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CIAT in Perspective 2003-2004
Cardinal Points Charting the Direction of Our Work

Perspective in Practice

The genetic diversity represented by crop varieties and their wild relatives is a treasure to be shared justly across borders. But human error, neglect, and misfortune have gravely endangered both that biological resource and the very land on which it grows. These are not isolated annoyances, amenable to local containment. They are global threats.

If the diversity of Latin America's beans, for example, were to be suddenly dealt a crippling blow, it would not be long before small farmers in Eastern and Central Africa began feeling the loss. And each of us, regardless of postal code, will have to face the consequences of faster global warming if pastures in the African and South American savannas store less carbon because they have become degraded.

The constructive counterpoint here is local innovation. Like any form of creativity, this endowment cannot be minted like so many identical pennies. But it can be stimulated, documented, and emulated.

This issue of CIAT in Perspective, the 2003-2004 annual report of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT, the acronym in Spanish), is more prospective than usual. It considers collaborative strategies for addressing three global issues: conserving and using agrobiodiversity, fighting land degradation, and promoting rural innovation.

Cardinal Points-Charting the Direction of CIAT's Work

Director General’s Message

Tike any team of explorers, researchers and the institutions they work for need reliable navigational aids to keep them on track. Typical aids are mission statements, strategic plans, project log frames, external reviews, and impact assessments.

The CIAT Strategic Plan for 2001-2010 describes three broad avenues for helping rural people improve their livelihoods: make small-scale agriculture more competitive, protect agroecosystem health, and stimulate rural innovation. Early in 2003, CIAT's scientific staff went on a 2-day retreat to reflect on how to put this people-centered strategy into practice over the next 7 years. In the end we agreed to pursue three major goals that closely parallel our strategy.

Let me extend the metaphor of exploration and navigation for a moment. Imagine that one of the four cardinal points of a compass, say south, represents CIAT's scientific capital. This is the Center's current standing on the rural development map. It reflects many assets: the expertise and innovations of individual scientists, the Center's collective knowledge acquired over more than three decades, its many contacts and partnerships, its laboratories, and its reputation for good science.

From that position of strength, we can, so to speak, move east, west, and north, in each case tackling a major constraint to sustainable development. Although these three cardinal points- distilled from many good ideas aired at the 2003 retreat-are now our research priorities, we will continue to pay attention to other intermediate targets on the R&D map.

Biodiversity, land degradation, and rural innovation

The three cardinal points on which we chose to focus are agricultural biodiversity, land degradation, and rural innovation. Each is a topic encompassing global challenges and opportunities for improving rural livelihoods, and each is an area in which CIAT can deliver international public goods.

The world's agrobiodiversity is under threat from population growth, natural habitat destruction, climate change, and shifts in agrarian economies and international trade. Two landmark agreements, the 1992 Convention on Biodiversity and the 2001 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, recognize these dangers. They also propose mechanisms and actions for conserving and harnessing agrobiodiversity and for sharing the resulting benefits equitably.

One of the three CIAT priorities, then, is to assist developing countries in implementing these treaties- through joint research, information and technology sharing, and capacity building. Our aim here is to make agriculture more productive and competitive through creative use of plant genes, thereby benefiting the traditional guardians of that genetic diversity, farmers. Protein-rich cassava, stress-tolerant beans, and iron-rich rice are three examples of the pro-poor benefits that can come from improved conservation and use of biodiversity. The last-mentioned example also illustrates that, through our co-leadership of the HarvestPlus Challenge Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), CIAT is working to add value to agrobiodiversity. The benefits in this case are in improving the health of the poor and the survival and cognitive capacity of their children.

Our second cardinal point is the prevention, reduction, and reversal of land degradation in the tropics. The objective is to restore the potential economic, social, and environmental benefits and services of such land. This widespread and growing problem afflicts one-third to three-quarters of the developing world's farmland, depending on the region. It is of particular concern in areas with fragile soils or steep slopes, typically tilled by poor farmers.

Despite many organizations' efforts over the years to introduce better land management practices, the impact has been disappointing. CIAT and its partners hope to improve the success rate by taking into account not only the biophysical aspects of land degradation but also the social, economic, and policy influences at work. We will look, too, for possible synergies across traditionally distinct disciplines, such as soil science and plant breeding. For example, introducing stress-adapted germplasm at the same time as soil fertility enhancement and erosion control should make land restoration more attractive to farmers, because the payoff period is shorter. Combining these biophysical interventions with the scenario-building and decision-making tools developed by our Land Use Project allows farmers and policy makers to assess where investments in land restoration are most likely to pay off and how best to carry out the interventions.

During a recent visit to Nicaragua, where the long dry season is hard on both livestock and pastures, I was impressed by the performance of a CIAT hybrid Brachiaria grass marketed under the varietal name Mulato. Plots of this grass were green and lush-tiny oases amid the surrounding brown and burnt unimproved pastures. The immediate benefits for farmers are healthy, more productive animals, milk for children, and lower bills for feed supplements. In the longer term, the environment will also benefit from Mulato's ability to fix large amounts of carbon in the soil through its deep root system. And in drought-prone areas with infertile acid soils, this robust grass can provide a thick protective cover, reducing nutrient loss and erosion.

The final cardinal point on CIAT's institutional compass is the promotion of rural innovation through learning alliances-groups of institutions and individuals who deliberately set out to learn from their experiences as they implement jointly agreed activities. This initiative recognizes the need to empower individual farmers and communities, so they can design their own solutions and exchange knowledge and technology among themselves. The use of information and communication technologies, both new and traditional, is central to this work. We will capitalize on our recent experiences in promoting community telecenters, designing and disseminating participatory research methods, and developing rural agroenterprises. The goal is to enrich agricultural knowledge and information systems with new tools, methods, and approaches, so that these genuinely improve the lives of the rural poor.

Kindling enthusiasm, capturing the imagination

The choice of these three cardinal points for CIAT's research program furnishes the principal objectives around which our research activities can coalesce. The selected topics are major items on the international agenda, the most cogent and agreed-on expression of which is the United Nations' eight Millennium Goals and 18 targets for the coming decade. Our work on the three issues will contribute especially to the stated UN targets for reducing hunger and extreme poverty and protecting the environment. We believe these initiatives will kindle enthusiasm among our partners and capture the imagination of donors and beneficiaries.

While we at CIAT agree on the importance and relevance of using our research capacity to tackle these three major development challenges, we also recognize how vital it is to maintain space for other creative ideas and to seize new opportunities. Likewise, we are engaged in several areas of research that contribute to one or more of these challenges, but whose principal objective is to resolve another problem or seize a different opportunity. We must recognize the merits of such responsiveness to our partners' needs but at the same time avoid becoming excessively scattered. What we are aiming for is a healthy balance of focus, responsiveness, and new experimentation.

This issue of CIAT in Perspective, our annual report for 2003-2004, carries three articles about the cardinal points we have selected to anchor our research program. Fund raising to support implementation of these R&D initiatives is under way. We invite our donors to lend their support to CIAT and its partners as we together tackle a trio of problems that affect the livelihoods of millions of rural people.

Joachim Voss
Director General, CIAT

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