The collaborative work of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has resulted in development impacts on a scale that is without parallel in the international community.
And there are 40 of them, more than half in crop improvement, half a dozen in natural resources management, a few in the policy arena. Anyone out there disagree? Anything left out? Anyone think some of “impacts” included are not so great after all? Let us know.
Let me start the ball rolling. I happen to think that putting together and maintaining the international germplasm collections, and placing them under the aegis of the International Treaty, is a significant technical and policy achievement in its own right. After all, they underpinned all that crop improvement. Maybe that doesn’t count as an “impact.” But perhaps it should.
This one, the #1 impact in Africa, is always in these lists, but I find it a poor example because it is hardly related to investments that the CGIAR made:
This was about fixing what other researchers had broken when they shipped infected South American cassava to Africa. I understand it was fixed by finding a natural enemy in South America and bringing that to Africa as well.
It was great that the CGIAR did this, and employed an entomologist to do it, but there would have alternative suppliers aplenty. Any decent entomologist could have done that.
So wouldn’t this have happened anyway, perhaps a little bit later? If so the counter-factual is “basically the same result” (no impact). Entirely different thing from investing in a breeding program. Or a genebank.
This happened before the Convention in Biological Diversity. Under current rules things might slow down as you would need to get permits to take the natural enemy to Africa. And the country of origin might request benefit sharing. Although this, perhaps, could be offset by negative benefit sharing? There’s lots of biodiversity out there that one would like to do without. Can you extort money (or at least a couple of natural enemies) from a country when you receive one of its plagues?
If we exclude every problem that is in some way caused by humans, we might have to shut down completely. Spread of insects and diseases is inevitable. The research helped reduce the damage….Interestingly, they did all this before computerized ecological niche models. And it is still paying off now that the mealy bug has arrived to Asia, where they are quickly establishing the natural enemy.
Yes, there is a glaring hole about the value of the germplasm collections as the basis for varietal improvement both within and beyond the CG and their future value under climate change. But a lot of this value was in bringing in and screening new samples year by year. This was ticking along at about 12,000 samples around the time of the CBD but now seems to have gone down to 5,000 or so a year under the FAO Seed Treaty: FAO is being coy about this number. Unless this figure goes up fast the Treaty is not a policy plus for the CG and could damage global agriculture.
The Treaty also compromised the unconditional return of duplicates to the providing country – once a point of honour for CG genebank managers and explicitly written into the FAO-CGIAR Agreement. It was something providing countries could depend upon as a right. Not any more: SMTAs have to be signed.
IMPROVING CASSAVA FOR ENHANCING YIELD, MINIMIZING PEST LOSSES AND CREATING WEALTH IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
… cassava research in Africa started in the 1930 by focusing on two central constraints to local production, namely African cassava mosaic virus (ACMV), and low yield of cassava, to which ACMW contributed. ACMV (later known as CMD or cassava mosaic disease) spreads by an insect vector and further distributed by infected plant cuttings, whereas low yield results from the use of poor planting materials and lack of access by farmer to bred-cultivars (IITA 1992). Breeding for ACMV began in Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania in the 1930s, and some hybrid clones ensue from crosses between cassava and M. glaziovii (Nassar and Ortiz 2007). Clones such as Gold Coast Hybrid 7 (GCH-7 bred in Ghana) and 5318/34 (bred at Amani, Tanzania) were brought to the Moor Plantation (Ibadan, Nigeria) in the 1940s and 1950s as source material for further cassava breeding, particularly for host plant resistance to ACMV. One of the clones selected in Nigeria was 58308 – an important source of new hybrids bred in the 1970s by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) such as TMS 30572 and TMS 4(2)142, which are still widely grown in the Nigerian cassava belt and other African locations.
The overall rationale, in the mind of the founders of IITA, for establishing this Institute as an international high quality research organization in sub-Saharan Africa, was to find ways to enhance yields and quality of tropical food crops such as cassava. The research domain included all aspects that allow increasing and improving the quality of food. In the early years (1970s), IITA’s agenda was organized into four programs; being one of them the Root and Tuber Improvement Program that was led by Dr. Sang Ki Hahn (Ortiz 2004). When Hahn arrived in Ibadan in 1971 to establish this program at IITA, he rightly saw that no amount of research effort would increase cassava yields until the problem of Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) was solved.
Hahn recognized the enormous implications of an endemic disease aggravated by humans through the use of diseased cuttings, and he focused cassava research tightly on this disease problem (Hahn et al. 1989). With Eugene Terry as pathologist, Hahn began the arduous task of searching the germplasm for resistance characters and then combining those characters with lines having desirable yield and quality factors (Hahn et al. 1980a). Fortunately, Hahn had access to the mosaic resistant families developed from A.J. Storey’s work in East Africa nearly 30 years before and that of Brian Beck at Moor Plantation in the 1950s. However, these families had very poor root yields. He also brought cassava germplasm from Asia and South America. The latter incorporated wild Manihot genes that were initially bred by Prof. Nagib Nassar (Univ. of Brasilia) and other researchers in Brazil. It remained the IITA team’s task ably assisted by Audrey Howland, an outstanding breeding research associate, to cross, select, clone, challenge, rogue, and select, beginning each season with up to 10,000 seedlings, until the desired level of resistance was incorporated into “elite” IITA cassava breeding materials.
In the early 1970s, cassava bacterial blight (CBB) was reported in Nigeria, and this ‘black disease’, as known by Nigerian farmers –particularly in eastern and mid-western states, caused huge crop losses because the best available cultivars (60444 and 60447) proved to be very susceptible (IITA 1992). Afterwards CBB epidemics were observed in a dozen African countries because their local cultivars were also susceptible to this disease. The clone 58308 –with low cyanide potential and resistance to ACMV, was also used as a source of resistance to CBB. An important genetic enhancement research finding was that CBB resistance derived from M. glaziovii was associated to with resistance to CMD (Hahn et al. 1980b). Furthermore, this IITA breeding endeavor led to new hybrid clones with resistance to CBB and ACMV, plus high yield and acceptable quality traits (Hahn et al. 1989). This breeding success ensued from the use of cassava clones brought from other continents, which were included in crossing blocks along with IITA disease-resistant clones, local African landraces, and the strong partnership research with the National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI) at Umudike, southeastern Nigeria (IITA 1992). The Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT, Cali Colombia) also facilitated the acquisition by IITA of new parental materials, especially those grown in South America or suitable for dryland areas.
In summary, the target of this cassava breeding strategy was broadly based breeding populations that would be further selected by national researchers and local partners according to their needs (Jennings and Iglesias 2002). Hence, crosses among local cultivars was high in the Institute’s breeding agenda as well as incorporating judiciously exotic germplasm into the desired gene complexes, but minimizing inbreeding and restoring heterozygosity to escape from inbreeding depression (Ortiz et al. 2006). The improved cassava germplasm was sent for testing across African locations through in vitro methods for elite genotypes, or as seed for half-sib and full-sib recombinant breeding populations. Furthermore, as indicated by Robinson (1995), the concept of farmer participatory schemes for plant breeding was initiated by Hahn and co-workers, who enlisted the help of small country schools in many West African locations with whom they shared some seeds of their promising materials.
… research to increase yields in a broad range of agro-ecological zones and cultivation systems, to suit a wide variety of consumer preference, was launched by IITA through the deployment of bred-cassava cultivars in many African locations. There were about 206 releases of cassava cultivars in 20 African nations. In the 1990s African programs incorporated IITA bred-materials in 80% of their cassava bred-germplasm that led to 50% gains in cassava yields on average (Manyong et al. 1999). Such cassava cultivars represent an important contribution to Africa’s food security, especially among the poor (Nweke et al. 2002) because the improved cultivars raised per capita output by 10% continent-wide, benefiting 14 million farmers. For example, the total benefits from the cassava multiplication partnership project between the National Agriculture Research Organization (NARO, Uganda) and IITA to combat the cassava mosaic disease pandemic in six districts was approximately US $ 36 million over four years (1998-2001) for an initial investment of US $ 0.8 million (Dixon et al. 2003). The success of cassava genetic enhancement in sub-Saharan Africa points out the benefits of having an eco-regional center such as IITA doing crop breeding, and together with many continental partners delivering the new seeds that impact on African livelihoods (Ortiz and Hartmann 2003). Clearly, there are some circumstances where national programs are already sufficiency developed to fulfill this role. In such cases (and the list will hopefully be rapidly expanding), international centers have a duty to rapidly devolve these activities to the national partners through technology and skills exchange (Ortiz and Crouch 2007).
Source: R. Ortiz (2006) Gene Conserve21, 301-319. http://www.geneconserve.pro.br/artigo_32.pdf [edited to correct link. JC]
References
A. Dixon et al. (2003) Chronica Horticulturae 43 (4):8–15
S.K. Hahn et al. (1989) Resistance breeding in root and tuber crops at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan, Nigeria. Crop Protection 8:147–168
S.K. Hahn et al. (1980a) Breeding cassava for resistance to cassava mosaic disease. Euphytica 29:673–683
S.K. Hahn et al. (1980b) Correlated resistance of cassava to mosaic and bacterial blight diseases. Euphytica 29:305–311
IITA (1992) Sustainable Food Production in sub-Saharan Africa. 1. IITA’s contribution. IITA, Ibadan, Nigeria.
Jennings DL, Iglesias C (2002) Breeding for crop improvement. In: R.J. Hillocks et al. (eds) Cassava: biology, production and utilization. CABI Publishing, Wallingford, Oxon, UK. Pp. 149–166
V.M. Manyong et al. (2000) The contribution of IITA-improved cassava to food security in sub-Saharan Africa: an impact study. International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria
N.M.A. Nassar & R. Ortiz (2007) Journal of Agricultural Sciences (Cambridge) 145:1–9
F.I. Nweke et al. (2002) The Cassava Transformation: Africa’s Best-kept Secret. Michigan State Univ Press, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
R. Ortiz (2004) IITA 40 years after. In Board of Trustees Docket. International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria
R. Ortiz and J.H. Crouch (2007) Creating an effective process to define, approve and review the research agenda of institutions in the developing world. In: G. Loebenstein & G. Thottappilly (eds) Agricultural Research Management. Springer, Germany. Pp. 65–92
R. Ortiz & P. Hartmann (2003) Beyond crop technology: The challenge for African rural development. In Vol. 2 Reference Material of the Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Program “Building Livelihoods through Integrated Agricultural Research for Development – Securing the Future for Africa’s Children”. Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), Accra, Ghana. pp. 39–72
http://www.rimisp.org/isc/documentos/beyondcroptechnology.pdf
R. Ortiz et al. (2006) Breeding vegetatively propagated crops. In: K. Lamkey & M. Lee (eds) Plant Breeding. Blackwell Publishing, Ames, Iowa. Pp. 251–268
R.A. Robinson (1995) Return to Resistance: Breeding Crops to Reduce Pesticide Dependence. International Development Research Center, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada – agAccess, Davis, California, USA