Resilient Agrifood Systems
About
The Resilient Agrifood Systems Science Group transforms current agrifood systems so more people, especially those who survive on less than US$1 a day, can access affordable, sufficient, and healthy diets. Efforts span planting to post-harvest needs, creating solutions that impact fields, farms, and value chains.
The Resilient Agrifood Systems Science Group integrates CGIAR’s wide-ranging expertise to improve the performance of crops, livestock, and fish systems at the field, farm, and landscape levels. This kind of integrated research is necessary to tackle the issues facing the globe’s diverse food sources all at once and is required to foster the transformation needed during our climate crisis. Expertise includes zoonotic diseases, plant health, and better management of crops, livestock, and fish systems, to name a few. The team, with diverse knowledge across multiple geographies, crops and systems tackles the challenges of addressing hunger in developing countries. They are also better positioned to develop and implement scientific innovations where needed most with the goal of healthier and more affordable diets.
Solving hunger and addressing food insecurity is not only about producing more food. Fifty years of CGIAR research, done in partnership across the globe with a strong impact on food systems, especially food production, has shown us that. There is complexity involving not only crops, livestock, and aquatic systems but people, societies, and economies, as well.
Research
The Initiatives led by the Resilient Agrifood Systems Science Group form a balanced and lasting portfolio that aims to achieve impact across CGIAR’s five Impact Areas. The Science Group applies excellent research and works alongside ground-level and international partners through a custom portfolio of global and Regionally Integrated Initiatives developed together with stakeholders.
The research within Initiatives has begun, with CGIAR’s Regional Directors coordinating country engagement. As designed, there is space for expansion, adjustment, and phasing in response to emerging opportunities.
View the Resilient Agrifood Systems theory of change here.
Initiatives
Plant Health: Plant Health will develop and scale fit-for-purpose innovations to combat established, emerging and invasive pests and diseases and mycotoxin contamination, which are collectively responsible for over US$10 billion worth of annual losses.
Excellence in Agronomy: Excellence in Agronomy will develop and deliver crop, soil, water and nutrient management solutions that intensify smallholder farming systems while adapting to and mitigating climate change, restocking or conserving soil health, and ensuring that inputs are used efficiently.
Sustainable Animal Productivity: Sustainable Animal Productivity aims to transform livestock sectors in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Nepal, Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam to make them more productive, resilient, equitable and sustainable.
One Health: This Initiative aims to demonstrate how One Health principles and tools integrated into food systems can help reduce and contain zoonotic disease outbreaks, improve food and water safety, and reduce anti-microbial resistance, benefitting human, animal and environmental health.
Livestock and Climate: This Initiative aims to partner with public and private actors to develop and deliver actionable innovations that measurably help producers, businesses, and governments adapt livestock agri-food systems to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to sustainability and development goals across livestock systems.
Nature-Positive Solutions: Nature-Positive Solutions will combine technical learning with the indigenous knowledge gathered over time by smallholder farmers, to make science relevant, context-appropriate and, above all, more likely to be adopted.
Aquatic Foods: Aquatic Foods aims to transform the aquatic food system to be healthier, fairer and more sustainable and benefit consumers and producers of aquatic foods.
Mixed Farming Systems: Mixed Farming Systems aims to understand the diversity of farming systems and their ability to interact across crop-livestock components, and develop, adapt and scale sustainable intensification options suitable to mixed farming systems in different agro-ecologies.
Resilient Cities: Resilient Cities seeks to understand how agri-food systems need to change to meet humanity’s food, economic and environmental needs. Working with partners, Resilient Cities will address urban challenges and opportunities, specifically those facing the urban poor.
Regional Integrated Initiatives
These are designed to help synchronize national, regional, and global needs.
Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia (TAFSSA): TAFSSA will deliver a coordinated program of research and engagement across the food production to consumption continuum to improve equitable access to sustainable healthy diets, improve farmer livelihoods and resilience, and conserve land, air and groundwater resources.
Diversification in East and Southern Africa: Diversification in East and Southern Africa will support climate-resilient agricultural livelihoods and agribusiness ecosystems in 12 east and southern African countries to help smallholders transition from maize-mixed systems to sustainably intensified, diversified, and de-risked agrifood systems.
Fragility to Resilience in Central and West Asia and North Africa: The initiative will aim at building resilient agri-food systems in the CWANA region, primed to withstand the effects of climate change and generate better livelihoods for rural communities.
West and Central African Food Systems Transformation: The initiative will bundle sustainable intensification and diversification innovations for use and impact at scale, while informing policies.
Asian Mega-Deltas: The initiative will assess climate risks and vulnerabilities and co-develop viable adaptation strategies, in addition to creating networks for knowledge exchange and integration to catalyze resilient delta development.
AgriLAC Resiliente: AgriLAC Resiliente aims to address climate change, nutrition and migration challenges across seven countries by working through novel and transformative partnerships on the ground.
