Feeding the Forgotten Poor
Nearly a billion poor people live in the harsh dryland environments that cover much of Africa and Asia. Due to scarcity of water and high costs of delivering it from elsewhere, as well as environmental risks such as salinity, irrigating these areas on a large scale for staple food grain crops has not been practical. As a consequence, these areas were unable to benefit from the Green Revolution that capitalized on water and fertilizer-responsive crops grown in more favorable environments.
The forgotten poor of these drylands still await their green revolution. But it will have to be different. Instead of applying costly inputs to create uniform, favorable environments, they will need dryland crops that can adapt to the diverse environments that they encounter. Millets, sorghum, and barley are the hardy crops that these dryland families and their livestock mostly depend on, and thus form the focus of the CGIAR Research Program on Dryland Cereals. Demand for these crops will increase by nearly 50 per cent by 2020 compared to the beginning of the millennium. Impending climate change compounds this challenge; it has been projected to reduce sorghum and pearl millet yields by almost 17 per cent by 2050 in Africa alone.
The research challenge is to raise the productivity of these crops to meet this growing demand, while retaining or even increasing their resilience against stresses. To meet these challenges, Dryland Cereals will increase our understanding of the mechanisms of stress tolerance and adaptation to diverse environments, the genetic control of these traits, and the potential of novel genes found within germplasm collections to enhance them. Dryland Cereals will use this knowledge to create and deliver higher yielding varieties ideally adapted to diverse agro-ecosystems, accompanied by crop management techniques custom-tuned to get the most out of those varieties. Seed systems will receive special emphasis to maximize the delivery and impact of these innovations. Techniques to reduce post-harvest losses and add value for farm families through processing innovations will also be developed.
Dryland Cereals is a global partnership between two members of the CGIAR Consortium (the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas – ICARDA and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics ICRISAT, the Lead Center), the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme, the French institutes CIRAD and IRD, key national programs (EMBRAPA-Brazil, AREEO-Iran and ICAR-India), and the USAID-supported INTSORMIL Collaborative Research Support Program.
Dryland Cereals will pursue the following six Strategic Objectives:
- Targeting: Better targeting of opportunities for technology development and delivery of dryland cereals to smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia;
- Genetic diversity: Enhancing the availability and use of genetic diversity, genomics and informatics to enhance the efficiency of dryland cereal improvement;
- Crop improvement: Developing improved dryland cereal varieties and hybrids for increased yield, quality and adaptation in smallholder farmers’ fields;
- Crop management: Developing sustainable crop, pest and disease management options to capture genetic gains from improved dryland cereal varieties and hybrids;
- Seed systems: Enhancing effective seed and information systems for better delivery of improved technology packages to smallholder farmers; and
- Value addition: Adding post-harvest value and improving market access of dryland cereals to provide smallholder farmers more benefits from dryland cereals.
