female scientist who inspired you when you were at school?
A: I was particularly inspired by my high school biology and chemistry teachers, who were both female. They taught me that what boys could do we girls could do too.
Q: âGirls should not believe that science training at university is a male domain.â Whatâs your comment on this?
A: Girls used to shy away from science especially at college level but with the new generation this seems to have changed as more girls are now doing science- based programs.
Q: Role models are also critical in shaping oneâs future. Who was your inspiration to pursue a doctorate in agriculture?
A: Dr. Marianne Banziger, CIMMYT deputy director general for research and partnerships (then leading CIMMYTâs Global Maize Program, based in Kenya) inspired me to pursue doctorate studies. Doing a doctorate was far-fetched for me until Dr. Banziger asked me if l were interested in pursuing doctoral studies. She assured me that CIMMYT would support me secure a place to study.
Q: Thereâs a general misconception that studying agricultural science only prepares one to work on a farm. Is this the case?
A: This misconception used to be there especially when l was studying for my national diploma. We would play sports with students from other technical colleges whose students would snear at us agriculture students. They thought we could only work on a farm. Even my high school friends never understood why l chose agriculture. They asked me whether l would be able to work on a farm. But this is changing. People are now aware of the opportunities in agricultural science. I have personally had encounters with parents asking me what is required for their children to study agricultural science. I have made a career in science and agriculture and young girls can do it, also.
Q: Tell us about your experiences as a female researcher with DRSS. What does it mean to a female researcher? What are your experiences at CIMMYT?
A: As a female researcher at DRSS, I commanded a lot of respect from both male and female counterparts. This inspired and gave me the zeal to keep aiming higher. I started working at DRSS in 1994 as a diploma holder. With encouragement and inspiration, l ended up with a doctorate in plant breeding.
At DRSS, I led the Crop Breeding Institute to win a national award in maize breeding excellence. Called the âRobert Gabriel Mugabe Awardâ (after the Zimbabwean president), it is presented bi-annually for critical breakthroughs in research. The $15,000 award was presented to the Crop Breeding Instituteâs National Maize Breeding Program, for outstanding research in the production and release of the maize variety ZS265. The variety has excellent tolerance to diseases, drought and low nitrogen and therefore suitable for production under dryland conditions.
In recognition of their sterling effort in using plant breeding to address low maize productivity on smallholder farms, CIMMYTâs Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa project awarded the âBest Maize Breeding Team in southern Africaâ prize to Zimbabwe a record five times from 2008 to 2014.
Food insecurity can be overcome if we can bring together new knowledge and skills to farmers in a very sustainable manner. There will be crop production challenges unless we integrate climate change, soil fertility and water.
Joining CIMMYT as a maize breeder in 2014 was a dream come true for me and l really felt rewarded for my work. As plant breeding is male-dominated at CIMMYT- Southern Africa Regional Office, l feel challenged to do even better and prove that even women can do the job. I believe Iâm an inspiration to other upcoming female scientists.
Q: During training, what was menâs attitude toward you?
A: I used to command respect from some of my male colleagues. However, some would look down on me. These were forced to change their attitude once they realized that I was better than them in our studies. I vividly remember such a scenario at the University of Zambia where l was the only female in a class of 10 Master of Science students.
Q: What was the main output of your agricultural research?
A: The main output of my agricultural research was the successful production of hybrids that are high yielding, drought and disease tolerant.
Q: To what extent are you involved in agricultural innovation at CIMMYT?
A: Iâm particularly working on a special program on pro – vitamin A maize. This research work is both challenging and rewarding as my colleagues respect me because of my achievements. The work seeks to alleviate the problem of vitamin A deficiency that is prevalent in most developing countries, including those in southern Africa. There is very good evidence that vitamin A deficiency leads to an impaired immune system and can even have an impact on brain development. But effective science can make a huge difference here by enriching staple crops such as maize, with pro-vitamin A and providing subsistence farming households with nutritionally enhanced food.
In Zimbabwe, nearly one in every five children under the age of five years are vitamin A deficient. These deficiencies can lead to lower IQ, stunting, and blindness in children, increased susceptibility to disease for both children and adults; and higher health risks to mothers â and their infants â during childbirth. In partnership with HarvestPlus, and other fellow CIMMYT scientists, l have managed to facilitate the research and release of four pro-vitamin A hybrids in Malawi, Tanzania (two), Zambia (six) and Zimbabwe (four).
Q: Has working for CIMMYT in maize biofortification enriched your skills and knowledge?
A: Working at CIMMYT has made me grow in science. Coupled with improved leadership and gradual increase in my communications skills, I have become very confident in my career. Before joining CIMMYT, I had less knowledge on maize biofortification. I have since gained a lot of knowledge so that l can now explain to people what lâm doing with so much confidence and enthusiasm. Iâm loving it!
Q:Â Women face huge challenges daily and often lack the right kind of support. The employment environment can also be hostile to women scientists. Has working for CIMMYT enabled male scientists to view female scientists the same, as equal partners in agricultural research in development?
A: I feel male scientists at CIMMYT are mature and view female scientists as equal partners in agricultural research in development, and l respect them for that.
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Despite over a decade of implementing policies and programs to promote gender equity in research, some countries have seen careers for women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) stagnate and even decrease in some fields.
Research indicates that women start out in equal numbers to their male colleagues â even outnumbering in some cases â while pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in STEM fields, but drop off at the doctoral level and even more at the research level, with men now representing 72 percent of the global research pool.
âThe age at which many pursue or complete a doctoral degree often coincides with the time people start thinking about having children,â said Denisse McLean, an agrobiodiversity doctoral student at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy, who is conducting research at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) headquartered near Mexico City. âI knew after my masterâs I wanted to do my doctorate right away because I know once I have kids, I wonât have as much flexibility.â
âA number of my male classmates study abroad while their spouses are at home with their kids,” McLean said. “In contrast, none of my female classmates have children. I would not be able to travel and work long hours like I do now if I had children of my own.â
Denisse McLean is an agrobiodiversity doctoral student at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna who is conducting research at CIMMYT. Photo courtesy of Denisse McLean.
McLean refers to a âmaternal wallâ which results from expectations that a womanâs job performance will be affected by her taking a leave of absence to have children, or by absences from work to take care of family.
The work environment of a lab or lecture hall frequently does not allow flexibility for child leave or care. Since most women still assume the primary caregiver role regardless of where they live in the world, in heterosexual couples this often results in the womanâs career lagging, not her male partnerâs.
âI never had maternity leave,” said Denise Costich, senior scientist and head of CIMMYTâs maize germplasm bank, now over three decades into her career. “There were no provisions in my contracts, either as a graduate student or a postdoctoral researcher, to cover this. I took vacation time to give birth. When my first child was born I took her to the greenhouse with me to check on my experiments, when she was under a week old.â
Costich, who lovingly refers to her three children as her âgrad school baby, thesis baby and post-doc baby,â pursued a career in ecological research while raising three kids, at times requiring the deployment of innovative problem-solving skills, including strapping baby seats to lab carts or her baby to her own body in the field. It was at times a challenge to meet the competitive requirements of a career in science, particularly on one occasion when she had to rush to a job interview, just two weeks after giving birth.
According to Costich, tenure positions at any institution can require 80 to 90 hours of dedicated attention a week. Young researchers are also expected to spend 80 to 120 hours a week in the laboratory, putting women with children at an immediate disadvantage.
âIâve always worked and Iâve never stopped because I know when you âtake some time off,â you fall behind, especially in science where the technology changes so quickly,â Costich said. âYou get out of the loop and are at an extreme disadvantage trying to play catch up with your career.â
Denise Costich, senior scientist and head of CIMMYTâs maize germplasm bank, conducting field work in Spain with daughter Mara in 1986 (left). On the right, Costich holds maize cobs grown by a farmer on the Nevado de Toluca volcano in Mexico. Photos courtesy of Denise Costich and Jennifer Johnson/CIMMYT.
Both Costich and McLean credit strong support networks for their success, but acknowledge structural changes are needed throughout the research system. Such countries as the United States, that donât guarantee paid maternity leave or sufficient support for child care must also re-orient their national policies to support working women, Costich said, making reference to her country of origin.
âI was able to make tweaks to the system and keep going, but I know a lot of people who had to give up,â Costich said. âWe need to get more women who have gone through these experiences in higher level positions so that we can make effective policy changes.â
Child rearing isnât the only time women leave their careers to serve as caregivers. Research shows that women also tend to be more likely to take family leave to care for parents, grandchildren and other relatives and were significantly less likely to be employed than their peers, whereas men who take on care giving roles experience no change in employment status.
Reformation of the institutionalized culture and processes that âpenalizeâ a woman for having a family life is vital to ensure more women can have meaningful STEM research careers. Changing generally accepted hiring criteria and accepting flexible work arrangements, publication and research schedules are some of the methods that can help ensure women and men who interrupt their career for family leave will not jeopardize their future careers.
All institutes that are serious about increasing the number of women in their ranks should take these and other steps to remove barriers to women in science, such as bias in the hiring process and peer review, if they want to conduct more effective research.
Tour of field trials sown with MasAgro maize materials in Hopelchen, Campeche, Mexico. (Photo: CIMMYT)
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) â Sustainable farming practices allow smallholder farmers to improve maize yields without increasing land, which has proven to reduce deforestation in Mexicoâs Yucatan Peninsula according to an independent report commissioned by the Mexico REDD+ Alliance and The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
Conservation agriculture, a sustainable intensification technique that includes minimal soil movement, surface cover of crop residues and crop rotations, was successfully trialed in the south east of Mexico to protect biodiversity and counter rainforest loss caused by a creeping agricultural frontier, as part of a rural development project the Sustainable Modernization of Traditional Agriculture (MasAgro).
Over a year ago, the MasAgro project, led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and Mexicoâs Secretariat of Agriculture (SAGARPA), partnered with local organization Pronatura Peninsula de Yucatan to test a sustainable intensification strategy in Hopelchen, a small community in the state of Campeche, where indigenous and Mennonite farmers grow maize following traditional farming practices.
Technician Vladimir May Tzun visits Santa Enna research platform to make fertility checks in Hopelchen, Campeche. (Photo: CIMMYT)
Decades of plowing the fields without crop rotation and applying agrochemicals to control pests have degraded the soils in Hopelchen. As a result, farmers are prone to convert rainforest areas into growing fields to address diminishing crop yields. In an effort to curb this practice, MasAgro introduced conservation agriculture to improve soil fertility and water availability on the fields of five participant farmers.
A key moment during the project was when producers saw the benefits of conservation agriculture after two months of drought. Participant farmers achieved more developed maize cobs than those who did not, according to findings in the MasAgro case study featured in the report, âExperiences on sustainable rural development and biodiversity conservation in the Yucatan Peninsula.â
The positive results have sparked the interest of farmers from adjacent communities who want to get involved in the MasAgro project, said Pronaturaâs field manager of sustainable agriculture, Carlos Cecilio Zi Dzib.
Maize growing in Santa Enna demonstration module in Hopelchen, Campeche, Mexico.
âMasAgro has been very successful in the Peninsula,â said Bram Govaerts, CIMMYTâs regional representative in Latin America. âIn the course of its second year of implementation, MasAgro has established a research platform and offered training to 150 farmers, who have attended events organized in collaboration with TNC and Mexicoâs Agriculture, Forestry and Livestock Research Institute.â
âThis work is an effort to document the experiences of some of the sustainable rural initiatives and projects that contribute to reduce deforestation in the region, and thus make their contribution to the conservation and sustainable management of the Mayan Forest in the Yucatan Peninsula,â wrote report authors Carolina Cepeda and Ariel Amoroso.
SAGARPA and CIMMYT plan to present achievements of their MasAgro partnership, including the Hopelchen farmersâ success story, during the United Nationsâ thirteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 13), which will take place from December 4 to 17 in Cancun, Mexico.
Farmers pledge to stop burning residues. Photo: L. Singh/CIMMYT
HARYANA, India (CIMMYT) — In the intensively cropped region of northwest India, poor management practices â especially residue burning after the rice season â often results in environmental degradation, severely affecting soil and human health. Residue burning is a major issue not only for agriculture, but for society as a whole. It cannot be dealt with in isolation and technology alone is not sufficient to address this challenge.
Arpana Services, a leading NGO in Haryana involved in promoting micro-enterprise programs by motivating womenâs self-help groups, is working together with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) to generate awareness among women about climate-smart practices. In view of the forthcoming wheat sowing season, two field days aimed at discouraging residue burning were held by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) on 18 and 25 September 2016 in the Taprana and Sangoi villages of Haryana, India. The events brought together around 2,000 women from villages across the state.
Aiming to foster climate-smart agriculture, the events promoted zero-tillage wheat and highlighted the adverse effects that residue burning has on soil physiochemical and biological properties. Demonstrations showed how the Happy Seeder and other zero-tillage machines reduce production costs, save water and increase yields. The field days also focused on reducing soil degradation and human health hazards by improving soil nutrient content and decreasing hazardous gas emissions. Citing the success of 27 climate-smart villages across Haryana, H.S. Jat, CIMMYT scientist, stressed the need to conserve natural resources and develop climate-resilient cropping systems.
Another part of the collaboration involves ensuring women farmers are financially independent. For example, Aruna Dayal, director of Arpana Services, stated that working together with CIMMYT will provide innovative solutions to women farmers who need to repay loans, while diversifying income and promoting savings. At the end of the field days, the highly motivated women took an oath not to burn crop residues on their fields and to educate other fellow farmers about the harm burning can do.
Shelley Feldman, recently retired professor at Cornell University, gives a keynote speech on gender balance in agriculture at CIMMYT’s 50th anniversary conference. CIMMYT/Alfonso Arredondo.
MEXICO CITY (CIMMYT) â Women play a crucial role in agricultural production throughout the world, yet they often face barriers to accessing improved seeds, new agricultural techniques and technologies that could increase their productivity and livelihoods. If women had access to the same productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent, raise the total agricultural output of developing countries from between 2.5 to 4 percent and reduce the number of malnourished people in the world by 100 to 150 million (FAO).
In order to improve womenâs access to productive resources and global food security as a whole, the first step is to learn to seek out and listen to womenâs needs and realities without bias, said Shelley Feldman, the recently retired director of feminist, gender and sexuality studies and the Polson Institute for Global Development at Cornell University. Feldman, who was speaking at a conference in Mexico City to mark the 50th anniversary of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), also served as an international professor of development sociology at Cornell from 1984 to 2016, was a former director of the South Asia and the gender and global change programs, president of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, and fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. She has published widely in area studies and social science journals on gender and rural development, feminist methodologies, patriarchy, religion, honor and normativity, as well as on displacement and ownership rights.
Feldman began conducting gender research in Bangladesh in the 1970s, where she was struck by how many of the rural women she worked with occupied crucial yet often unrecognized roles at all levels of the agricultural value chain, from food production to farming and post-harvest work. A passion for research in gender and agriculture was born.
At the CIMMYT conference in Mexico City on September 29, Feldman challenged the audience to really think about, unpack, and change their assumptions about female farmers and gender in a keynote speech titled, âWhat does gender-balanced agriculture look like?â
She shared some of her views on women and agriculture after her speech.
Â
Q: What can we be doing here at CIMMYT to help improve gender balance in agriculture?
Allow yourself to hear what women really want. I feel that many of us still donât know. Itâs not just a question of listening. They speak to us and we translate it through our own language, our own personal experience and understanding. For example, when I first started doing research in Bangladesh, every single woman in a village reported on a survey that they were married. I wondered how this was possibleâthe country had just endured a terrible famine, surely some women had lost their husbands. So I went back to the village to ask the women to explain. It turns out that this particular village happened to be Hindu, and in their tradition, once a woman is married she is always married, even if her husband dies or abandons her. Because I had translated their responses in terms of my own personal understanding of marriage, I ran the risk of overlooking these womenâs actual status, situation and needs. We need to change the way we think about our survey instruments. Weâve learned a lot about what women do, but not why or howâwhy they do or donât take risks, adopt technologies or change eating habits. There is such a push for quantitative data, but qualitative information is so important if you are to truly understand the realities that people are facing.
We also really need to think about the structure of our research process. âTaking it to the farmer,â in the words of Norman Borlaug (the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former wheat breeder at CIMMYT, known internationally as the father of the Green Revolution), is absolutely crucial, but we really need to think about âWho is the farmer?â âWhat do they want?â and âHow are we convincing them?â
Farmers are not just one homogenous groupâwomen farmers are not one homogenous group. Interventions will only work if we truly listen to what they want and need, and understand where they are coming from, to develop solutions that are appropriately adapted to their situation.
Q: What advice do you have for researchers?
When I first started conducting gender research in the field in Bangladesh in the 1970s I saw how many donors and other organizations often threw âblanketâ fixes at people who needed specific solutions. These people were genuinely trying to help, but either because they were not listening to women, or because they were interpreting the womenâs responses through their own understanding of the world, they werenât helping the situation.
Donât reproduce the assumed meaning of things, take it to the field, and use it as evidence you have actual data. In order to create any sort of positive change you need to be reflexiveâalways question, think about your assumptions, unsettle them. Demand self-reflection, even when it hurts, and it will truly change your research analysis. This will allow you to appreciate when your subjects say something you never thought of.
Q: What are your thoughts on CIMMYTâs approach to gender work?
I really appreciate CIMMYTâs work with the GENNOVATE initiative through the CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) on Maize and Wheat. GENNOVATE is a cross-CRP global comparative research initiative which addresses the question of how gender norms and agency influence men, women and youth to adopt innovation in agriculture and natural resource management. I think itâs great that the initiative includes both qualitative and quantitative researchâand most importantly, comparative research.
We need to realize that âwomen farmers are not women farmers are not women farmersââwomen in any two different locations or social groups will not have the same realities or constraints. Thatâs why itâs so important that the project is looking at 125 rural communities in 26 countries. The work that CIMMYT gender specialist Lone Badstue and her colleagues are doing on GENNOVATE is incredible, in that they are working to pattern out broad trends without flattening out key differences. Not looking at women as a homogenous group ensures that youâll get better results.
NGO partnership brings new capacity building opportunities. Photo: CIMMYT
In the Indian state of Haryana, women are actively involved in farm operations but do not contribute significantly to decision-making. An effective way to enhance womenâs decision-making and promote gender equity is to teach them to use new agricultural technologies and thus generate higher yields and better income. How technological change contributes to womenâs empowerment has thus become an important area of study in Indiaâs male-dominated farm sector.
Under the aegis of CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), CIMMYT is working on developing climate-smart agricultural practices (CSAPs) that enable farmers to reduce climate-related risks. As part of this activity, CIMMYT-CCAFS is joining hands with a leading NGO, Arpana Services (www.arpanaservices.org), that seeks to enhance livelihoods in rural areas of the states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi. More to the point in this case, it works with 830 self-help groups including 11,600 women across 100 villages in Haryana.
CIMMYT will build confidence and awareness among the womenâs groups Arpana has formed by instructing them on CSAPs and their use. CIMMYT and Arpana will merge their areas of expertise to promote CSAP adoption among female smallholders, thereby benefiting farm households. They plan to provide capacity building programs aimed at educating female farmers on technical aspects of sustainable intensification and making them realize the importance of nutrition by introducing legumes into their cropping systems.
The women will also be trained to use a farm lekha jokha book, which is an accounting and farm management tool that allows farmers to understand and compare farm expenses that, though important, are commonly neglected. Keeping such records would make women more knowledgeable and help them manage their farms more efficiently, thereby escalating their decision-making authority at home.
Although the CIMMYT-Arpana initiatives target womenâs empowerment, they will also lead to other socio-economic changes. For example, successful women farmers could help promote CSAPs and convince government and policy makers to make recommendations based on conservation agriculture. In this way, a model encompassing the pre-requisites of sustainable agriculture could be established with women as torch-bearers of the future of agriculture.
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) â In developing countries, 43 percent of income-earning farmworkers are women â a percentage that is even higher if unwaged farm work is included, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Despite the large numbers of women working on farms, their voices are not heard by international development policymakers and funders, which handicaps global efforts to achieve food security, said the 2003 World Food Prize laureate and former head of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP).
âWhen policymakers or grant-makers look at community needs, the dearth of women in leadership or spokesperson roles, prevents them from learning what is really required to best support the community,â Catherine Bertini wrote in a special issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
âFeedback comes from men, and it predictably centers on what men need,â she added, pointing out that the role of women in the fight for food security is vital not only because they are farmers, but also because they typically oversee nutrition and meal management in the household.
Women and men do not have the same access to agricultural inputs â to seeds and fertilizer, land and extension services, and FAO estimates that if they did, womenâs agricultural production would increase up to 20 percent, said Bertini, who will speak at a conference on September 29 in Mexico City to mark the 50th anniversary of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
Additionally, financial resources controlled by women are more likely to be spent on household needs in contrast to financial resources controlled by men, which are more likely to be used outside the household, Bertini said.
In her essay titled âInvisible Women,â Bertini, currently a professor at Syracuse University, cites a gender-specific mix-up with hoes as an example of how things can go terribly wrong when women farmers are not consulted about their needs.
During her tenure at WFP, Bertini visited a rural area in Angola, which was recovering from more than a quarter century of civil war. Farmers said they could not work the fields because they had no farm implements, although there were about a hundred hoes leaning against a nearby fence.
It turned out that the non-governmental organization (NGO) that ordered them was unaware that hoes in Angola were gender differentiated.
âThe NGO had not talked to the women,â Bertini said. âIn that region of Angola, women were the only people who tilled the fields, but they did not use the long-poled hoes. Womenâs hoes, it turned out, had shorter wooden handles and shovel-like spades at the end.â
Women squat to use their hoes because they usually have a baby strapped to their back and it is less cumbersome and causes less stress on the back, unlike the men who stand.
âFor me, this story became a metaphor for the importance of always speaking with the people who know what their needs are, and that those who do not specifically seek out women in order to understand their needs may waste their entire contribution to the good they seek to accomplish,â Bertini said.
âIt also reminds me that women are generally not in community leadership roles and are too often politically invisible.â
She says for women to be seen and heard, and for society to benefit from their knowledge, changes must occur, including:
Educating girls
Starting research with womenâs needs in mind
Enhancing womenâs health support
Supporting breastfeeding
Improving womenâs literacy
Creating agricultural extension programs that include women
Expanding micro-bank loans and insurance
Creating legal rights for women to own and inherit land
Considering societal gender roles in all development thinking
MartĂnez displays her award at the Autonomous University of Chapingo. Photo courtesy of Tania MartĂnez.
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Tania MartĂnez, Ph.D. fellow with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), received the Mexican National Youth Award for her outstanding performance in academic achievement from Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Established in 1975, the award recognizes Mexican youth whose dedication inspires peers and exemplifies the values of personal growth and community development.
MartĂnez is at CIMMYT studying for her doctorate with the Knowledge, Technology, Innovation Group at Wageningen UR University in the Netherlands. She follows technology trajectories and processes of social inclusion/exclusion within them. As part of her research she is studying conservation agriculture, a set of farming practices based on minimal soil disturbance, permanent soil coverage and use of crop rotations, in Mexicoâs Bajio region. Under MasAgro – a large Mexico-CIMMYT initiative – she is involved in work that helps smallholder farmers in breeding to improve their prized local maize varieties, and also looks at how farmers can access information through information and communications technology.
In 2001 at the age of 14, MartĂnez left her home of TamazulĂĄpam Mixes, an indigenous village in the northern mountains of Oaxaca, to study at the Autonomous University of Chapingo in Central Mexico.
Her achievements are noteworthy. Of the more than 15 million indigenous Mexicans â about 15 percent of the countryâs population â over a quarter of adults donât have a single year of education and only 26 percent of women work or take part in other economic activities. Mexicoâs indigenous citizens are among the countryâs poorest and most marginalized.
âI decided to study agronomy because I was raised in the countryside and rooted to the land,â MartĂnez said. âIn Chapingo, though, I met people who didnât know there were places in Mexico without electricity, drinkable and sanitary drainage systems or even access roads. âYes, they exist!â I would reply. âI actually have been in places, they exist in many regions of Mexicoââ
Nearly 30 percent of indigenous peoples in Mexico live without running water and 66 percent of households cook with wood and charcoal.
Prior to undertaking Ph.D. studies, she received a Fullbright scholarship to study at the University of Arizona, where she obtained a master’s degree in agricultural and biosystems engineering focusing on water management, irrigation and bioethanol production from sweet sorghum.  MartĂnez then went on to work at CIMMYT as an intern and consultant before beginning her doctoral research with the organizationâs socioeconomics program in 2013. MartĂnez credits meeting Conny Almekinders â her current professor and supervisor at Wageningen â and Carolina Camacho, a postdoctoral fellow with CIMMYTâs socioeconomic program, who specializes in social analysis of agricultural technologies, as the source of inspiration for pursuing her Ph.D. in the same topic.
âI hope more people are willing to help those whoâve not had the same opportunities and support I have had, to help change their reality,â MartĂnez said. âIâm grateful to all those whoâve helped me along the way, especially CIMMYT and the many researchers and people I have met in this long journey.â
As part of her National Youth Award, MartĂnez plans to donate books to libraries in marginalized communities and help develop policies that help these communities.
With its twisted cables and flickering computer screens, the room commandeered by the GENNOVATE study team at the headquarters of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) near Mexico City looks more like a Silicon Valley hackathon than what most would understand as gender research. Yet up on the main screen, questions are being asked of around 8,000 participants as part of a global gender study.
Researcher Alejandro Ramirez records the life experience of a farmer in Chiapas, Mexico. Photo: Sam Storr/CIMMYT
It is often a mystery why a new agricultural technology or practice can be successful in one community yet fail to have the desired effect in another. Social expectations of how men and women should behave may affect their ability to adopt or benefit from such innovations.
To understand how, researchers linked to 11 CGIAR research programs (CRPs) conducted guided discussion groups and interviews with women and men from 135 communities in 26 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
By recording and analyzing their personal testimony, GENNOVATE aims to develop insights and practical tools to improve research design in the CGIAR group of agricultural research institutes.
The study is qualitative, meaning that methods were used to encourage participants to discuss topics of interest to the researchers from their own perspective. It is also comparative, with the same methodology being applied across deliberately varied contexts, with men and women from different age groups and socio-economic backgrounds.
As part of the study, once transcripts were collected and translated from 2,025 interviews and discussion groups, the next step was to tag every statement made with codes that can be read by the social science software NVivo. These codes indicate exactly what was being said, by whom and in what context, so that researchers can analyze statements on a wide scale.
To help design the coding framework and guide implementation, GENNOVATE recruited Patti Petesch as a consultant. Petesch has worked on several high-profile projects on poverty and gender for the World Bank that use a similar approach, including On Norms and Agency: Conversations about gender equality with women and men in 20 countries. The coding work required the efforts of two teams based in Mexico and Peru.
âOur use of NVivo goes a lot further than any of the major studies Iâve worked on before,” Petesch said. “Weâve invested a lot in having this powerful tool for drawing out patterns across the different communities and population groups reached.”
Exploration begins
Researcher Gloria Martinez leads a focus group of women in Chiapas, Mexico. CIMMYT/Sam Storr
With the data collected and coded for analysis, the next question is what to look for. Using the data collected by the CIMMYT-led CRPs on Maize (MAIZE) and Wheat (WHEAT), the GENNOVATE team start by making exploratory queries – broad questions that might reveal patterns or contrasts in the testimony given by study participants across different contexts.
As an example, Petesch turns to a major topic of concern: âWe find, for instance, young men and women on the outside nearly everywhere in the 27 communities visited by MAIZE,” Petesch said, explaining that young people encountered in the study were not frequently involved in agricultural decision-making. Â “You can see it in the data, responses from adults on any agricultural topic number in the hundreds, while young people have much less to say.â
Through the analysis software, it is possible to ask the young participants in the study a hypothetical question: âWhat do you think the young men and women of your village should do when they finish studying?â
NVivo registers all of the statements by young people in which they mentioned an aspiration, showing that agriculture and natural resource management falls far behind non-agricultural livelihoods, education and parenting goals. Intriguingly, girls were twice as likely to hope for education in their future as boys.
This kind of general comparative analysis is of limited value, but helps to identify broad patterns and direct researchers to lessons about gender, agency and agriculture buried deeper in the data. NVivo also allows the researchers to dive right into crucial moments in the interviews and discussions, where what is being said is of importance to the question at hand. This allows their wide analysis to be supported by in-depth case studies of the research communities sampled.
Next steps
CIMMYT gender specialist Lone Badstue, who leads the GENNOVATE executive committee, envisions a two-track approach for GENNOVATE to have an impact: authoritative research and institutional change in the CGIAR consortium of agricultural researchers.
MAIZE and WHEAT are collaborating with nine other CRPs, aiming to produce their respective GENNOVATE CRP reports by the end of 2016. These reports will be used to inform discussion on the implications of the study findings for agricultural research in the CGIAR, while consultations will be held with biophysical scientists to create focused tools that help them integrate gender in their daily work.
âYou could imagine a future where if someone asks if you are an agronomist, they would assume that you know about gender,â Badstue said. âThere is only a small pool of experts, so now is a good time for a young person to get into agriculture.â
In the meantime, GENNOVATE has already had an impact in terms of the national researchers trained to carry out the fieldwork. âIn each country one team was trained in gender studies and qualitative analysis. That kind of capacity is often rare and difficult to find,â Badstue emphasized.
This story is one of a series of features written during CIMMYTâs 50th anniversary year to highlight significant advancements in maize and wheat research between 1966 and 2016.
HARARE, Zimbabwe (CIMMYT) — When practiced unsustainably, agriculture has led to environmental degradation and famine, which have plagued civilizations through the centuries. Innovations such as irrigation or the plow (since circa 6,000 and 3,000 BC) increased productivity, but often deteriorated long-term soil fertility through erosion and other forms of degradation.
We are now facing historically unprecedented challenges to food security. We must increase food production by 70 percent to feed nine billion people by 2050, without damaging our finite and often already degraded natural resource base. In addition, farmers face more frequent drought and water scarcity, which makes it increasingly difficult to grow crops, and extreme weather events such as the 2015-2016 El Niño, which has already caused large-scale crop failures and soaring maize prices in southern Africa.
Conservation agriculture (CA) practices based on the principles of minimal soil disturbance, permanent soil cover and crop rotation are helping farmers combat growing environmental challenges by maintaining and boosting yields, while protecting the environment and increasing profits for smallholders globally. When CA practices are coupled with water-use efficient and drought tolerant varieties, the benefits are even greater.
Drought is increasingly common in Malawi, leaving an estimated 3 million people in need of urgent humanitarian food assistance this year alone. However, more than 400 farmers and their families in Balaka, southern Malawi, who have been practicing CA over the last 12 years will escape hunger. CIMMYT and its partner Total LandCare have helped more than 65,000 farmers adopt CA systems throughout the entire country. Above, SIMLESA lead farmer Agnes Sendeza harvests maize ears on her farm in Tembwe, Salima District, Malawi. Photo: Peter Lowe/CIMMYT
âCA approaches can mean the difference between farmers being able to feed their families or having to starve,â says Christian Thierfelder, senior cropping systems agronomist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), regarding the recent El Niño â the strongest on record â in southern Africa. To date, approximately 10 million people in southern Africa are dependent on food aid and an estimated 50 million people are projected to be affected, pushing them to the brink of starvation.
Sustainable intensification of agricultural systems and practices such as CA have become a necessity for farmers in Africa, where a combination of climate change and unsustainable agricultural practices are undermining land and water resources. This, coupled with an exploding population, makes increasing productivity while conserving the environment absolutely urgent.
Based on its experience in Latin America, which began in the early 1990s, CIMMYT started its first CA project in Africa in 2004, targeting Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. This initial work focused on understanding CA systems in the context of farmers and their environmental conditions and was funded by the German government and the International Fund for Agriculture Development. Its aim was to facilitate the adoption of CA systems by smallholder farmers. This culminated in the establishment in 2009 of a large PAN-African project on Sustainable Intensification of Maize-Legume Systems in Eastern and Southern Africa (SIMLESA).
Farmers in Shamva District, Zimbabwe, are introduced to an animal traction direct seeder which allows seeding and fertilizing directly into crop residues with minimum soil disturbance. Photo: Thierfelder/CIMMYT
Today, CA research at CIMMYT in Africa is increasingly focused on adaptation to the changing climate, which is leading to more erratic rainfall, increased heat stress and seasonal dry spells, in an effort to increase the use of climate-resilient cropping systems. CIMMYTâs work on CA in the region has shown that the practice can significantly increase farmersâ resilience to climate variability and change. Combining sustainable intensification practices with improved varieties has proved to increase productivity by 30-60 percent and income by 40-100 percent under drought conditions.
Despite CAâs successes, many smallholder farmers in developing countries still lack knowledge and understanding of sustainable agricultural practices and often revert to traditional farming practices that are labor-intensive and environmentally damaging. Also, CA systems are difficult to scale out if favorable policies and markets are not in place.
Araujo Njambo (right), a smallholder maize farmer in Mozambique, was used to the traditional way of farming that his family has practiced for generations, which required clearing a plot of land and burning all plant residues remaining on the soil to get a clean seedbed. However, as demand for land increases, this fuels deforestation and depletes soil nutrients. CIMMYT has been working with farmers like Njambo since 2006 to adapt sustainable intensification practices like CA to his circumstances. In the 2013-2014 cropping season, Njambo harvested his best maize yield in the last six years thanks to CA. Photo: Christian Thierfelder/CIMMYT
Mineral fertilizer, for example, is a basic agricultural input, but its adoption and use remain limited in sub-Saharan Africa. Farmers apply less than 10 kilograms per hectare on average due mainly to poor distribution networks (especially in rural areas) and high prices that are 3-5 times those in Europe. Lack of knowledge and training on how to use mineral fertilizer and other agricultural inputs renders them ineffective.
New discoveries in agriculture and breeding must be adaptable and transferable to smallholder farmers. This means improving physical distribution of technologies, training, knowledge and information sharing, credit availability and creating enabling environments for growth.
Just before passing away in September 2009, world-renowned agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug famously implored the world to âtake it to the farmerâ â a call to action we must follow if we are to sustainably feed the world by 2050. Without a basic understanding of good agricultural practices, most smallholder farmers will not be able to grow enough crops to move past subsistence farming.
Grain yield from a conservation agriculture demonstration plot in Zomba District, Malawi, is measured precisely as part of CIMMYTâs research on the combined benefits of drought tolerant maize and CA. Photo: Peter Lowe/CIMMYT
NAIROBI, Kenya (CIMMYT) â When a strange maize disease suddenly appeared in 2011 in Bomet, a small town 230 kilometers (143 miles) west of Kenyaâs capital city, Nairobi, scientists from CIMMYT and Kenya Agricultural Livestock and Research Organization were thrown into disarray. The disease, later identified as Maize Lethal Necrosis (MLN), became a nightmare for maize scientists leading many to work around the clock to find a solution to stop its rapid spread. As intensive research and screening work started, it became apparent that there was a dire need to fill a glaring information gap on the disease, particularly regarding MLNâs geographic distribution, the number of farmers affected, the levels of yield loss and the impact of those losses.
To address this gap, surveys were conducted with groups of male and female farmers in over 120 sub-locations of Kenyaâs maize production zones in a recent study âCommunity-survey based assessment of the geographic distribution and impact of maize lethal necrosis (MLN) disease in Kenya.â Â The results estimate maize losses from MLN at half a million tons per year with the highest losses reported in western Kenya. Â The study identified an urgent need to develop improved maize varieties resistant to MLN and emphasized the need for farmers to be informed and adapt appropriate agronomic practices to cope with the disease.
Read more about this research and other related studies on MLN from CIMMYT Scientists.
Community-survey based assessment of the geographic distribution and impact of maize lethal necrosis (MLN) disease in Kenya. 2016. Hugo De Groote, Francis Oloo, Songporne Tongruksawattana, Biswanath Das. Crop Protection Volume 82, April 2016, Pages 30â35
MLN pathogen diagnosis, MLN-free seed production and safe exchange to non-endemic countries. 2015. Monica Mezzalama, Biswanath Das, B. M. Prasanna
Genome-wide association and genomic prediction of resistance to maize lethal necrosis disease in tropical maize germplasm. 2015. Manje Gowda, Biswanath Das, Dan Makumbi, Raman Babu, Kassa Semagn, George Mahuku, Michael S. Olsen, Jumbo M. Bright, Yoseph Beyene, B. M. Prasanna. Theoretical and Applied Genetics
This story appeared originally on the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative website. Linda McCandless is associate director for communications, International Programs, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at Cornell University. She also oversees communications for the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat project.
“A ship is safe in the harbor, but thatâs not what ships are forâ is Maricelis Acevedoâs favorite mantra. The newly appointed associate director for science for Cornell Universityâs Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) project left her island home of Puerto Rico in 2003 to pursue a career as a pathologist and has been traveling the world ever since.
This past month, Acevedo visited wheat screening nurseries in Kenya and Ethiopia and wheat research centers in India with Ronnie Coffman, director of the DGGW. She feels grateful for the opportunity to lead the scientific component of a project whose goals are to help mitigate the threat of food insecurity in vulnerable regions of the world, especially Ethiopia.
âThe job comes with new opportunities and great responsibilities to achieve food security for a growing population,â said Acevedo. âGiven the challenges of a changing climate, scarce agricultural resources, and the misinformation about what technology can provide to agriculture in the developing and developed world, I feel privileged to be a voice for farmers, researchers and sponsors in the fight against wheat pathogens.â
Acevedo believes the world can do better in bringing science to smallholder farmersâ fields. Her new journey on behalf of the DGGW began on March 16 when she helped launch the DGGW project in the wheat fields of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), in Ciudad ObregĂłn in Mexico’s state of Sonora. Over the next year she will be visiting farmers and partner agricultural research facilities, including CIMMYT, around the globe.
âFor the past eight years, Maricelis has collaborated with the Cornell team on various aspects of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project,â said Coffman, vice-chair of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI). âMaricelis is an accomplished rust pathologist who also comes from an agricultural background. That is enormously helpful in a project whose success is so closely linked to farmer adoption of new varieties. We welcome her with great enthusiasm.â
The new DGGW grant will use modern tools of comparative genomics and big data to develop and deploy varieties of wheat that incorporate climate resilience and heat tolerance as well as improved disease resistance for smallholder farmers.
SMALL FARM ROOTS
Growing up on a small farm in Puerto Rico, in a family that grew plantains, bananas, edible beans, taro, sweet potato, maize and pigeon peas, Acevedo received an early introduction to the agricultural science behind farming. It was her father, now a retired agronomist from the University of Puerto Rico, who first introduced her to the concept of âpathogens.â She remembers watching him spray their fields to protect their crops from disease dressed in a protective suit and face mask. Mimicking his actions as a 4-year-old, she took a small plastic cup and sucked it tight onto her face breaking the capillaries all around her mouth and nose while âsprayingâ her Momâs flowers with a watering can â âmy first job as a pathologist,â she laughs.
More seriously, she also remembers her father testing farming practices that were going to be introduced to farmersâ fields in following seasons â âparticipatory breeding and research at its best.â And his first lessons on phenotypic selection of plantains and beans and his eagerness to try the new varieties coming out of the University of Puerto Rico Agricultural Experiment Research Station breeding and crop improvement programs.
Having experienced the devastation of seasonal crops due to drought, hurricanes, diseases and insects, Acevedo said she also knows the heartaches associated with farming. âI will never forget the emotional stress on my dadâs face in those moments.â
UNDERSTANDING HOST-PATHOGEN INTERACTION
During her undergraduate years at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, Acevedo studied biology, genetics, botany and biotechnology, courses that helped her decide to pursue a masterâs degree in agronomy where she focused on crop improvement and the genetics of edible beans.
Working on host resistance helped her decide to understand the pathogen side of the disease equation so she joined James R. Steadmanâs laboratory in the department of plant pathology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to pursue her Ph.D. in 2003. Acevedoâs research project, partially funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, focused on virulence diversity of edible bean rust pathogens in Honduras and the identification of resistance in wild beans and bean landraces. âThat is how my passion for international agriculture and rust research began,â said Acevedo.
Acevedo was in the first class of BGRI Women in Triticum (WIT) Early Career Award Winners in 2010. âThe WIT award help me identify and meet an amazing pool of female scientists who have mentored and encouraged me. We have developed collaborations that go beyond our professional lives.â
Acevedo takes seriously her role as mentor to other younger WIT winners who look to her as a role model for their research and academic careers.
SOLUTION ORIENTED
Acevedo believes her role with the DGGW is the perfect opportunity for her to facilitate how great work done by wheat scientists makes it to the field.
âI look forward to being part of the solutions necessary to deliver higher genetic gain wheat and promote better variety adoptions in key regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South Asia,â said Acevedo. âI also look forward to seeing how we can utilize new technologies such as high through-put phenotyping, genomic selection and early warning systems for pathogen epidemics and implementing them in research and farmersâ fields.
âWith the BGRIâs help in capacity building, research and education, we are training the next generation of wheat scientists for their countries and for their regions, increasing wheat production, and helping achieve food security,â Acevedo said. âI am very excited about helping developing countries with high potential for wheat improve their production and yield.â
This story is one in a series of features written during CIMMYT’s 50th anniversary year to highlight significant advancements in maize and wheat research between 1966 and 2016.
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) â The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) stepped onto the global stage during the âSwinging Sixties.â The decade was defined by social upheaval dominated by left-right political tensions provoked in large measure by Cold War rivalries between the United States and the former Soviet Union.
It was 1966 when Mexicoâs Office of Special Studies, formed in the 1940s as an agency of the countryâs Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation to improve bean, maize, potatoes and wheat crops, became CIMMYT.
That same year, civil war exploded in Chad, Chinaâs cultural revolution began, Indira Gandhi became Indiaâs first woman prime minister and musician John Lennon met his future wife Yoko Ono. In the United States, the feminist National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed. Throughout the decade, as the Vietnam War rumbled and more than 30 countries declared independence in Africa, women in many developing countries struggled to gain basic human rights, including the chance to vote.
In wealthy western nations, the âWomenâs Liberation Movement,â ultimately known as second-wave feminism, emerged, supplanting womenâs suffrage movements and deepening debates over womenâs rights.
At CIMMYT, efforts to meet agricultural needs of women farmers and those in charge of nutritional wellbeing within the household to bolster global food security took shape.
Women make up 43 percent of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). However, rural women suffer systematic discrimination with regard to their ability to access resources for agricultural production and socio-economic development.
Now referred to as âgender issuesâ and âgender relations,â debates over how to address inequity on farms and in the workplace are ongoing at CIMMYT. Rather than focusing specifically on womenâs rights, gender studies focus on how notions of women or men are determined through characteristics societies attribute to each sex. Gender relations consider how a given society defines rights, responsibilities, identities and relationships between men and women.
As staple foods, maize and wheat provide vital nutrients and health benefits, making up close to one-quarter of the worldâs daily energy intake, and contributing 27 percent of the total calories in the diets of people living in developing countries, according to FAO.
Globally, if women had the same access to agricultural production resources as men, they could increase crop yields by up to 30 percent, which would raise total agricultural output in developing countries by as much as 4 percent, reducing the number of hungry people by up to 150 million or 17 percent, FAO statistics show.
SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS
From the outset, women scientists played a key role as maize and wheat researchers at CIMMYT.
Evangelina Villegas, who in 2000 became the first woman to win the World Food Prize, joined CIMMYT in 1967. She shared the prestigious award with CIMMYT colleague Surinder Vasal for efforts and achievements in breeding and advancing quality protein maize to improve productivity and nutrition in malnourished and impoverished areas worldwide.
Maize scientist Marianne BĂ€nziger joined CIMMYT in 1992. When she was transferred to Zimbabwe in 1996 to lead the Southern African Drought and Low Soil Fertility Project (SADLF), she became the first woman scientist at CIMMYT posted to a regional office.
âIn the good old days, women scientists were considered an oddity â women were considered something special, even though a scientist like Eva Villegas was very well integrated into CIMMYT,â said BĂ€nziger, who now serves as CIMMYTâs deputy director general.
BĂ€nzigerâs work was centered on eastern and southern Africa, where the livelihoods of about 25 million people depend directly on agriculture and maize is the staple crop of choice. Drought and poor soil quality often erode food security and increase socio-economic pressures in the region.
BĂ€nziger became known as âMama Mahindi,â Swahili for âMother Maize,â for her work developing stress-tolerant maize and for fostering the widespread access of seed producers and farmers to improved drought-tolerant maize now grown by at least 2 million households.
Denise Costich manages the worldâs biggest maize gene bank at CIMMYT headquarters near Mexico City. She joined CIMMYT to work closely with farmers. She now holds farmer field days to help improve seed distribution. Her aims include understanding how best to move genetic resources from gene bank to field through breeding, so they become products that help improve food security.
âI was always encouraged to go as far as I could,â Costich said. âThe way I prove that women can be scientists is by being a scientist. Let me get out there and do what I can do and not spend a lot of time talking about it.â
Wheat physiologist Gemma Molero spent two years inventing a hand-held tool for measuring spike photosynthesis, an important part of the strategy for developing a high-yielding plant ideotype. Now, Bayer Crop Science is interested in joining a collaborative project with CIMMYT, which will focus around use of the new technology.
Wheat scientist Carolina Saint Pierre has made important contributions towards obtaining the first permits for growing genetically modified wheat in open field trials in Mexico. The trials have allowed the identification of best-performing genetically modified wheat under water stress and helped understand the genetic control of physiological mechanisms related to drought.
WORKPLACE EQUITY
Despite a daycare at headquarters and other efforts to encourage gender equity, women scientists at CIMMYT continue to face different burdens than men in maintaining a work-life balance.
âWhether you are a western woman in a white-collar job worrying about a daycare or a woman farmer in a developing country worrying about her aging parents, women have a different level of responsibility,â said Jenny Nelson, manager of the Global Wheat Program.
A lot of women drop out of agricultural science after earning their doctoral degrees once they have a family, said Costich, acknowledging a challenge many women working in agricultural science face related to long hours and travel requirements.
âAs a young woman I have to work very hard â I have to work even harder than men in the field to demonstrate my abilities and gain respect,â Molero said.
Overall, economists concur that gender inequity and social disparities have a negative impact on economic growth, development, food security and nutrition.
Through various projects, CIMMYT aims to address the challenges of gender equity to improve development potential. For example, CIMMYT researchers are among the leaders of a global push to encode gender into agricultural research in tandem with other international research partnerships.
In more than 125 agricultural communities in 26 countries, a field study of gender norms and agricultural innovation, known as âGennovate,â is underway. The aim is to help spur a transformation in the way gender is included in agricultural research for development. Gennovate focuses on understanding how gender norms influence the ability of people to access, try out, adopt or adapt new agricultural technology.
Acevedo believes her role with the DGGW is the perfect opportunity for her to facilitate how great work done by wheat scientists makes it to the field.