For Centers and Members Day 2004, the Future Harvest Centers combined to showcase partnerships in the host region-Latin America and the Caribbean-and demonstrate how CGIAR is reshaping its work to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

On behalf of the Centers, Jacqueline Ashby, CIAT, described the strength and vitality of CGIAR-Latin America partnerships. Through a practical demonstration, Mauricio Bellon, CIMMYT, showed how geographic information systems are aiding the targeting of poverty in research-for-development programs.

Centers have forged strong partnerships with a broad range of institutions in Latin America. Key topics include fighting fusariam head blight in barley, promoting conservation of crop genetic resources, potato production, and fostering participatory research in selecting new forestry trees for domestication. Successful partnerships in conducive environments included the Convenio Colombia which returned $180 million on investments of $14 million over 9 years in increased rice production alone.

Ren Wang, IRRI and Ed Rege, ILRI, described how the Centers were working to achieve the MDGs. "For us, a focus on the
MDGs is a way of addressing new issues, adopting new paradigms that better organize our work and the way it is done, and forging new partnerships for progress and change," they said.

For Centers, the starting point is to realign research to address the MDGs. Centers have created research units to monitor impacts of their work, and are conducting priority-setting studies. Changes made include a greater focus on human health and agriculture, natural resource management and policy research, and greater attention to rural wealth creation, plus the reallocation of resources regionally, especially to Africa. The IMPACT-WATER model has been used to project childhood malnutrition under different scenarios, including 'business as usual' and where the MDG goals will be met globally. These simulations show that even under favorable conditions, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are unlikely to meet the goals.

The new integrated focus is translating into new development and research paradigms such as producing high-value products to create wealth for the poor, ensuring that poor people have access to modern technology, making commodity production more market-oriented and environmentally sustainable, and changing from 'technology transfer' mode to 'action research', 'learning alliances' and 'creative outreach'. A project on enabling rural innovation in Kenya is demonstrating an important paradigm shift of empowering people, both in the marketplace and on environmental management. Centers are also helping to develop new ways to get existing and new innovations to be scaled-up to reach millions more and are working particularly to get young people involved. The Future Harvest Centers have been enlisted by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) to facilitate, in collaboration with national programs and advanced research institutions, the development of Biosciences Eastern and Central Africa (BECA), a shared biosciences platform to help address Africa's priority agriculture and allied problems.

Center partnerships are broadening as they find that work directed at poverty, hunger, livelihoods and the environment is serving other goals such as education, health and gender empowerment. For example, more profitable farm production improves education through extra cash for school fees and improved cognitive abilities resulting from better nutrition at critical stages of child development. Another successful example involves Future Harvest Centers and partners working with the media and local drama groups to persuade 2 million rice-growing households in Vietnam to cut back chemical applications as a way of improving health.

The re-engineering within the Future Harvest Centers involves new and open processes, creation of synergies by working with new and a larger variety of partners, developing a broader agenda that looks beyond just food production, and increasingly involves multiple Centers working together to create farming solutions that benefit poor people.