Category: Funding

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Agriculture important, World Bank discovers

The World Bank is suddenly all concerned about agriculture. Within a few days there’s the result of an independent evaluation of its assistance to sub-Saharan Africa, and the latest World Development Report, which focuses on agriculture for development. The NY Times has an article on the African report:

At a time of growing debate about how to combat hunger in Africa, the evaluation team recommended that the bank, the single largest donor for African agriculture, concentrate on helping farmers get the basics they need to grow and market more food: fertilizer, seeds, water, credit, roads.

Ah, seeds. If only it were that easy. The World Development Report 2008 actually refers to the spread of improved varieties as “slow magic” (p. 159, chapter 7), pointing out that crop improvement “has been enormously successful, but not everywhere.” Then, on page 259, in a discussion of the “global agenda for the 21st century,” the money quote:

Conserving genetic resources for future food security. Genetic resources and seeds have been the basis for some of the most successful agricultural interventions to promote growth and reduce poverty (chapter 7). Conserving the world’s rich heritage of crop and animal genetic diversity is essential to future global food security. Gene banks and in situ resources that provide fair access to all countries and equitably share the benefits are a global public good that requires global collective action.

Chapter 8, on Making Agricultural Systems more Environmentally Sustainable, should also make for interesting reading.

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Support for beekepers

Sweet news for Kenya’s apiarists: the European Union has advanced Sh13 million to increase the flow, marketing and returns on honey. More than 3000 beekeepers in seven projects across the country stand to benefit. Here’s hoping they don’t import any dodgy sick bees from Australia — current favoured culprits for the cause of colony collapse disorder. I wonder whether fruit and veg harvests might improve too.

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AGRA to train plant breeders

AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, has announced buckets of cash for two universities to train plant breeders. Students in Ghana and South Africa will learn about locally important crops. From the press release:

“A PhD student training in Europe might look for valuable DNA sequences in wheat. An African scientist whose country has no wheat production and no DNA labs will not be equipped to face the challenges of developing local food crops when they go home,” said Prof. Eric Danquah, director of WACCI at the University of Ghana, Legon.

Most of the crops important to Africa—such as cassava, sorghum, millet, plantain, and cowpea—the so-called “orphan crops,” are of little importance to researchers and educators in the developed world. As a result, there is a serious shortage of breeders of these crops. For example, there are under a dozen millet breeders in all of Africa. Yet millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa depend on millet as an important part of their diet. Conversely, most of the more than US$35 billion invested by private firms in agricultural research is concentrated in North America and Europe, on a handful of commercially important crops.

I think this is excellent news. I wonder, though, how much these students will learn about the importance of diversity, within and among the crops. AGRA and its sponsors have had a distressing tendency to think in terms of single silver bullets, and that — unlike 120 PhD plant breeders of orphan crops, in not what Africa needs at all.

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A bit of cash for biodiversity

This looks potentially rather interesting.

The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Energy invite applications for the establishment or continuation of “International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups” (ICBG) to address the interdependence of biodiversity exploration for potential applications in health, agriculture and energy, with investments in research capacity that support sustainable use of these resources, the knowledge to conserve them, and equitable partnership frameworks among research and development organizations in the U.S. and low and middle income countries.

That’s from the announcement of about US$3-4 million of new funding available in the US. It’s hard to know exactly what it might cover, but it is nice to see agriculture in there explicitly, along with health and, somewhat less appealing, energy. I found it at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, but you can go straight to the government source. And, hey, let us know if anyone lands a big grant.