As staple foods, maize and wheat provide vital nutrients and health benefits, making up close to two-thirds of the worldâs 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 worldâs 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.
A farmer checks the drip irrigation system at his rice field in India. (Photo: Hamish John Appleby/IWMI)
In 2009, state governments in Northwest India implemented a policy designed to reduce groundwater extraction by prohibiting the usual practice of planting rice in May and moving it to June, nearer the start of monsoon rains.
Although the policy did succeed in alleviating pressure on groundwater, it also had the unexpected effect of worsening already severe air pollution. The reason for this, according to a recent study published in Nature Sustainability, is that the delay in rice planting narrowed the window between rice harvest and sowing of the subsequent crop â mainly wheat â leaving farmers little time to remove rice straw from the field and compelling them to burn it instead.
Even though burning crop residues is prohibited in India, uncertainty about the implementation of government policy and a perceived lack of alternatives have perpetuated the practice in Haryana and Punjab states, near the nationâs capital, New Delhi, where air pollution poses a major health threat.
Land preparation on a rice field with a two-wheel tractor. (Photo: Vedachalam Dakshinamurthy/CIMMYT)
A farmer uses a tractor fitted with a Happy Seeder. (Photo: Vedachalam Dakshinamurthy/CIMMYT)
A farmer checks the drip irrigation system at his rice field in India. (Photo: Hamish John Appleby/IWMI)
Wheat crop in conservation agriculture. (Photo: Vedachalam Dakshinamurthy/CIMMYT)
A farmer ploughs a rice field with a water buffalo. (Photo: Licensed from Digitalpress – Dreamstime.com; Image 11205929)
Decades of research for development have enabled researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and other partners to identify potential solutions to this problem.
One particularly viable option focuses on the practice of zero tillage, in which wheat seed is sown immediately after rice harvest through the rice straw directly into untilled soil with a single tractor pass.
In a new blog published as part of the Chicago Council on Global Affairsâ Field Notes series, CIMMYT scientists Hans Braun and Bruno Gerard discuss the combination of agronomic and breeding conditions required to make zero tillage work, and propose a fundamental shift away from current incentives to maximize the regionÂŽs cereal production.
Reduced water availability for irrigation and increasing temperatures are of great concern. These two factors can considerably affect wheat production and reduce grain yields.
Watch CIMMYT Wheat Breeder Suchismita Mondal explain â in just one minute â how breeders are developing wheat varieties that have stable grain yield under low water availability and high temperatures.
Last year, droughts devastated staple food crops across the developing world, cutting production by about half in some countries. A stream of reports from Central America, Eastern and Southern Africa as well as the Asia-Pacific region painted a grim picture of suffering and upheaval.
Extreme weather, with its appalling consequences, demands an extraordinary response. Redoubled efforts must focus on building resilience into the developing worldÂŽs major food systems.
Behind every farmer dealing with a crop pest is a scientist who has supported them by developing better seeds, crop protection methods and apps to identify weeds.
On March 8, the world celebrates International Womenâs Day, and the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the most progressive roadmap for the empowerment of women and girls, everywhere. In an op-ed in The Independent, Claudia Sadoff, CGIAR Gender Champion and Director General of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), declares that our climate change-ravaged food systems cannot wait for the gradual progress of gender quality.
From locust swarms, hurricanes, wildfires and emerging famines, climate-related disasters are taking place around the world and our fragile food systems are on the front line.
Our food systems are in need of urgent support, and rural women play a critical role in reversing the problem. Research has found that rural women are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change, yet their significant contributions to food systems receive only a fraction of the focus they deserve.
Rural women are hamstrung by gender bias in food systems, home life, economics and culture. Barriers to accessing finance, insurance, high-quality seed, fertilizer, additional labor and markets result in women producing 20-30% less per hectare than men.
Womenâs unpaid daily household tasks are often backbreaking and time-consuming. Women are responsible for collecting water and fuel for cooking and tending kitchen gardens and family-owned livestock. With African women producing up to 80% of food for their household, these women have less opportunity to grow and sell foods at market to improve their financial position.
Breaking free of this gender bias requires a rethink on how rural women are reflected in, and participate in, society at large, says Sadoff in her op-ed, published in The Independent on March 7, 2020.
So, what does this rethink look like? How can we enable women and, in the process, strengthen our food systems?
Sadoff has summarized this huge undertaking into three key steps: (1) Ensure rural women can invest in productivity in their farms, (2) ease the burden of daily household tasks, and (3) build research systems and cultures to be more gender equitable in the long run.
Through One CGIAR and the Generating Evidence and New Directors for Equitable Results (GENDER) Platform, we are proud to say that we are working together to achieve these three objectives. Closing the gender gap completely will not happen in a generation but taking steps towards achieving greater gender equality will help to build the resilience of our food systems, bolster rural economies and improve rural livelihoods.
With UN Women, One CGIAR supports #GenerationEquality, for the benefit of all.
Corn is one of the most widely produced crops in the world, and Mexico is home to at least 60 recorded unique landraces, the traditional, locally adapted strains. Preserving these ancient varieties is key for future sustainability, explains geneticist Martha Willcox, who works with the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) to conserve the genes of dwindling crops. But left in the hands of aging campesinos, ancestral maize is at risk of becoming extinct. And the consequent loss of biodiversity, the FAO warned in its 2010 report, will have a major impact on the ability of humankindâwhich will number nine billion by 2050âto combat food insecurity in the face of climate change.
Some of Mexicoâs favorite dishes are taking on a new hue with blue corn chips, blue tortillas or blue tamales. But should breeders, millers, processors and farmer organizations invest in expanding the production of blue maize and blue maize products? Are consumers really interested, and are they willing to pay more?
CIMMYT markets and value chain specialist Trent Blare explains, in one minute, the results of his study, which gives insight into Mexican consumersâ preferences and demand for blue maize tortillas. Consumers near Mexico City perceived blue maize tortillas to taste better and were willing to pay up to a third more to buy them for special family events or to consume them in a restaurant .
The Mutwales farm a small plot of land in the camp, growing primarily cassava and maize for food. They are also one of the 105 refugee farming families participating in an initiative during the 2019/2020 growing season to help them cultivate nutritious, vitamin A-biofortified orange maize, which was developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in partnership with HarvestPlus.
The public sector plays a vital catalytic role, through enabling policies and programs, in ensuring that biofortified crops like iron pearl millet, zinc wheat, and zinc rice reach the most vulnerable populations to address the problem of âhidden hungerâ.
How can we ensure we have enough food to meet the demand by 2030? First, we need to understand food consumption patterns and how they are influenced by variables such as urbanization, population and economic growth, income, beliefs and more.Â
Agricultural economist Khondoker Mottaleb is working on a project to examine food demand by 2030, considering these factors. Watch him share preliminary results â in just one minute. Â
Maize is more than a crop in Mexico. In many cases, it connects families with their past. Landraces are maize varieties that have been cultivated and subjected to selection by farmers for generations, retaining a distinct identity and lacking formal crop improvement. They provide the basis of Mexicoâs maize diversity.
Back in 1966-67, researcher Ăngel Kato from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) collected 93 maize landraces samples from 66 families in Mexicoâs state of Morelos. These seeds were safeguarded in CIMMYTâs Germplasm Bank, which today stores 28,000 samples of maize and its wild relatives from 88 countries.
50 years later, doctoral candidate Denisse McLean-Rodriguez, from the SantâAnna School of Advanced Studies in Italy, and researchers from CIMMYT started a new study to trace the conservation and abandonment of maize landraces over the years.
The study shows that landrace abandonment is common when farming passes from one generation to the next. Older farmers were attached to their landraces and continued cultivating them, even in the face of pressing reasons to change or replace them. When the younger generations take over farm management, these landraces are often abandoned. Nonetheless, young farmers still value the cultural importance of landraces.
Maize landraces can be conserved âin situâ in farmersâ fields and âex situâ in a protected space such as a germplasm bank or community seed bank. The loss of landraces in farmersâ fields over 50 years emphasizes the importance of ex situ conservation. Traits found in landraces can be incorporated into new varieties to address some of the worldâs most pressing agriculture challenges like changing climates, emerging pests and disease, and malnutrition.
This research was supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Maize (MAIZE), the SantâAnna School of Advanced Studies, Wageningen University and the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
Any fifth grader is familiar with the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, which saw dinosaurs â and three quarters of all species alive at that time â disappear from Earth, probably after it was struck by a very large asteroid. However, few people are aware the planet is currently going through a similar event of an equally large magnitude: a recent report from the World Wide Fund for Nature highlighted a 60% decline in the populations of over 4,000 vertebrate species monitored globally since 1970. This time, the culprit is not an asteroid, but human beings. The biggest threat we represent to other species is also the way we meet one of our most fundamental needs: food production.
As a response, scientists, particularly ecologists, have looked for strategies to minimize trade-offs between agriculture and biodiversity. One such strategy is âland sparing,â also known as the âBorlaug effect.â It seeks to segregate production and conservation and to maximize yield on areas as small as possible, sparing land for nature. Another strategy is âland sharingâ or âwildlife-friendly farming,â which seeks to integrate production and conservation in the same land units and make farming as benign as possible to biodiversity. It minimizes the use of external inputs and retains unfarmed patches on farmland.
A heated debate between proponents of land sparing and proponents of land sharing has taken place over the past 15 years. Most studies, however, have found land sparing to lead to better outcomes than land sharing, in a range of contexts. With collaborators from CIFOR, UBC and other organizations, I hypothesized that this belief was biased because researchers assessed farming through a narrow lens, only looking at calories or crop yield.
Many more people today suffer from hidden hunger, or lack of vitamins and minerals in their diets, than lack of calories. Several studies have found more diverse and nutritious diets consumed by people living in or near areas with greater tree cover as trees are a key component of biodiversity. However, most of these studies have not looked at mechanisms explaining this positive association.
Forests for food
Studying seven tropical landscapes in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Nicaragua and Zambia, we found evidence that tree cover directly supports diets in four landscapes out of seven. This may be through the harvest of bushmeat, wild fruits, wild vegetables and other forest-sourced foods. The study further found evidence of an agroecological pathway â that forests and trees support diverse crop and livestock production through an array of ecosystem services, ultimately leading to improved diets â in five landscapes out of seven. These results clearly demonstrate that although land sparing may have the best outcomes for biodiversity, it would cut off rural households from forest products such as forest food, firewood and livestock feed. It would also cut off smallholder farms from ecosystem services provided by biodiversity, and smallholders in the tropics tend to depend more on ecosystem services than on external inputs.
In Ethiopia, previous research conducted by some of the same authors has demonstrated that multifunctional landscapes that do not qualify as land sparing nor as land sharing may host high biodiversity whilst being more productive than simpler landscapes. They are more sustainable and resilient, provide more diverse diets and produce cereals with higher nutritional content.
The debate on land sparing vs. sharing has largely remained confined to the circles of conservation ecologists and has seldom involved agricultural scientists. As a result, most studies on land sparing vs. sharing have focused on minimizing the negative impact of farming on biodiversity, instead of looking for the best compromises between agricultural production and biodiversity conservation.
To design landscapes that truly balance the needs of people and nature, it is urgent for agronomists, agricultural economists, rural sociologists and crop breeders to participate in the land sparing vs. sharing debate.
This study was made possible by funding from the UKâs Department for International Development (DFID), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the project Agrarian Change in Tropical Landscapes, and by the CGIAR Research Programs on MAIZE and WHEAT.
A second âGreen Revolutionâ is needed to increase global wheat production by sixty per cent by 2050 when the world population is predicted to be 9.3 billion, global wheat research organisation, âWheat Initiativeâ said in a report.
Early Maturing Short Duration High Yielding White Maize open-pollinated variety. (Photo: MMRI)
Pakistanâs maize sector achieved a remarkable milestone in 2019 by releasing ten new maize varieties developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) for commercial cultivation. The new varieties were released by two public sector research institutes.
The Maize and Millets Research Institute (MMRI) in Yousafwala, one of the leading and the oldest maize research institutes in Pakistan, released four open-pollinated varieties (OPVs) sourced from CIMMYT. The varieties, named Gohar-19, CIMMYT-PAK, Sahiwal Gold, and Pop-1 are the newest additions to Pakistanâs maize variety list. All the varieties are short-duration, which means they can be harvested quickly to rotate land for the next crop. They can also be grown in the main and off season, which makes them suitable for many different cropping systems.
The Agricultural Research Institute (ARI) in Quetta received approval for six of CIMMYTâs white kernel OPVs from the Provincial Seed Council (PSC), a government body responsible for variety registration in Balochistan. The varieties are named MERAJ-2019, MAHZAIB-2019, NOOR-2019, PAGHUNDA-2019, SILVER-2019, and SAR-SUBZ-2019. They are early-maturing with high yielding potential & drought tolerance. Drought stress is a major challenge for farmers in the Balochistan province, which covers 45% of Pakistanâs territory.
A group of maize experts visits maize research and seed production fields at the Maize and Millets Research Institute (MMRI) in Yousafwala, Pakistan. (Photo: CIMMYT)
Muhammad Arshad, Director of MMRI, acknowledged CIMMYTâs efforts to deploy the wide range of maize germplasm in the country. Arshad added that the Institute is working with partners to widely distribute these seeds to smallholder farmers at a reasonable price. âWe are able to harvest maize yields from these early maturing varieties by applying 4-6 irrigations, unlike other varieties that require a minimum of ten irrigations per crop cycle,â said Syed Asmatullah Taran, Director of Cereal Crops at the Agricultural Research Institute in Quetta, Balochistan. âThese are the first ever released maize varieties in our province,â he added, applauding CIMMYT for this milestone.
Muhammad Imtiaz, CIMMYT’s Country Representative for Pakistan and leader of the Agricultural Innovation Program (AIP), appreciated MMRI and ARI for their dedication and impactful efforts to strengthen the local maize seed system. Imtiaz explained that these new varieties will help cash-strapped smallholder farmers improve their livelihoods.
Through the AIP project, CIMMYT and its partners are helping new seeds reach farmers. âWe expect to see more releases in 2020, as many varieties are in the pipeline,” said CIMMYTâs Seed Systems Specialist for South Asia, AbduRahman Beshir. “What is important is to scale up the seed production and distribution of these varieties so that farmers can get their share from the interventions. Water-efficient maize varieties will not only contribute to climate change adaptation strategy, but will also support the livelihood of marginal farmers.â Beshir also emphasized the importance of private sector engagement for seed delivery.
A maize field is prepared manually for planting in Balochistan province, Pakistan. (Photo: CIMMYT)
Maize is Pakistanâs third most important cereal following wheat and rice, encompassing an area of 1.3 million hectares. Maize productivity is also among the highest in South Asia, with national yields reaching almost 5 tons per hectare.
Despite its growing demand, maize production in Pakistan faces various challenges such as a lack of diverse genotypes suitable for various uses and ecologies, a weak seed delivery system unable to reach marginal farmers, high retail price of seeds and unpredictable weather conditions due to climate changes. Â
To enhance the availability, accessibility and affordability of quality maize seeds, the Agricultural Innovation Program (AIP) for Pakistan, led by CIMMYT and funded by USAID, is working with partners to benefit smallholder farmers across the country. The project focuses on the development and deployment of market-ready maize products sourced from different breeding hubs and systematically testing their adaptation in order to accelerate seed and varietal replacement in Pakistan. In the last six years, AIPâs public and private partners were able to access over 60 finished maize products and more than 150 parental lines from CIMMYT and IITA for further testing, variety registration, demonstration and seed scale up.
