For further information contact: Communications Unit

[next theme >>]

CIAT in Perspective 2000-2002
From Risk to Resilience

Perspective in Practice

Step by meticulous step, you move ahead, struggling to keep your balance on the unpredictable surface beneath your feet—the family farm. But you know the forces swirling around you, especially bad weather and economics, are beyond your control. They may knock you down at any moment.

Making a living from small-scale agriculture in the tropics is a lot like walking a tightrope in a thunderstorm. Through its biophysical and socioeconomic research, CIAT helps such agricultural acrobats reduce risks and exploit new opportunities that may, like patches of blue sky, appear from time to time amid the turbulence.

In this issue of CIAT in Perspective, our annual report for 2001-2002, we look at the multiple risks faced by small-scale tropical farmers and describe research aimed at making rural communities more resilient. Webster’s defines resilience as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” Among the diverse resources we provide to enhance rural resilience in the face of a constantly changing environment are improved crop varieties, information tools for predicting risk, and social capital based on participatory research.

Public Goods for Rural Resilience

Director General’s Message

Abject poverty is the daily burden of more than a billion human beings. A particularly insidious aspect of this predicament is people’s inability to cope with unexpected risks and threats or, in better times, to seize upon new opportunities.

I see CIAT’s comparative advantage in tropical agricultural research as our capacity to supply a wide mix of international public goods, which can make poor farmers both more resilient in the face of adversity and more responsive to new economic options. Our basket of public goods—improved crop varieties, pest and disease control measures, soil conservation techniques, and so on—must and does include “social” technologies. These are tools and methods for helping poor farmers systematically learn, experiment, and organize themselves for rural innovation. That way, they are able not only to exploit the fruits of formal biophysical research by organizations like CIAT but also to design their own solutions to problems.

Adoption of social technologies in Bolivia

During a recent trip to the Bolivian shores of Lake Titicaca, I met a group of farmers who have successfully set up small agroenterprises. Some members are making and marketing high-quality sweaters from locally produced wool. Others grow, mill, and package quinoa, a traditional Andean grain that is gaining popularity among European and North American consumers.

What really impressed me was that these and other small-scale entrepreneurs have picked up and applied two of CIAT’s social technologies. One is our system of farmer-run local agricultural research committees, best known by the Spanish acronym CIALs, which is also being used by several potato-producing communities (for further details, see pages 17-19). The other is our method for identifying new market opportunities for rural products and building small agroenterprises around those opportunities.

Potatoes and quinoa are not part of CIAT’s crop research mandate. But through the efforts of two long-time CIAT partners—the Foundation for Research on Andean Products (PROINPA) and the International Potato Center (CIP)—our social technologies have found a receptive clientele among rural Bolivians who produce these commodities, particularly Quechuan farmers. As these indigenous people of the Andes have a strong capacity for community organization, the CIAL method of local agricultural experimentation and sharing of results comes very naturally to them.

During our field trip, I was glad to hear a representative of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) comment that the Bolivian farmer groups provide “proof of concept” of the CIAL methodology. This supports CIAT’s view that this participatory research method, now used by about 250 groups in eight Latin American countries, is an excellent way to promote local rural innovation and social capital accumulation, the pillars of farmer resilience.

Economic levers: Cassava and tropical fruits

Liberalized international trade presents small tropical farmers with both risks and opportunities. Cheap imports of feed maize from North America, for example, are hurting small maize producers in many parts of tropical Latin America these days. Yet CIAT has been able to demonstrate the great potential of cassava as an alternative animal feed. Given the right growing conditions, large volumes of cassava roots and protein-rich leaves can be efficiently produced, processed into high-quality feed, and sold at internationally competitive prices. As a tropical crop, cassava is an underexploited lever for enhancing small farmers’ social and economic resilience in the face of globalization.

Tropical fruits, both for export and domestic consumption, also hold great economic promise for developing country farmers trying to cope with economic change. As permaculture crops, fruit trees have the added bonus of helping to conserve soil. Under our new strategy and medium-term plan, CIAT will undertake research, aimed at helping rural people identify and seize new opportunities for producing and commercializing these high-value crops.

Our current efforts to help poor farmers transform risky rural livelihoods into resilient ones include many other avenues of investigation. These range from the improvement of staple crops to overcome micronutrient malnutrition among women and children to the use of geographic information systems and modeling tools to predict the impact of climate change on crop yields. A conviction guiding all our work is that access to a wide and complementary mix of biophysical and social technologies is the best way to help rural communities adapt to, and thrive in, a rapidly changing world.

Joachim Voss
Director General, CIAT

Improving Rural Livelihoods

CIAT’s Medium-Term Plan for 2002-2004

Last year CIAT unveiled its strategic plan for 2001-2010. At its heart is a long-term vision of sustainable livelihoods for millions of poor farm families throughout the developing world. To aid them in their arduous exit from poverty, we believe three critical conditions must be met: more competitive small-scale agriculture, improved agroecosystem health, and robust rural innovation.

The Center is now implementing the first phase of that strategy through its medium-term plan for 2002-2004. Below we highlight several innovations in CIAT’s research agenda and organizational structure that will shape our work in the coming years.

Soils institute

Soil is a living biological system in which agriculture is literally grounded. But it is also one of our most threatened natural resources, particularly in Africa. For many small farmers in the tropics, heavy use of inorganic chemical fertilizers to build soil fertility is not a realistic option because of the expense involved. So it is essential to devise sustainable soil management techniques that make efficient use of local resources like crop residues and forage plants. CIAT’s experience in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has shown that such methods can be successfully designed and applied when formal soil science is carefully blended with the site-specific experience and know-how of small farmers.

To pursue this approach on a large scale, CIAT has recently completed a merger with the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility (TSBF) Programme and created the Alliance for Integrated Soil Fertility Management in Africa with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF).

Rural innovation

For CIAT, science is a means to an end: sustainable rural livelihoods. Linking research to grassroots development is therefore a top priority. Our recently launched Rural Innovation Institute pulls together several threads of CIAT’s action research. These are projects aimed at helping rural communities and NGOs learn about their local environment, solve problems, and exploit new agricultural technologies and markets. Our ongoing work in the area of participatory research and agroenterprise development have been reassigned to the new institute.

“But the Rural Innovation Institute isn’t meant to act as an extension service,” explains Douglas Pachico, CIAT’s director for research. “It’s there to investigate the development process itself and make our other research efforts more relevant and successful. It has the special role of examining how rural communities can build social capital and gain access to information that will help them be more innovative.”
The institute has launched a new project titled Information and Communications for Rural Communities. Among its key outputs will be organizational approaches for gathering and sharing information and knowledge. These include the design of community telecenters and Web-based information systems. The new project will help CIAT consolidate and expand the experience it has gained in these areas during the past few years.

Research organization

In the past most CIAT projects were organized around two broad themes: plant genetic resources and natural resource management. Our new structure integrates these efforts under a single research directorate, allowing for tighter coordination of these two rapidly converging domains.

To ensure that our research responds to the needs of our various partner organizations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, three regional coordinators have been appointed. Each will monitor the relevant agricultural and policy environment and ensure that the priorities of national and regional research programs, as well as those of farmer associations and community development organizations, are taken into account in CIAT activities.

Tropical fruits

Growing tropical fruits is labor intensive and can provide steady employment and income even to families with very small parcels of land. The long production cycle of fruit trees also contributes to soil conservation. With demand for tropical fruits on the rise, this type of high-value agriculture represents a strong comparative advantage for tropical countries. CIAT recognizes that targeted R&D in this area has enormous potential to boost small-farmer competitiveness while promoting healthy agroecosystems.

To help partners in the public and private sectors promote the production, processing, and marketing of tropical fruits in rural communities, CIAT scientists will develop an interactive Web-based information system that indicates what tropical fruit species can be grown successfully in particular locations, based on agroecological similarities. They will also identify and help develop tropical fruit-based business opportunities.

The Tropical Fruits Project will be housed within the Agronatura Science Park at CIAT headquarters in Cali, Colombia. We have created the science park on the premise that research linked to commercial opportunities can generate new benefits for poor farmers. Agronatura currently hosts 18 research organizations, which share the Center’s facilities and work with our scientists in joint projects.

Climate change

Global warming is now an accepted scientific fact, and climate change models are giving us an increasingly detailed picture of what is in store. The issue is of particular concern to CIAT, since crop yield reductions are now being predicted for most of the tropics and subtropics where the capacity to rapidly adapt is weakest.

Our new climate change project builds on and integrates earlier CIAT research on this topic. It centers on three themes:

• The use of geographic information systems and other modeling tools to predict the effects of climate change on agriculture
• The design of coping strategies for farmers and agricultural policy makers
• Research on the mechanisms by which agriculture either contributes to atmospheric warming (for example, through the release of methane by livestock) or slows it down (as when improved tropical pastures sequester large amounts of carbon in the soil)

This CIAT work will feed into any future multi-institutional initiative on climate change undertaken by the CGIAR.
 

[next theme >>]