Perspective
in Practice
 The
dire state of sub-Saharan Africa’s agriculture may not
be hard news for the international media. But for the International
Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and other organizations
devoted to improving rural livelihoods, it is one of two messages
that bear constant repetition. The other—more optimistic
and less frequently heard—is that African farmers, the
poorest of the poor, are ready, willing, and able to confront
many of their own problems through group action, backed up
by socially and environmentally progressive agricultural science.
“We see tremendous potential for community-based innovation,”
says CIAT research director Douglas Pachico. “The Center
is fully committed to stimulating that process.”
In this issue of CIAT in Perspective, our annual report for
2002-2003, we look mainly at how the Center is working with
its many African partners to integrate the various threads
of its research on competitive agriculture, natural resource
management, and community empowerment. Our intention is to
ensure that innovations in these areas, thoroughly tested
by clients, reinforce each other at the level of day-to-day
rural life.
African Innovation and Global Problem
Solving
Director General’s Message
People armed with the tools, knowledge, and ambition needed
to shape their own destinies are the epitome of human progress.
They remind us that international development is all about
social and political empowerment—through learning, research,
organization, and local innovation.
CIAT is committed to reducing poverty in rural areas of the
tropics. We do this by helping small farmers identify and
exploit diverse new options for greater agricultural productivity,
viable livelihoods, and sound stewardship of the environment.
In Africa the focus of this year’s annual report, we
have made major efforts to provide small farmers with a range
of tools and methods for self-directed progress in these three
areas.
The associated changes we have consistently seen in rural
African communities are highly encouraging. Many formerly
passive farmers have become self-confident and often outspoken
defenders of rural interests. Their comments, queries, and
arguments are fueled by facts and figures from their own experiments
with crops and natural resources. This is more than idle talk.
As the articles in our “Innovation Africa” report
demonstrate, farmers are launching new agroenterprises, building
soil fertility, and using environmentally friendly methods
to reduce crop damage by insects and plant diseases.
That African development must be managed by Africans is reflected
not only in the content of CIAT’s products but also in
the way we work. Our research on the continent is now led
mostly by African scientists. Similarly, scientific collaboration
with national partners is coordinated through regional networks
governed by African partner institutions, such as the Association
for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central
Africa (ASARECA). This practical, ear-to-the-ground approach
is in line with current donor thinking on the importance of
nationally and regionally led development. It is one reason
the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) recently
boosted funding of CIAT’s work in Africa.
Agriculture’s comeback
Over the past decade, agriculture and agricultural research
have been assigned back seats in the delivery vehicles of
international development assistance. Fiscal difficulties
in most donor countries, plus expanding obligations in the
new countries of the former Soviet Union, explain some of
the budget cuts.
But the pendulum is now swinging back. The importance of
environmentally sustainable agriculture for poverty alleviation
in the tropics is increasingly recognized in donor countries
and international agencies alike. Sustainable agriculture
figured prominently in discussions at the Rio+10 summit in
Johannesburg in 2002, for example. It is also seen as essential
to achieving the UN’s Millennium goals.
Canada’s minister for international cooperation, Susan
Whelan, is among those who have persistently advanced the
international dialog on agriculture and agricultural research.
In early 2003 she announced a new strategy for agricultural
aid and a US$30 million increase in funding for Future Harvest
center research in Africa over 3 years. In keeping with the
G8’s support for the New Partnership for Africa’s
Development (NEPAD), the revised policy specifically targets
Africa, especially its women. The UK’s Department for
International Development (DFID) has likewise been instrumental
in reinvigorating agricultural programs as promoters of sustainable
rural livelihoods in developing countries.
Recent private-sector support is also encouraging. The Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation recently approved US$25 million
for the Biofortification Challenge Program of the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The
project aims to enhance the content of naturally occurring
vitamins and other essential micronutrients in major food
crops through plant breeding. CIAT and the International Food
Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) are joint coordinators of
this global research. Sub-Saharan Africa stands to gain the
most from this “biofortification” effort. Micronutrient-related
malnutrition is pervasive in that region, especially among
women and children.
CIAT’s contribution focuses on beans and cassava. In
collaboration with the International Potato Center (CIP) and
the University of Nairobi, for example, a diet of iron-rich
beans and vitamin A-enriched sweet potato is being tested
in African countries. New funding from the Gates Foundation
will allows that work to be scaled up, and it will support
micronutrient enhancement of other important plant species.
Global problems, African solutions
During 2002-2003, CIAT scientists identified three issues
of global significance to which we can make significant contributions.
This was intended as a research-grounding exercise, the establishment
of an institutional “compass” to keep our work relevant
to the needs of large numbers of poor people throughout the
tropics. The selected research themes are rural innovation,
the restoration of degraded lands to social profitability,
and the scientific challenges of implementing international
agreements on biosafety, biodiversity, and the exchange of
plant genetic resources. Under each global theme, CIAT researchers
will apply their expertise in clearly defined projects and
locations across the regions in which we work.
How does CIAT’s work in Africa fit in with our R&D
elsewhere in the world? The problem of land degradation illustrates
how this integration is occurring. Participatory methods based
on CIAT’s experience with Latin American farmers are
now taking root in Africa. Working with NGOs, national scientists,
and extensionists, African farmers are conducting experiments
with organic and inorganic fertilizers in an attempt to replace
soil nutrients lost through years of continuous cropping.
Africans have also helped to perfect a CIAT method for integrating
modern scientific approaches to soil-problem diagnosis with
traditional indicators used by farmers. Originally developed
in Latin America, the method and manual were adapted for use
in eastern Africa. Feedback from that region has since been
incorporated in an updated Spanish version, thus completing
a cycle of South-South collaboration.
In the war against rural poverty, the hybridization of ideas
is, I believe, one of CIAT’s most important assets. It
comes not only from long-distance sharing of information via
scientific publications and the Internet but also from face-to-face
meetings between researchers visiting each other’s regions.
African scientists continually tell me how direct contact
with counterparts in Asia and Latin America has led them to
pursue new opportunities for African farmers. I hear similar
stories from Asian and Latin American scientists.
The success of our work also depends on constant contact
with advanced research institutes, whose findings we can adapt
and apply, and with tropical farmers, the final arbiters of
utility and relevance. As we pursue our global science agenda,
we have one foot firmly planted in the latest developments
of science and technology, the other in farmers’ fields,
in Africa and elsewhere.
Joachim Voss
Director General, CIAT
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