CRP Maize Annual Report 2021
The newly released CGIAR Research Program on Maize 2021 Technical Annual Report highlights joint achievements in making maize more affordable, nutritious and available for consumers and producers worldwide.
Theme: Nutrition, health and food security
As staple foods, maize and wheat provide vital nutrients and health benefits, making up close to two-thirds of the world’s food energy intake, and contributing 55 to 70 percent of the total calories in the diets of people living in developing countries, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. CIMMYT scientists tackle food insecurity through improved nutrient-rich, high-yielding varieties and sustainable agronomic practices, ensuring that those who most depend on agriculture have enough to make a living and feed their families. The U.N. projects that the global population will increase to more than 9 billion people by 2050, which means that the successes and failures of wheat and maize farmers will continue to have a crucial impact on food security. Findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which show heat waves could occur more often and mean global surface temperatures could rise by up to 5 degrees Celsius throughout the century, indicate that increasing yield alone will be insufficient to meet future demand for food.
Achieving widespread food and nutritional security for the world’s poorest people is more complex than simply boosting production. Biofortification of maize and wheat helps increase the vitamins and minerals in these key crops. CIMMYT helps families grow and eat provitamin A enriched maize, zinc-enhanced maize and wheat varieties, and quality protein maize. CIMMYT also works on improving food health and safety, by reducing mycotoxin levels in the global food chain. Mycotoxins are produced by fungi that colonize in food crops, and cause health problems or even death in humans or animals. Worldwide, CIMMYT helps train food processors to reduce fungal contamination in maize, and promotes affordable technologies and training to detect mycotoxins and reduce exposure.
CRP Wheat Annual Report 2021
The newly released CGIAR Research Program on Wheat 2021 Technical Annual Report highlights joint achievements in making wheat more affordable, nutritious and available for consumers and producers worldwide.
Over the course of ten years, WHEAT worked with hundreds of research and development partners worldwide to release high-yielding, disease-resistant, nutritious and climate-resilient wheat varieties, and efficient, sustainable wheat-based cropping systems.
This final report from 2021 shares important research on staple cereals’ role in global efforts towards food security, the number and distribution of wheat farms, the expected impact of climate change on wheat productivity, nitrogen-in-agriculture research, nutrition, and the most critical, immediate effects of COVID-19 on food systems, and more.
With its national partners, WHEAT released 70 new CGIAR-derived wheat varieties to farmers in 13 countries in 2021, and developed 18 innovations in the areas of genetics, biophysics, farm management, research and communication methods, or social sciences.
Food Is Just as Vital as Oil to National Security
A new Bloomberg op-ed urges nations to steer more money to organizations like CIMMYT that are advancing crucial research on how to grow more resilient wheat and maize crops in regions that are becoming steadily less arable.
What price wheat?
When wheat prices rise, so do global food prices, along with conflict, inequality and instability. Over the past two decades, the world has witnessed multiple crises erupt over the social and political instability caused by rising costs for staple cereals. The global food crisis that impacted many parts of the world in 2007–2008 was a response, in part, to the prices for wheat and rice which had increased 130% and 70%, respectively, compared to the year before. More recently, spikes in grain prices catalyzed the 2011 Arab Spring.
With the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the resulting longer-term disruptions of the country’s rural economy, there is potential for another round of turmoil linked to prices for staple cereals.
Ukraine is a breadbasket for the world, with 57% of its land area arable for agriculture. Wheat production in the country increased roughly 10%, on average, between 2000 and 2020. In 2022, Ukraine ranked as the fifth largest wheat exporter globally, exporting $3.59 billion of wheat.
Today, global wheat prices are at their highest levels since 2012: $9 per bushel, based on data from the Chicago Board of Trade.
Wheat is a staple crop, essential to food security. It is consumed by over 2.5 billion people worldwide, including large proportions of the populations of many food-insecure regions in the world. Many of the wheat-consuming countries in these regions are far from wheat self-sufficient, relying on global imports to meet demand. This causes significant vulnerability in food supply and increases associated humanitarian risks. In 2019, important quantities of Ukrainian wheat were exported to low- and middle-income countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Although the impacts of current price increases are anticipated to be short-term, they are likely to be inequitably felt, as not all buyers are able to pay higher prices.
There are over 6 million hectares of wheat planted in farmers’ fields across Ukraine that will be due for harvest in June and July of 2022. The length and depth of the current crisis has potential implications for the fate of this in-field crop, and for its subsequent harvest and global distribution. Likewise, sanctions and trading restrictions on Russia, the world’s largest wheat exporter — exporting $7.92 billion of wheat in 2020 — are likely to place added pressure on international wheat markets. This comes at a time of rising costs in agriculture, including the soaring price of nitrogen fertilizer and increasing fuel and supply chain costs. The gap between supply and demand is also becoming wider with climatic instability — such as drought conditions — hitting both domestic production and export stocks in several countries.
Rising prices for staple cereals have historically led to instability, particularly in fragile regions where food security is low. The impacts of current high wheat prices are likely to be felt most significantly by populations in the Global South who rely on wheat imports.
The potential humanitarian crisis beyond the borders of the current conflict needs to be addressed to avoid deepening global divisions in equality of access to food. In the case of wheat, long-term solutions will require much higher levels of investment, coordination and cooperation between governments, development organizations and agro-industry. Without doubt, part of the solution lies in increasing wheat productivity and profitability in food-insecure regions where wheat has traditionally been grown, as well as supporting the expansion of wheat production into climatically suitable areas in countries which have traditionally relied on imports to meet local demand.
Plant breeding innovations
What is plant breeding?
Emerging in the last 120 years, science-based plant breeding begins by creating novel diversity from which useful new varieties can be identified or formed. The most common approach is making targeted crosses between parents with complementary, desirable traits. This is followed by selection among the resulting plants to obtain improved types that combine desired traits and performance. A less common approach is to expose plant tissues to chemicals or radiation that stimulate random mutations of the type that occur in nature, creating diversity and driving natural selection and evolution.
Determined by farmers and consumer markets, the target traits for plant breeding can include improved grain and fruit yield, resistance to major diseases and pests, better nutritional quality, ease of processing, and tolerance to environmental stresses such as drought, heat, acid soils, flooded fields and infertile soils. Most traits are genetically complex — that is, they are controlled by many genes and gene interactions — so breeders must intercross and select among hundreds of thousands of plants over generations to develop and choose the best.
Plant breeding over the last 100 years has fostered food and nutritional security for expanding populations, adapted crops to changing climates, and helped to alleviate poverty. Together with better farming practices, improved crop varieties can help to reduce environmental degradation and to mitigate climate change from agriculture.
Is plant breeding a modern technique?
Plant breeding began around 10,000 years ago, when humans undertook the domestication of ancestral food crop species. Over the ensuing millennia, farmers selected and re-sowed seed from the best grains, fruits or plants they harvested, genetically modifying the species for human use.
Modern, science-based plant breeding is a focused, systematic and swifter version of that process. It has been applied to all crops, among them maize, wheat, rice, potatoes, beans, cassava and horticulture crops, as well as to fruit trees, sugarcane, oil palm, cotton, farm animals and other species.
With modern breeding, specialists began collecting and preserving crop diversity, including farmer-selected heirloom varieties, improved varieties and the crops’ undomesticated relatives. Today hundreds of thousands of unique samples of diverse crop types, in the form of seeds and cuttings, are meticulously preserved as living catalogs in dozens of publicly-administered “banks.”
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) manages a germplasm bank containing more than 180,000 unique maize- and wheat-related seed samples, and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen preserves back-up copies of nearly a million collections from CIMMYT and other banks.
Through genetic analyses or growing seed samples, scientists comb such collections to find useful traits. Data and seed samples from publicly-funded initiatives of this type are shared among breeders and other researchers worldwide. The complete DNA sequences of several food crops, including rice, maize, and wheat, are now available and greatly assist scientists to identify novel, useful diversity.
Much crop breeding is international. From its own breeding programs, CIMMYT sends half a million seed packages each year to some 800 partners, including public research institutions and private companies in 100 countries, for breeding, genetic analyses and other research.
A century of breeding innovations
Early in the 20th century, plant breeders began to apply the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, a 19th-century mathematician and biologist, regarding genetic variation and heredity. They also began to take advantage of heterosis, commonly known as hybrid vigor, whereby progeny of crosses between genetically different lines will turn out stronger or more productive than their parents.
Modern statistical methods to analyze experimental data have helped breeders to understand differences in the performance of breeding offspring; particularly, how to distinguish genetic variation, which is heritable, from environmental influences on how parental traits are expressed in successive generations of plants.
Since the 1990s, geneticists and breeders have used molecular (DNA-based) markers. These are specific regions of the plant’s genome that are linked to a gene influencing a desired trait. Markers can also be used to obtain a DNA “fingerprint” of a variety, to develop detailed genetic maps and to sequence crop plant genomes. Many applications of molecular markers are used in plant breeding to select progenies of breeding crosses featuring the greatest number of desired traits from their parents.
Plant breeders normally prefer to work with “elite” populations that have already undergone breeding and thus feature high concentrations of useful genes and fewer undesirable ones, but scientists also introduce non-elite diversity into breeding populations to boost their resilience and address threats such as new fungi or viruses that attack crops.
Transgenics are products of one genetic engineering technology, in which a gene from one species is inserted in another. A great advantage of the technology for crop breeding is that it introduces the desired gene alone, in contrast to conventional breeding crosses, where many undesired genes accompany the target gene and can reduce yield or other valuable traits. Transgenics have been used since the 1990s to implant traits such as pest resistance, herbicide tolerance, or improved nutritional value. Transgenic crop varieties are grown on more than 190 million hectares worldwide and have increased harvests, raised farmers’ income and reduced the use of pesticides. Complex regulatory requirements to manage their potential health or environmental risks, as well as consumer concerns about such risks and the fair sharing of benefits, make transgenic crop varieties difficult and expensive to deploy.
Genome editing or gene editing techniques allow precise modification of specific DNA sequences, making it possible to enhance, diminish or turn off the expression of genes and to convert them to more favorable versions. Gene editing is used primarily to produce non-transgenic plants like those that arise through natural mutations. The approach can be used to improve plant traits that are controlled by single or small numbers of genes, such as resistance to diseases and better grain quality or nutrition. Whether and how to regulate gene edited crops is still being defined in many countries.
Selected impacts of maize and wheat breeding
In the early 1990s, a CIMMYT methodology led to improved maize varieties that tolerate moderate drought conditions around flowering time in tropical, rainfed environments, besides featuring other valuable agronomic and resilience traits. By 2015, almost half the maize-producing area in 18 countries of sub-Saharan Africa — a region where the crop provides almost a third of human calories but where 65% of maize lands face at least occasional drought — was sown to varieties from this breeding research, in partnership with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). The estimated yearly benefits are as high as $1 billion.
Intensive breeding for resistance to Maize Lethal Necrosis (MLN), a viral disease that appeared in eastern Africa in 2011 and quickly spread to attack maize crops across the continent, allowed the release by 2017 of 18 MLN-resistant maize hybrids.
Improved wheat varieties developed using breeding lines from CIMMYT or the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) cover more than 100 million hectares, nearly two-thirds of the area sown to improved wheat worldwide, with benefits in added grain that range from $2.8 to 3.8 billion each year.
Breeding for resistance to devastating crop diseases and pests has saved billions of dollars in crop losses and reduced the use of costly and potentially harmful pesticides. A 2004 study showed that investments since the early 1970s in breeding for resistance in wheat to the fungal disease leaf rust had provided benefits in added grain worth 5.36 billion 1990 US dollars. Global research to control wheat stem rust disease saves wheat farmers the equivalent of at least $1.12 billion each year.
Crosses of wheat with related crops (rye) or even wild grasses — the latter known as wide crosses — have greatly improved the hardiness and productivity of wheat. For example, an estimated one-fifth of the elite wheat breeding lines in CIMMYT international yield trials features genes from Aegilops tauschii, commonly known as “goat grass,” that boost their resilience and provide other valuable traits to protect yield.
Biofortification — breeding to develop nutritionally enriched crops — has resulted in more than 60 maize and wheat varieties whose grain offers improved protein quality or enhanced levels of micro-nutrients such as zinc and provitamin A. Biofortified maize and wheat varieties have benefited smallholder farm families and consumers in more than 20 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Consumption of provitamin-A-enhanced maize or sweet potato has been shown to reduce chronic vitamin A deficiencies in children in eastern and southern Africa. In India, farmers have grown a high-yielding sorghum variety with enhanced grain levels of iron and zinc since 2018 and use of iron-biofortified pearl millet has improved nutrition among vulnerable communities.
The future
Crop breeders have been laying the groundwork to pursue genomic selection. This approach takes advantage of low-cost, genome-wide molecular markers to analyze large populations and allow scientists to predict the value of particular breeding lines and crosses to speed gains, especially for improving genetically complex traits.
Speed breeding uses artificially-extended daylength, controlled temperatures, genomic selection, data science, artificial intelligence tools and advanced technology for recording plant information — also called phenotyping — to make breeding faster and more efficient. A CIMMYT speed breeding facility for wheat features a screenhouse with specialized lighting, controlled temperatures and other special fixings that will allow four crop cycles — or generations — to be grown per year, in place of only two cycles with normal field trials. Speed breeding facilities will accelerate the development of productive and robust varieties by crop research programs worldwide.
Data analysis and management. Growing and evaluating hundreds of thousands of plants in diverse trials across multiple sites each season generates enormous volumes of data that breeders must examine, integrate, and co-analyze to inform decisions, especially about which lines to cross and which populations to discard or move forward. New informatics tools such as the Enterprise Breeding System will help scientists to manage, analyze and apply big data from genomics, field and lab studies.
Following the leaders. Driven by competition and the quest for profits, private companies that market seed and other farm products are generally on the cutting edge of breeding innovations. The CGIAR’s Excellence in Breeding (EiB) initiative is helping crop breeding programs that serve farmers in low- and middle-income countries to adopt appropriate best practices from private companies, including molecular marker-based approaches, strategic mechanization, digitization and use of big data to drive decision making. Modern plant breeding begins by ensuring that the new varieties produced are in line with what farmers and consumers want and need.
Cover photo: CIMMYT experimental station in Toluca, Mexico. Located in a valley at 2,630 meters above sea level with a cool and humid climate, it is the ideal location for selecting wheat materials resistant to foliar diseases, such as wheat rust. Conventional plant breeding involves selection among hundreds of thousands of plants from crosses over many generations, and requires extensive and costly field, screenhouse and lab facilities. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)
New CIMMYT maize hybrids available from Eastern Africa Breeding Program
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is offering a new set of elite, improved maize hybrids to partners for commercialization in eastern Africa and similar agro-ecological zones. National agricultural research systems (NARS) and seed companies are invited to apply for licenses to register and commercialize these new hybrids, in order to bring the benefits of the improved seed to farming communities.
The deadline to submit applications to be considered during the first round of allocations is February 11, 2022. Applications received after that deadline will be considered during the following round of product allocations.
Information about the newly available CIMMYT maize hybrids from the Latin America breeding program, application instructions and other relevant material is available in the CIMMYT Maize Product Catalog and in the links provided below.
| Product Profile | Newly available CIMMYT hybrids | Basic traits | Nice-to-have / Emerging traits |
| Eastern Africa Product Profile 1A
(EA-PP1A) |
CIM20EAPP1-01-38 | Intermediate-maturing, white, high yielding, drought tolerant, NUE, and resistant to GLS, TLB, Ear rots, and MSV | MLN, Striga, FAW |
| CIM20EAPP1-01-1 | |||
| CIM20EAPP1-01-16 |
You can download the full text and trial data summary for the CIMMYT Eastern Africa Maize Regional On-Station (Stage 4) and On-Farm (Stage 5) Trials: Results of the 2020 to 2021 Seasons and Product Announcement.
Applications must be accompanied by a proposed commercialization plan for each product being requested. Applications may be submitted online via the CIMMYT Maize Licensing Portal and will be reviewed in accordance with CIMMYT’s Principles and Procedures for Acquisition and use of CIMMYT maize hybrids and OPVs for commercialization. Specific questions or issues faced with regard to the application process may be addressed to GMP-CIMMYT@cgiar.org with attention to Nicholas Davis, Program Manager, Global Maize Program, CIMMYT.
Fruits and vegetables are essential, but there are three reasons why it takes cereals to feed the world
Like many development research and funding organizations, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) is emphasizing a renewed commitment to a nutrition-sensitive approach to agricultural development projects.
As part of the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables, a recent blog proposed that one central issue of improved nutrition is consumption of more fruit and vegetables. We agree that a diverse diet including fruits and vegetables should be accessible to every person. Here we highlight the presence of a wider picture.
In the past decade, awareness has grown about the importance of diets that are rich in vitamins and minerals, and the need to combat micronutrient malnutrition which can lead to irreversible health outcomes impacting entire economies and perpetuating a tragic cycle of poverty and economic stagnation.
Lack of vitamins and minerals, often called “hidden hunger,” is not confined to lower-income food-insecure countries. In richer countries we clearly see a transition towards energy-rich, micronutrient-poor diets. In fact, populations throughout the world are eating more processed foods for reasons of convenience and price. To hit our global hunger and health targets we need to invest in nutrition-sensitive agricultural research and production as well as promoting affordable diets with varied and appealing nutrient-rich foods.
Alongside hunger, we have a pandemic of diet-related diseases that is partly caused by the over-consumption of energy-rich junk diets. This is because modern food formulations are often shaped towards addictive and unhealthy products. We see this in rising levels of obesity and diabetes, some cancers, heart diseases and chronic lung conditions.
Investing in agri-food research and improving nutrition will be much cheaper than treating these diet-related non-communicable diseases. Besides being healthier, many people will be much happier and able to live more productive lives.
Yet, the picture is bigger than micronutrient malnutrition. Even if new investments in research enable us to increase the production and delivery of fruits, vegetables and other nutrient-rich foods such as legumes and nuts, we will not have cracked the whole problem of food security, nutrition and health.
Besides “hidden hunger,” many hundreds of millions of people worldwide are hungry because they still lack the basic availability of food to live and work.
Enter cereals. Wheat, maize and rice have been the major sources of dietary energy in the form of carbohydrates in virtually all societies and for thousands of years: recent research in the Middle East suggests that the original “paleo” diet was not just the result of hunting and gathering, but included cereals in bread and beer!
There are three reasons why cereals are essential to feeding the world:
- First, nutritionists and medics tell us that cereals not only provide macronutrients — carbohydrates, proteins and fats — and micronutrients — vitamins and minerals. We now know that cereals are important sources of bioactive food components that are not usually classed as nutrients, but are essential to health all the same. These are compounds like carotenoids, flavonoids, phytosterols, glucosinolates and polyphenols, which are found naturally in various plant foods and have beneficial antioxidant, anticarcinogenic, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties, likely to be important in mitigating and/or combating disease.
- Second, whole-grain foods, especially wheat, are also a major source of dietary fibre, which is essential for efficient digestion and metabolism. Fibre from cereals also nourishes the human gut flora whose products such as short-chain fatty acids have many health benefits including combatting some cancers. Eating such carbohydrates also helps us recognise that we have eaten sufficiently, so that we know when “enough is enough.”
- Third, cereal foods are relatively cheap to produce and to buy, and also easy to transport and preserve. Hence, supplies are relatively stable, and good nutrition from cereals is likely to remain accessible to less affluent people.
But all is not well with cereals these days. Cereals are under siege from climate change-related heat and drought, and new and more virulent forms of plant diseases, which threaten our agriculture and natural resources. There remains much research to undertake in this era of rapidly changing climatic conditions, and of economic and political stresses.
Here are a few strategies for agri-food research and its supporters:
- We can further increase the nutritional content of cereal foods through biofortification during plant breeding.
- We can produce disease- and heat-resilient varieties of grains that are efficient in the use of water and fertilizer, and whose production is not labor-intensive.
- By working with communities, we can adapt new production technologies to local conditions, especially where women are the farmers.
- We can enhance the quality of cereal foods through nutrient fortification during milling, and by better processing methods and food formulation.
- Experts in all agri-food disciplines can work together to inform and “nudge” consumers to make healthy food purchasing decisions.
Cereals matter, but in an age of misinformation, we still have to be cautious: Some people are susceptible to certain components of cereals such as gluten. People who are medically diagnosed with cereal intolerances must shape their diets accordingly and get their carbohydrates and bioactive food components from other sources.
So, we cannot live on bread alone: We should aim for diets which are rich in diverse foods.
Such diets include fruits and vegetables that must be accessible to people in different regions, particularly to the most vulnerable, and that provide different macronutrients, micronutrients and essential bioactive components. For most of us, the health-promoting content of cereals means that they must remain a major part of the global diet.
Nigel Poole is Emeritus Professor of International Development at SOAS University of London and Consultant at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
Rajiv Sharma is Senior Scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
Alison Bentley is the Director of the Global Wheat Program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
Meet The Indian Researcher Helping To Solve The Deadly Aflatoxin Puzzle
Indian agricultural researcher Pooja Bhatnagar-Mathur, a Principal Scientist at CIMMYT, says aflatoxin, a toxin produced from soil fungus and found in groundnuts like peanuts, is a serious public health and food safety problem around the globe.
Agricultural research fights global food shocks
In an op-ed on Newsweek, CIMMYT director general Bram Govaerts wrote argues the best protection is actually reducing food system risks by building food system resilience against shocks. He highlighted how previous investments in agricultural research and development generated evidence-based strategies that mitigate global food price crisis.
High-yielding staple crops improve health and prosperity in developing countries
Several recent studies document the long-term health and economic benefits from the “Green Revolution” — the widespread adoption of high-yielding staple crop varieties during the last half of the 20th century — and argue for continued investment in the development and use of such varieties.
Analyzing data relating to more than 600,000 births between 1961 and 2000 across 37 developing countries, scientists led by the World Bank’s Jan von der Goltz found that the diffusion of modern crop varieties during the Green Revolution reduced infant mortality by 2.4 to 5.3 percentage points.
“Our estimates provide compelling evidence that the health benefits of broad-based increases in agricultural productivity should not be overlooked,” the authors state. “From a policy perspective, government subsidies for inputs leading to a green revolution as well as investments in extension and R&D programs seem to be important.”
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of the global food system and the need to transform it, increasing its environmental and economic resilience to withstand future threats, and underpinning healthier diets. The studies suggest that improved versions of cereal crops such as rice, wheat, and maize can play a key role.
“Our work speaks to the importance of supporting innovation and technology adoption in agriculture as a means of fostering economic development, improved health, and poverty reduction, said author Jan von der Goltz. “It also suggests that it is reasonable to view with some alarm the steady decline in funding for cereal crop improvement over the last few decades in sub-Saharan Africa, the continent with least diffusion of modern varieties.”
Likewise, a study co-authored by Prashant Bharadwaj of the University of California, San Diego, concluded that farmer adoption of high-yielding crop varieties (HYVs) in India reduced infant mortality dramatically across the country. Between 1960 and 2000, infant deaths dropped from 163.8 to 66.6 per 1,000 live births, and this occurred during the decades of India’s wheat productivity leap from 0.86 to 2.79 tons per hectare, as a result of HYV adoption and improved farming practices.
“What both of these papers do is to carefully establish a causal estimate of how HYVs affect infant mortality, by only comparing children born in the same location at different points in time, when HYV use was different, and by checking that mortality before arrival of HYVs was trending similarly in places that would receive different amount of HYVs,” Bharadwaj said.
“In the absence of a randomized control trial, these econometric techniques produce the best causal estimate of a phenomenon as important as the spread of HYVs during and after the Green Revolution,” he added. These thoughts were echoed by University of California San Diego professor Gordon McCord, a co-author of the global study.
Many knock-on effects
Recent studies indicate that the Green Revolution also had long-term economic impacts, which also affected health outcomes.
In a 2021 update to the 2018 paper “Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution,” Douglas Gollin, Professor of Development Economics at Oxford University and co-authors found that, in 90 countries where high-yielding varieties were adopted between 1965 and 2010, food crop yields increased by 44% and that, had this adoption not occurred, GDP per capita in the developing world could be half of what it is today.
Even a 10-year delay of the Green Revolution would, in 2010, have cost 17% of GDP per capita in the developing world, with a cumulative GDP loss of $83 trillion, equivalent to one year of current global GDP.
These GDP and health impacts were boosted by a related reduction in population growth. By observing causal inference at country, regional and developing world levels, and using a novel long-term impact assessment method, the study authors detected a trend: as living standards improved for rural families, they generally wanted to invest more in their children and have fewer.
“Our estimates suggest that the world would have contained more than 200 million additional people in 2010, if the onset of the Green Revolution had been delayed for ten years,” Gollin and his co-authors stated. This lower population growth seems to have increased the relative size of the working age population, which furthered GDP growth.
A long-term investment in system transformation
It takes time from the point of an intervention to when broad health impacts can be observed in the population, the authors note. For example, although the development of modern high-yielding varieties began in the 1950s and 60s, the rate of adoption did not speed up until the 1980s, 1990s, and even into the 2000s, with evidence from sub-Saharan Africa showing that variety adoption has increased by as much in the 2000s as in the four preceding decades.
In addition, any nutrition and food security strategy which aims to reach the second Sustainable Development Goal of feeding 9 billion by 2050 must incorporate wider system transformation solutions, such as zero-emissions agriculture, affordable, diverse diets and increased land conservation.
As Gollin explained, “The Green Revolution taught us that we need to approach productivity increases, especially in staple crop yields, differently. The challenge now is more complex: we need to get the same productivity increases, with fewer inputs and resources, more environmental awareness, and in larger quantities for more people.”
In part, this means increasing productivity on existing agricultural land with positive environmental and social impacts, according to Bram Govaerts, director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
“Breeding and sharing more productive, hardy crop varieties is as important as ever,” Govaerts said, “but also engaging farmers — in our case, smallholders — in shared research and innovation efforts to bridge yield gaps, build climate-resilient farming systems, and open access to better nutrition and market opportunities.”
Cover photo: Children eat lunch at a mobile crèche outside Delhi, India. (Photo: Atul Loke/ODI) (CC BY-NC 2.0)
State-of-the-art maize doubled haploid facility inaugurated in India
On December 3, 2021, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and its partners inaugurated a state-of-the-art maize doubled haploid (DH) facility in Kunigal, in India’s Karnataka state. The facility was established by CIMMYT in partnership with the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore (UAS Bangalore), with financial support from the CGIAR Research Program on Maize (MAIZE).
It is the first public sector facility of its kind in Asia, fulfilling a very important need for maize breeding programs in the region. The facility, operated by CIMMYT, will provide DH production services for CIMMYT’s and UAS Bangalore’s breeding programs, as well as for national agricultural research institutions and small- and medium-sized seed companies engaged in maize breeding across tropical Asia. This is expected to result in accelerated development and deployment of a greater number of elite, climate-resilient and nutritionally-enriched maize hybrids in tropical Asia.
DH technology has the potential to enhance genetic gains and breeding efficiency, especially in combination with other modern tools and technologies, such as molecular markers and genomic selection. The facility occupies 12 acres of land at the Agricultural Research Station in Kunigal, in southwestern India. It is expected to produce at least 25,000-30,000 maize DH lines per year.
For more information, and to request these services, visit CIMMYT’s Maize Doubled Haploid Technology website.
Fast-track maize breeding in Asia
R.S. Paroda, who is a Padma Bhushan awardee in India and the chairman of the Trust for Advancement of Agricultural Sciences (TAAS) in New Delhi, thanked CIMMYT for its role in developing the facility. “The maize DH facility will revolutionize hybrid maize programs in both the public and private sectors in Asia, enabling fast-tracked development of climate-resilient and genetically diverse maize hybrids suitable for the rainfed maize-growing areas.”
S. Rajendra Prasad, vice chancellor of UAS Bangalore, appreciated the partnership between his institution and CIMMYT. “The facility will create opportunities to modernize maize breeding programs in India, besides serving as an educational and training hub for young students at the University,” he said. Members of UAS Bangalore Board of Management also participated in the formal opening of the facility.
B.M. Prasanna, director of CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program and the CGIAR Research Program on Maize (MAIZE), spearheaded the process of establishing this important breeding facility. “Along with similar maize DH facilities in Mexico and Kenya, which respectively serve Latin America and Africa, this third facility for Asia rounds up CIMMYT’s commitment to strengthen tropical maize breeding programs across the globe,” he explained.
Bram Govaerts, CIMMYT’s director general, participated through a recorded video message.
Attending the ceremony were also 150 post-graduate students, faculty from UAS Bangalore, researchers from UAS Raichur and the Indian Institute of Maize Research, CIMMYT maize scientists, and private-sector members of the International Maize Improvement Consortium for Asia (IMIC-Asia).
Collaboration networks
A technical workshop titled “Transforming India’s Agriculture and Modernizing Maize Breeding Programs” was held the same day. The workshop featured talks by Paroda on the role of youth in Indian agriculture, Prasanna on modernizing maize breeding and enhancing genetic gain, CIMMYT scientist Vijay Chaikam on maize doubled haploid technology, and CIMMYT breeder Sudha Nair on genomic technologies for maize improvement.
IMIC-Asia held a General Body Meeting soon after the technical workshop, at which B.S. Vivek, maize breeder at CIMMYT, introduced the framework for the third phase of IMIC-Asia. Participants included representatives of the Indian Institute of Maize Research, the All-India Coordinated Maize Improvement Program, and private seed companies with membership in the consortium. Meeting participants expressed a keen interest in utilizing the new doubled haploid facility’s services.
Mexico’s seed producers honor CIMMYT work to breed and spread high-yield maize
The Association of Mexican Seed Producers (Asociación Mexicana de Semilleros, A.C., or AMSAC) gave the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) its annual Cesár Garza Award for work by MasAgro (Crops for Mexico), a project that develops and spreads high-yielding, climate resilient maize and improved farming practices in Mexico. MasAgro is operated by CIMMYT and Mexico’s Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER).
“We unanimously selected CIMMYT for having established an effective and inclusive network of some 100 Mexican testing sites to generate and spread hybrid seed adapted to the country’s diverse agro-ecologies,” said José Luis Gastelum Careaga, president of the governing council of AMSAC, a group of more than 70 seed companies.
The award ceremony took place in Playa del Carmen, in Mexico’s Quintano Roo state, on November 4, 2021.
CIMMYT breeding research is behind the development of 70 new maize hybrids released in Mexico by dozens of small- and intermediate-scale seed companies, helping to double the maize yields of farmers who adopt them, according to Bram Govaerts, CIMMYT director general and leader of the Center’s work in MasAgro.
“AMSAC’s recognition comes at a crucial time, when public support for crop breeding, seed systems, and capacity building are more urgent than ever in the face of climate change and increased, pandemic-related food insecurity,” Govaerts said. “We’ll leverage this prestigious award and our strong partnership with AMSAC members to move toward an improved and more widespread version of MasAgro’s integrated approach for transforming Mexico’s cereal crop farming systems.”
Propelling public-private partnerships
Taking advantage of CIMMYT training and breeding lines, Mexican seed producers working with MasAgro have boosted their maize seed sales 33% — or 4.6% yearly — during 2011–20, Govaerts said.
This and the recent award illustrate CIMMYT’s success at sharing improved maize through powerful, decades-long partnerships with public and private entities. Small- and medium-scale seed companies have benefitted from access to CIMMYT breeding lines, technical support, business model training, and Center participation in efforts to foster competitive seed markets, according to a recently published book documenting 50 years of maize research by CIMMYT and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). Both centers are members of CGIAR, the world’s largest global agricultural innovation network.
“The increased number and market share of [small- and medium-scale] maize seed companies in Mexico and sub-Saharan Africa in recent years are strongly linked to the availability of stable, stress tolerant inbreds from CGIAR programs,” the book’s executive summary states. “The annual production … of over 130,000 tons of seed of CGIAR-derived stress-tolerant hybrids in Africa by [small- and medium-scale enterprises] … has addressed an important gap in seed markets not being met by multi-national companies.”
In 2015 more than a third of the area in sub-Saharan Africa was sown to new varieties and hybrids derived from CIMMYT and IITA breeding research, and adoption has accelerated since then, generating from $0.66 to 1.05 billion each year in economic benefits, according to a 2021 study.
As part of CIMMYT partnerships with large, multi-national seed companies, the Center has obtained royalty-free licenses to use proprietary technology and maize hybrids in specific areas of Africa, focusing on small-scale farmers. These partnerships, as well as similar agreements with advanced public research institutes, have fostered more widespread application for tropical maize of tools such as genomic selection, database software, and doubled haploids.
In Asia, building on collaborations from as far back as the 1960s, CIMMYT launched a maize improvement consortium in 2010 involving 25 mostly small- and medium-scale seed companies. For a modest annual fee to fund consortium management, members have access to early- and advanced-generation CIMMYT inbred lines and trait donors, as well as support services for hybrid development. This model has subsequently been copied in Mexico and in eastern and southern Africa (17 companies).
“CIMMYT science and support for maize and wheat farming systems span more than six decades and have brought impressive, well documented impacts in improved harvests and food security for those who grow and consume these globally-critical staple crops,” Govaerts said. “On behalf of the Center, I would like to recognize and thank those who fund our work, and especially the hundreds of skilled and committed partners without whom our efforts would not be possible.”
Creating a better leaf
A new article in the New Yorker praises the cutting-edge technology CIMMYT, CGIAR and other scientists are developing to produce a second Green Revolution that doesn’t repeat the mistakes of the first, putting the experiences and challenges of farmers at the heart of it.
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/creating-a-better-leaf
A decade of world-leading maize and wheat research
For over a decade, the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize (MAIZE) and Wheat (WHEAT) have been at the forefront of research-for-development benefiting maize and wheat farmers in the Global South, especially those most vulnerable to the shocks of a changing climate.
From 2012 to 2021, MAIZE has focused on doubling maize productivity and increasing incomes and livelihood opportunities from sustainable maize-based farming systems. Through MAIZE, scientists released over 650 elite, high-yielding maize varieties stacked with climate adaptive, nutrition enhancing, and pest and disease resistant traits.
The WHEAT program has worked to improve sustainable production and incomes for wheat farmers, especially smallholders, through collaboration, cutting-edge science and field-level research. Jointly with partners, WHEAT scientists released 880 high-yielding, disease- and pest-resistant, climate-resilient and nutritious varieties in 59 countries over the life of the program.
To document and share this legacy, the MAIZE and WHEAT websites have been redesigned to highlight the accomplishments of the programs and to capture their impact across the five main CGIAR Impact Areas: nutrition, poverty, gender, climate and the environment.
We invite you to visit these visually rich, sites to view the global impact of MAIZE and WHEAT, and how this essential work will continue in the future.
A visual celebration in Mexico City
CIMMYT’s relationship with Mexico is one of a kind: in addition to being the birthplace of the wheat innovations that led to the Green Revolution and the founding of CGIAR, Mexico is also where maize originated thousands of years ago, becoming an emblem of the country’s economy and identity.
Honoring this longstanding connection and celebrating Mexico’s key contribution to global wheat and maize production, Mexico City will host a photo exhibition from December 1, 2021, to January 15, 2022, in the Open Galleries Lateral, located on Paseo de la Reforma, one of city’s most iconic promenades.
Titled “Maize and Wheat Research in Focus: Celebrating a Decade of Research for Sustainable Agricultural Development Under the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize and Wheat,” the exhibition illustrates the impact of MAIZE and WHEAT over the last ten years. The selection of photographs documents the challenges faced by maize and wheat smallholders in different regions, and showcases innovative interventions made by national and regional stakeholders worldwide.
From pathbreaking breeding research on climate-smart varieties to helping farming families raise their incomes, the photos — taken by CGIAR photographers before the COVID-19 pandemic — capture both the breadth of the challenges facing our global agri-food systems and the spirit of innovation and cooperation to meet them head on.
Don’t miss the chance to visit the exhibition if you are in Mexico City!
Harnessing the power of science to reduce poverty and malnutrition
A five-year partnership being launched by the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI)—a non-profit founded by Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna—and CGIAR, the world’s largest publicly-funded agricultural research partnership, will harness the power of science to help millions of people overcome poverty, hunger and malnutrition.
One in four people globally, and rising, are unable to afford a healthy diet. COVID-19 has exacerbated this trend by disrupting food production and distribution, driving up by 20 percent the number of people threatened by hunger in 2020. The pandemic is unfolding amidst an environmental and climate crisis which is undermining food production and our ability to nourish the world.
But global consensus is building for urgent action. At the COP26 meetings in November, 45 nations committed to shifting to more sustainable ways of farming and accelerate the deployment of green innovations. Similarly, in late September, many government representatives at the United Nations Food Systems Summit committed to accelerating the transformation of how we grow, transport, process, and consume food. Recognizing the centrality of science and innovation for driving that transformation, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on the world to scale public and private investment in research for food.
According to Barbara Wells, Global Director for Genetic Innovation at CGIAR: “World-class science is vital for facilitating farmer adaptation and mitigating our food system’s contribution to climate change. Plant-breeding innovations can help ramp up food production while making farms more climate resilient, profitable and environmentally friendly”.
“Technologies such as gene editing, which enable scientists to make targeted changes to a crop’s DNA, can accelerate the development of more disease-resistant, water-efficient varieties that can improve food production and nutrition in areas that are especially vulnerable to climate change,” Dr. Wells explained.
CGIAR has produced and promoted innovations that are boosting the sustainable production of nutritious food in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Over the past five decades, CGIAR scientists and national partners have developed and disseminated robust and highly productive crop varieties and livestock breeds tailored to the needs of local men and women. Those innovations have helped hundreds of millions of people across the Global South overcome hunger and poverty.
The IGI is a collaboration of the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco with a mission to develop revolutionary genome-editing tools that enable affordable and accessible solutions in human health, climate, and agriculture. The IGI’s Climate & Sustainable Agriculture program focuses on developing crops that are resistant to pests and diseases, resilient to a changing climate, and less dependent on farmer inputs. Whereas the IGI is a pioneer in applied genomic research, CGIAR focuses on translating discoveries into improved crop varieties and cropping systems. This partnership provides an accelerated pipeline from upstream innovation to real-world impact.
“The IGI is testing technologies with great potential to benefit people in the countries where CGIAR is active, such as a way of removing the cyanide found in cassava—a staple upon which nearly a billion people depend—and fighting diseases in economically important crops like wheat, rice and bananas,” said Brian Staskawicz, the IGI Director of Sustainable Agriculture.
“The IGI is also pioneering new ways to reduce methane emissions from rice farming, which accounts for 2.5 percent of humanity’s contribution to global warming, by using genomic approaches to reduce methane production by soil microbes,” he added.
“By partnering with CGIAR, the IGI can ensure that the products of its research will benefit farmers and consumers in some of the world’s poorest countries, where CGIAR has been working for 50 years and has extensive partner networks,” said Dr. Melinda Kliegman, Director of Public Impact at the IGI. “Together we can accelerate the development and delivery of more climate-resilient, productive and nutritious crops for resource-poor farmers and consumers.”
Over the next five years, the IGI and CGIAR will use the latest breakthroughs in genomic science to enhance the resilience and productivity of farmers in low- and middle-income countries and improve the wellbeing and livelihoods of women and men in some of the world’s poorest communities.
Authored by CGIAR and the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI)
Cover photo: Researchers at work at CGIAR’s International Institute of Tropical Agriculture campus in Ibadan, Nigeria. (Credit: Chris de Bode/CGIAR)