From Discovery to Scaling Up : CIMMYT Annual Report 2021

In this report, we summarize and highlight our progress on key areas of food systems transformation, including scientific discoveries, capacity building, technology transfer, and scaling efforts in the Global South. Our research for development and capacity building work is closely aligned with and greatly contributes to the CGIAR Research and Innovation strategy, particularly to its five impact areas that aim to end hunger and malnutrition, alleviate poverty, bridge gender and youth gaps in agriculture, conserve biodiversity and natural resources, and adapt agriculture and mitigate its contribution to climate change. Our 2021 report is organized in three sections or impact areas that are essential to food systems transformation, which means shifting the focus of global and local food production from efficiency to resilience, and from competition for resources to balance and inclusion. To give you an overview of the contents of this report, on the discovery side we embarked on an ambitious initiative to apply environmental genome wide association methods to predict how today’s maize, rice, sorghum, cassava, groundnut and bean varieties will perform, and to identify needed genetic diversity for them to succeed three or four decades from now. This is a very exciting area of research that will help us hedge our food systems against the harshest conditions anticipated from climate change, and an example of shifting the focus of our science from solving yesterday’s problems tomorrow to solving tomorrow’s problems today. Breeding continues to be at the core of CIMMYT’s excellence in science and response capacity. In 2021, we made great progress in boosting both maize and wheat’s resilience to a hotter and drier world, but also to known and emerging biological threats in the form of ever evolving and invasive pests and diseases. We also report on our progress scaling-up sustainable technologies and farming practices in the countries where we work in partnerships with dozens of public and private sector collaborators, and more importantly, with hundreds of thousands of farmers who put their trust in our unwavering determination to food systems transformation.