FOOD BIOTECHNOLOGY

G20 nations turn to agricultural research for food security

2011-09-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

The G20 group of major economies has for the first time put international agricultural research on its agenda, in an effort to take a long-term view on the fight for food security

The group's first meeting on the topic has endorsed the key role of agricultural research not only in preventing global food crises, but also in making an effective contribution to economic growth.

The meeting, taking place in Montpellier, France, this week (12–14 September), is being hosted by the French presidency of the G20 (the group of finance ministers and central bank governors from 20 major economies).

The meeting involves representatives of international development organisations including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN and the World Bank.

"It is the first time the G20 has actively put international agricultural research on its agenda," said Mark Holderness, executive secretary of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), and one of the conference rapporteurs.

"That is a big step in itself — the G20 countries have recognised that [agricultural research has] a wider economic relevance."

Although food security shot to the top of the political agenda during the 2008 food riots, "people put in a rapid response … there was no political buy-in to have a long-term view," Holderness told SciDev.Net.

"We have had another price spike and the World Bank is predicting another because food stocks are dwindling and there isn't the capacity in the system — we need to increase food productivity to meet that need."

According to the meeting's draft summary document, research systems in the G20 countries that help increase agricultural productivity can "contribute decisively to the improvement of food security" in the developing world through "improved coherence and coordination, stronger and equal partnerships and better knowledge sharing".

The G20 countries have been described as "a powerhouse of both agricultural innovation and production, with around 70 per cent of scientific publications on agriculture, and around 60 per cent of agricultural exports," said a paper for the conference prepared by Brazil, Canada, France and Japan, together with international organisations including the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the World Bank and the FAO.

"We are not going to have global-scale research for development without appropriate scientific partnerships," said Anne-Marie Izac, CGIAR chief science officer and another rapporteur.

The meeting also recognised the need for foresight studies to improve preparedness.

Izac said that foresight did not mean just being prepared for emergencies, but asking the research questions "which may not be urgent now, but are nonetheless essential for food security in a dynamic, constantly changing environment".

The CGIAR's Independent Science and Partnership Council advises donors on future scenarios, but foresight studies are "not yet embedded in the international agricultural research system", acknowledged Izac.

France's minister for cooperation Henri de Raincourt said the meeting's outcomes would be taken into account at the G20 meeting of finance and development ministers in Washington DC, United States, next week (23–24 September) before the G20 Summit in November in France.

Yojana Sharma
SciDev

CGIAR announces next batch of research programmes

2011-08-07T15:29:00.000-07:00

Some of the key foods that could help solve the global food crisis will be the focal point of six new research programmes totalling US$957 million over the next three years.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) — a network of governments and organisations that funds 15 major research centres around the world — conditionally approved proposals for the programmes yesterday (20 July).

It is the latest move in a radical overhaul of CGIAR's research activities, promoting large-scale, joined-up research, which began in December 2009.

The six new programmes are among 15 setting global research priorities for improving food security while protecting the environment over the next 25 years.

The newly approved programmes aim to improve wheat productivity (US$113.6 million); root, tuber and banana yields (US$207.3 million) and meat, fish and milk availability (US$119.7 million).

They also aim to help poor people reliant on aquatic agriculture (US$59.4 million); to study how to use agriculture to tackle under-nutrition, for example by developing biofortified foods (US$191.4 million) and to investigate how policies and institutions can help rural smallholders, especially women, access markets (US$265.5 million).

Jonathan Wadsworth, executive secretary of the CGIAR Fund Council, toldSciDev.Net that the research programmes are likely to start receiving funding by the end of 2011.

The CGIAR Fund — a central fund established earlier this year to encourage donors to make multi-year funding commitments — is expected to provide a total of US$477.5 million to the six programmes over three years. It currently holds around US$130 million.

The remaining US$480 million will come from additional donations directly to the CGIAR research centres.

"We've got every confidence that what donors have said they will be providing will transpire — probably with a growth of between five and ten per cent on last year," said Wadsworth, adding that his optimism was based on increases for agricultural research funding seen in previous years.

Five research programmes — on rice, climate change, forests, drylands and maize — have already been approved. The remaining programmes are scheduled for approval in November.

Steve Wiggins, an agricultural and rural development researcher from the United Kingdom's Overseas Development Institute, welcomed the CGIAR identifying key research priorities.

"If you tell senior decision-makers there are 142 things we need to do with agriculture, they won't listen. If there are five things, they'll give us a hearing," he said.

But he warned that research discoveries alone cannot improve food security:

"We need to invest in rural areas in power supplies, decent schooling, health and clean water for people to be able to use [agricultural] technology".

Vivienne Raper

SciDev

http://www.cgiar.org/languages/lang-spanish.html

How to feed the world without destroying the planet

2011-08-01T20:42:00.000-07:00

By 2050, there will be another two to three billion people on Earth, and the planet's population will consume twice as much food as now.

For 50 years farmland has grown at the cost of natural habitat and biodiversity, and already more than two-thirds of agricultural land is either in use or protected.

As a result, we need to develop the technology to double the output of the 10–15 main calorie crops, particularly if we are alleviate the burden on developing countries of feeding a rapidly growing population, argues Jason Clay of the WWF in the journal Nature.

He makes eight strategic suggestions — described as "food wedges" — for Africa, the continent that faces the greatest challenge of increasing food production.

Clay believes the responsible use of genetics is one of the keys. He suggests that mapping the genomes of staple food cropssuch as yams, plantains and cassava, andselecting useful genetic traits, can both increase production and improve drought tolerance, disease resistance and nutrient content.

Improving agricultural inputs and practices is also essential, he argues. It currently takes one litre of water to produce one calorie of food.

Even if we halved water use and doubled production, food deficiency would still increase fourfold.

Technologies already exist to achieve this, but in Africa they haveoften not been taken up. Mulching, for example, can help rebuild soil fertility and reduce water usage, and is suitable for use even in household gardens, without need for high-tech tools.

Even within nations some producers are ten times more efficient than their producers. We gain the most by improving the poorest performing producers.

Other strategic goals and research gaps include rehabilitating degraded land; reducing food waste — currently one out of every three calories is wasted — and improving property rights so that by 2020, half of African households can own the land they cultivate.

Clay notes that work to reform global food production is underway.

For example NEPAD (African Union's New Partnership for Africa's Development), the food company Mars, and WWF are working with experts to sequence the genomes of staple crops. These will be made public within three to five years.

There is no silver bullet for increasing food production. However Clay concludes that, with the correct reforms and the right partnerships, feeding the world without destroying the environment may be achievable.

Link to full article in Nature

SciDev

Cloned seeds show promise for crop breeding

2011-03-08T17:44:00.000-08:00

Seeds have been cloned for the first time, a move which could speed up crop breeding and one day allow farmers to produce their own high-yielding seed.

Most crop varieties are hybrids with a mixture of characteristics from genetically distinct parents.

But their useful traits are not passed on to their seeds because sexual reproduction, which involves two parents, shuffles genes.

Now an international team of scientists has forced plants to produce seeds that are identical to themselves genetically (i.e. cloned), rather than containing a mix of genes from themselves and another parent.

The seeds have thus retained all the useful traits of their parent.

Imran Siddiqi, researcher at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, India, and one of the authors of the paper, published in Science last month(18 February), called this a "proof of principle" of what has long been only a theory.

The key to what they have done lies in the fact that some plants naturally reproduce asexually, by 'apomixis', where the offspring are identical to the parent.

They have managed to make a plant that usually makes seeds sexually do so by this method instead.

Siddiqi said the process involved manipulating 2–4 genes that retain parental genetic material in a seed.

He told SciDev.Net that the process would make it possible to 'fix' desirable traits in crops without going through the several generations of cross breeding that are normally required.

"This is a real boost to the field of plant genomics as a whole," said Siddiqi. "But application is still a long way off."

The method creates clones in around a third of offspring in the model plant species Arabidopsis.

Commercial use would require at least 85–90 per cent of seeds to be successfully cloned, he said.

The publication has generated interest among plant scientists in India but they recognise that this is the first step on a long road.

P. B. Kirti, professor of plant sciences at the University of Hyderabad, toldSciDev.Net that demonstrating that the method works for important crops would be a "huge challenge" and reaching field trials would take years of work and considerable financing.

"Getting good genetic material to work on and take this proof of concept further also poses its own challenges, particularly to scientists in developing countries," he added.

Siddiqi agreed: "To take this forward would certainly require a more concerted effort — a greater level of funding, a policy-level commitment and wider collaboration."

He said provisional patents have been filed for the process.

"If and when application becomes a reality, the technology should remain accessible to public institutions."

Link to full paper in Science

Usha Raman

SciDev

Defending biofortified crops

2010-05-12T04:46:00.000-07:00

Michiel Korthals makes several incorrect assertions about biofortification as a strategy for tackling malnutrition in his letter to the editor Don't medicalise micronutrient deficiency.

First, biofortification is not "ignoring the food and agricultural aspects" of malnutrition. Rather, it explicitly accounts for the agricultural context of poorer rural communities in the developing world, where small-scale farmers mostly grow, and eat, staple food crops.

By breeding nutrients directly into staple foods, together with other agronomic traits farmers want — such as disease or drought resistance — biofortification is a way to improve the diets of the undernourished. Biofortification simply adds nutrients to other traits being developed for farmers.

Second, farmers participate in trials to select the varieties they prefer that also contain nutritional traits. This participation is a standard practice in developing agricultural technology.

In this way, biofortification is integrated into existing farming practices, and does not "require more water or land". Rather than being "pushed" on farmers, the entire approach is built on farmers' needs. Further, it is incorrect to assume that the seeds of biofortified crops will only be affordable to rich or commercial farmers, especially since most biofortification efforts to date focus on staple crops that the poor grow and eat.

Third, contrary to Korthals' assertion, biofortification does not force farmers to buy seed every year. It is true that if farmers plant hybrids, they cannot save seeds. But most crops planted in the developing world are not hybrids. For staple crops such as wheat, rice, sweet potato, open pollinated maize and cassava, regardless of whether they are biofortified or not, farmers can save their seed or planting material to share or replant

Finally, while Korthals is correct in saying that malnutrition is a "multi-faceted problem", biofortification advocates have not disparaged other solutions. The enormous challenge of micronutrient malnutrition is best addressed in the long run through poverty alleviation, economic development, education, women's empowerment, access to adequate healthcare and dietary diversification, among other things

In the interim, biofortification offers another tool to cost-effectively provide crucial micronutrients to millions of poor people in rural areas, through the foods that they already grow and eat every day.

Bonnie McClafferty

HarvestPlus

SciDev

Global agricultural alliance sets its research agenda

2010-05-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

A global research alliance that aims to produce more food for the world's growing population while reducing carbon emissions from agriculture has laid out its plans.

The Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases — launched at the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009 (see Agricultural alliance vows to grow more and emit less) — held its first meeting in Wellington, New Zealand, earlier this month (7–9 April) with 28 of the 29 member states in attendance.

The alliance aims to bridge gaps in research on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, which account for around 14 per cent of the world's total emissions. It also seeks to coordinate such research on an international scale, ensuring that scientists share their findings with research communities and farmers in other countries as well as their own.

This was the first time policy officials and scientists had come together to discuss the alliance's work for the next year, David Carter, New Zealand's agriculture minister and the meeting's co-host, told SciDev.Net.

Alliance members agreed on three research strands: crop management research led by the United States; livestock issues led jointly by the Netherlands and New Zealand; and rice paddy farming investigations led by Japan. A further research area to study the role of soil carbon in agricultural emissions is also under consideration, said Carter.

Member states, including 13 developing countries, can decide which research groups are most relevant to their needs and join any of them, said Carter. The work across all three strands will initially focus on mitigation of greenhouse emissions, he added, and research must be clearly defined to avoid overlap with existing knowledge.

Developing countries are important to the alliance, he said, because a large proportion of their emissions usually comes from agriculture.

"The quickest way [developing countries] will get access [to the alliance's research], without doubt, is to become members. But if you're talking about a particular project and whether that technology will be free — we don't know yet. Those are some of the tricky issues surrounding intellectual property we have to work through in the future."

The United States announced at the meeting that it will provide ten fellowships for agricultural researchers from developing countries to collaborate on the alliance's research.

The meeting also agreed a draft charter that will be finalised in 2011. New Zealand will act as the interim secretariat.

Developing country member states of the alliance are: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Uruguay and Vietnam. Brazil and China attended the Wellington meeting as observers.

Katherine Nightingale

SciDev

'Evergreen agriculture' wins for climate and hunger

2010-01-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

Soil science and agroforestry can help tackle climate change and boost crop yields, say M. S. Swaminathan and Dennis Garrity.
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In Zambia's Central Province, a dirt track marks a line between hope and despair.
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On one side is farmer Collens Mwinga's lush maize crop, a full three metres high, swaying in the breeze.
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On the other, a neighbour's maize is withered, barely reaching knee height. Mwinga harvests eight tonnes of maize per hectare — his neighbour is lucky if he gets one tonne.
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What does this mean?
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First, Mwinga can afford to send his ten children to school and give his family a nutritious diet.
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A strong crop has lifted the Mwingas out of poverty.
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A second impact is less visible but important for all of us. Mwinga planted nitrogen-fixing, or 'fertiliser', trees that convert atmospheric nitrogen into soil nutrients.
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In addition to lowering production costs and raising yields, the trees have improved his soil and helped it absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
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In contrast, his neighbour's soil is completely degraded and has released carbon, contributing to global warming.
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The story of Mwinga, and thousands of other smallholder farmers around the world has come to be known as 'evergreen agriculture'.
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It means using scientific knowledge to improve soils as part of the solution to tackling climate change — and is a growing force in many countries.
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Agroforestry tackles climate change
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Agriculture — and deforestation and other changes to the land — account for nearly one-third of global emissions.
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To successfully tackle climate change, it is as important to curb these emissions as those generated by burning fossil fuels.
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For that to happen, negotiators at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this week must agree to encourage more sustainable land use.
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The agricultural sector could go a long way toward being 'carbon neutral' by 2030 and producing enough food for nine billion people by 2050 — but only if farmers are encouraged to adopt land use practices now proven to be effective.
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These include agroforestry (including planting fertiliser trees) and minimum tillage
(where fields are left unploughed before sowing).
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Agroforestry has huge potential.
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Over one billion hectares (46 per cent) of agricultural land have more than ten per cent tree cover and are home to almost 600 million people.
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The trees provide fruit, livestock fodder, medicines, fuel and much else.
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They also help lock up vast quantities of carbon.
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Our research suggests that expanding agroforestry could remove up to 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 50 years. This is equivalent to one-third the amount we need to remove to halt global warming.
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Sustaining families in Africa
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Meanwhile the productivity advantages of agroforestry, as in Zambia, are telling. Long-term studies show that farmers using fertiliser trees can cut the need for commercial fertilisers by up to 75 per cent, while routinely doubling or tripling their yields.
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Other practices, such as minimum tillage — first adopted to prevent wind erosion in the American Midwest after the 1930s dust bowl — can further improve soil quality and crop yields.
In Zambia, the fertiliser trees are part of a sustainable agriculture programme funded by the Norwegian government that is now benefiting more than 160,000 families.
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In neighbouring Malawi, at least 200,000 families — about 1.3 million of the country's poorest people — are improving their soils, increasing their food production and enhancing their nutrition through agroforestry, thanks to the assistance of Irish Aid.
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These projects are just the start.
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Wider commitment is needed
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At the 2007 climate change conference in Bali, negotiators decided that reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) should be a key component of any future agreement.
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That makes good sense, as deforestation contributes approximately 20 per cent of global emissions.
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But the scope of REDD should be broadened to include all land uses.
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We need a firm commitment in Copenhagen to provide the measures and financial incentives needed to encourage the transition to sustainable forms of agriculture.
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It is likely that a legally binding climate deal will not be reached in Copenhagen and that negotiations will continue well into next year. But it is imperative that world leaders at least agree in outline, if not in precise detail, to firm targets and commitments.
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Evergreen agriculture can help us to avoid a grim future of more poverty and hunger, and even greater climatic instability.
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- M. S. Swaminathan, winner of the 1987 World Food Prize,
is founder and chairman of the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in India.
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- Dennis Garrity is director general of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya.
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scidev.net

Agricultural genetics could help ensure food security

2009-06-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

Existing agricultural technologies could help give local growers access to well-tested and robust crops
FAO photo

Agricultural genetics can help manage shortfalls in the world's food supply, says an editorial in Nature Genetics.

Nutrition impacts global health more than medical interventions and translating genetics research is easier in agriculture than medicine.

This needn't mean creating new knowledge.

Rational breeding schemes, molecular marking, transgenic technology and recognition of the genetic resources of locally adapted crop strains could all help give local growers access to well-tested and robust crops to deal with the spread of drought and saline soils, says the editorial.

And new discoveries by the crop genome revolution can help guide adaptive coevolution.

The big problems, argues the editorial, are economic, social and political.

"Hunger is the top global issue that is not on the G8 or G20 agenda," it says.

It adds that the United States must continue to lead global agricultural research but must be careful not to view overseas farmers as competitors.

Link to full article in Nature Genetics

Nature Genetics

SciDev