East Asia, boosted by China’s two digit economic growth, is the only part of the world that was able to reduce drastically rural poverty in the last two decades. Elsewhere, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day is rising, and the majority are still marginal smallholders.
However, national and global agricultural research has generated many innovations in the past decades that could help small farmers grow better crops and raise more meat and fish. The promotion of efficient pest control farming techniques, a super tilapia breed or fertilizer microdosing to boost yields of dryland cereals in the Sahel, have improved livelihoods for many farmers. But the scope of these successes is not enough. Facing the many development threats in the decades to come, such as population growth and access to water and other natural resources, marginal farmers urgently need greater capacities to adapt and innovate in their complex and challenging environment.
As Patrick Dugan, director of the CGIAR Research Program on Agricultural Aquatic Systems (AAS) said during the CGIAR stakeholder engagement workshop, agricultural scientists need to do things differently to help achieve FAO’s new motto, the “Zero Hunger” goal.
Enhancing local innovation capacities
To reach the ambitious Intermediate Development Outcomes (IDOs) defined by the CGIAR Research Programs (e.g. Agricultural Aquatic Systems aims for a 30% increase in incomes for 2.7 million poor smallholder households by 2023), CGIAR and partners must find faster and more sustainable ways to scale up effective agricultural innovations.
Researchers, NGOs, donors and other development partners agreed that the adoption rate of agricultural innovations among poor farmers was often inadequate. Solutions nurtured by scientists are not always adapted to the local needs of farmers. Constraints from within or outside the agriculture sector, such as poor infrastructure or dysfunctional institutions, may also prevent scaling-up.
Development organizations may also be unaware of potentially valuable new technologies or farming practices, or institutional innovations that could improve rural household incomes, food security and nutrition in a sustainable manner. Bill Payne, director of the CGIAR Research Program on Dryland Systems, noted for instance that it took over 35 years for integrated pest management practices in West Africa to be disseminated at large scale.
Ann Waters-Bayer, representing Prolinnova, a network facilitating farmer-led innovations, highlighted that dissemination is not always linear from labs to fields. We need to better recognize the role of farmers themselves in developing agricultural innovations. For instance, Simon Masila a smallholder farmer from Machakos in Kenya invented a finger millet seedlings nursery-and-transplanting technique in response to a drier climate and less reliable rainfalls. This enabled him to harvest nutritious grains despite crops in neighbouring farms failing due to drought conditions. Researchers from the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute are now helping to test and improve the technique and ultimately local extension agents will help disseminate this climate adaptation practice.
Ann Waters-Bayer was pleased that the AAS is focusing on how research can maximize local innovation capacity.
Approaches like local innovation platforms (e.g. goat innovation platform in Mozambique) gathering researchers and development organizations alongside farmers and value chain actors, could facilitate technology uptake.
The question of how to evaluate the research impact on local innovation capacity-building was of great interest among the participants. Wageningen University’s experience in this field was highlighted by Kwesi Atta-Krah, director of the CGIAR Research Program for the Humid Tropics.
The right partnerships for large-scale impact
Many participants highlighted that agricultural research does not drive development but has a role in the development process. Redefining the role of agricultural research, together with other development stakeholders, was the essence of discussions. CGIAR research architecture starts by agreeing on the best way of working in partnership between CGIAR researchers, partners and donors.
Partnership can take various forms starting from jointly building the research agenda to integrate research into development programs. Broad participation is in fact essential for well targeted research but also for scaling up. Analyzing the causes of rural poverty through a “systems” thinking requires a holistic vision, looking at the various crops and livestock value chains, the social and environmental dimensions but also factors external to the agricultural sector.
Some NGOs such as Catholic Relief Services (CRS) or CARE International are already collaborating with CGIAR scientists to share their field experience and build their own capacity for better targeted development programming.
Tom Remington, CRS senior technical adviser for agriculture, describes himself as a knowledgeable user of CGIAR research results. “CGIAR scientists, NGOs and local research and extension organizations can work together for large impact,” he said. Under the Great Lakes Cassava initiative, CRS and CGIAR developed a simple informal certification protocol for inspecting the quality of pest-free cassava samplings. These pest resistant samplings were disseminated at large scale in 6 countries of the Great Lakes region in order to fight cassava mosaic and brown streak disease that were destroying this essential staple crop.
As member of AAS leadership team, Andrea Rodericks from CARE India is helping to design the CRP research agenda, sharing her field experience, in particular in gender transformative change processes. Andrea reports back to a learning group within her NGO so that CGIAR expertize can be used by them to design development actions where project impact can be rigorously evaluated.
Some pending issues remain such as negotiating the allocation of human and financial resources between partners to implement the ambitious CGIAR Research Programs. Since last year the CGIAR Consortium has been reviewing stronger partnerships and guidelines are now being prepared. While concluding the discussions, CGIAR Consortium CEO Frank Rijsberman stressed that the right partnerships are essential to speed up effective innovations to farmers for a food secure future.
The 24th and 25th June, CGIAR scientists, donors and partners met at the CGIAR Consortium headquarters in Montpellier, France to discuss progress on shared targets, development objectives and pathways of three “systems” CGIAR Research Programs or CRPs (Aquatic Agricultural Systems, Humid Tropics and Drylands Systems ) and Genebanks CRP. This is part of CGIAR’s new way to deliver, in partnership with the many development stakeholders, agricultural research for impact on poor smallholder farmers in developing countries.
More information:
See CGIAR Research Program Engagement with Donors and External Stakeholders for more resources relating to the setting of targets and gauging impacts across the CGIAR Research Program portfolio. #LELP2013 #Ag4Dev (Listening Engaging Learning Progressing – LELP2013)
I m francis Hypolite Kemeze PhD student in applied Agricultural Economics and Policy university of Ghana, Legon. for my thesis, I m looking to genetically modified (GM)food crops and food security. when I look literature about what is done in developing countries, I remark that the question of how small scale farmers can adopt GM food crop is not take to acount, so how can small scace farmers adopt GM food in term of they do not have funds to buy seed everytime, in term of market access of seed and GM product. I want someone to help me understand why
Dear Francis – thank you for your query. I will email you directly to see if we can help further.
Moi etant qu’Africain , je vois très pertinent votre rapport et vos apports comme solution pour atteindre cet objectif qui est la ( Zero faim) .
Nous vous encourageons et vous apporte notre soutient total afin de regler ce probleme de crise qui mine le monde entier. A mon avis, je vois que le probleme agricol est global mais la solution est locale. Vous devez alors penser a regler les probleme a la base. De mon côté nous menons quelques efforts mais c’est tres minime. Bonne continuation et conjuguons nos efforts pour un meilleur resultat.
Merci pour vos commentaires et votre message de soutien. Cordialement