Research platforms within CIMMYT’s innovation hubs and the Latin American Agronomic Research Network (RedAgAL)

Agrifood systems in Latin America must find ways to raise farm yields, productivity, and incomes, while adapting to and mitigating the detrimental effects of climate change and addressing the region’s widespread malnutrition (Govaerts et al., 2021). Myriad efforts to achieve this have offered well-meaning but short-term, unrealistic, unvalidated, one-size-fits-all responses that fail to solve the actual problems of farmers across Latin America’s highly diverse agroecologies and socioeconomic circumstances. For instance, smallholder farmers in parts of Mexico continue to practice ancient, traditional milpa intercrops (Fonteyne et al., 2023), while the country’s large-scale commercial farmers embrace the latest technologies (Verhulst et al., 2011; Romero et al., 2021). The urgent need for extensive agronomic research that effectively supports farmers under all circumstances far surpasses the capacity of any single actor and, apart from the Southern Cone countries and Brazil, there is a notable lack of investment in such research in Latin America. Its difficulty and expense stem partly from the need to conduct it under conditions that accurately reflect farmers’ realities and thus allow them easily to apply the results. To address the above challenges, CIMMYT leads a network of agricultural field experiments, the Latin American Agronomic Research Network (Red Latinoamericano de investigación agronómica, RedAgAL). This paper describes the network and its origins and the methodology of adoption-focused research platforms within its innovation hubs.