CGIAR 2008 King Baudouin Award: Special Recognition for Outstanding Work in Central Asia and the Caucasus

A massive and intensive 10-year effort to rejuvenate food production in countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus (CAC) shattered by the breakup of the Soviet Union received the CGIAR’s 2008 King Baudouin Award.

Pictured left to right: Venancio Massingue, Minister of Science and Technology of Mozambique, Kathy Sierra, CGIAR Chair, Mahmoud Solh, Director General of ICARDA, Christopher Martius, CAC Program Facilitation Unit, Hukmatullo Ahmadov, CACAARI Chair and Ambassador Jan Mutton of Belgium.

Awarded every 2 years in recognition of an outstanding contribution to agriculture in developing countries, the 2008 honor singled out the CGIAR Collaborative Research Program for Sustainable Agricultural Production in the CAC region. For the last 10 years, the program has marshaled the talents of experts from nine CGIAR centers worldwide to implement dozens of new agriculture and environmental technologies, which are today providing a critical boost to food production and incomes across the region.

“Nearly 40 million rural people in the countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus were essentially stranded by the break-up of the Soviet Union, which left their economies shrinking and poverty increasing, with food security a major concern,” said Christopher Martius, head of the CAC Program’s Facilitation Unit, which is based in Uzbekistan at the Regional Office for CAC of the International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) . “The research team assembled to assist the region, which included crop and livestock scientists and experts on water management as well as food and agriculture policy, has been instrumental in providing these countries with a sturdy bridge to modern agriculture.”

Evaluating the performance of ICARDA-CIMMYT rainfed wheat lines in Gallaaral site in Uzbekistan

For example, CGIAR scientists mobilized a series of missions to conserve plant diversity in the region and use these indigenous genetic resources to breed new crop varieties. With help from the program, there are now functioning crop genebanks in all eight countries in CAC, which together house some 47,000 seed samples.

This plant material has been instrumental in driving breeding programs, which have provided the region with 40 new varieties of high-yielding, stress-resistant crops, like winter wheat, barley, chickpea, groundnut, soybean, lentil, potato and a range of vegetables. These new varieties are now grown on 357,000 hectares of farmland across Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the Caucasus.

In addition, scientists with the program developed partnerships with each country’s national agriculture research center. During the Soviet years, these centers had been essentially isolated from the international scientific community and hence unable to explore and provide new, cost-effective technologies. Capacity building programs developed by CGIAR experts have reached 7,000 scientists in the region. Together, they have worked with more than 9,000 farmers to encourage adoption of a variety of innovations.

In Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, for example, the program has helped farmers learn how to plant wheat in standing cotton, which is a major cash crop in the region but competes with food crops for fertile ground and natural resources. The practice is now commonplace, being applied on about 1.3 million hectares.

Additional accomplishments include a more than ten-fold increase in soybean production in southeastern Kazakhstan, where the area under soybean cultivation has gone from 3,000 to 40,000 hectares. Meanwhile, the use of raised beds for cultivating winter wheat has produced tremendous improvements over traditional methods for farmers in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

“This program in the CAC shows what can be achieved through a well-coordinated and collaborative international research effort,” said Martius. “The speed at which agriculture innovations have been developed and adopted is remarkable. It provides a powerful model for an intervention driven by agriculture research, which can be studied and duplicated in other parts of the world where farming systems are imperiled.”

The CGIAR centers involved in the project, in addition to ICARDA, are the International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center (CIMMYT), International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), International Potato Center (CIP), International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Bioversity International, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).