Category: Funding

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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.

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Use monoculture to pay for diversity

Palm oil plantations destroy the biodiversity of the forests they replace. But high-falutin’ ideas of paying farmers not to plant oil palms are doomed to failure for two reasons. First, as developing countries rush to point out, Europe and America destroyed their own forests to power their development, so who are they to ask developing countries to forego similar development? Secondly, palm oil is so profitable that very little else is likely to appeal to farmers. Lian Pin Koh and David Wilcove have a nifty idea in a recent Nature. Conservationists should invest in small palm oil plantations and use the profits to buy — and protect — rainforest.

Koh and Wilcove say that a typical mature oil-palm plantation in Malaysia makes an annual net profit of roughly $2,000 per hectare. Existing oil palm-cultivated land sells for about $12,500 per hectare, so the capital investment could be recovered in just 6 years. Thereafter, the profits from a 5,000-hectare oil palm plantation would be about $10 million, which could buy 1,800 hectares of forest each year. The forest would be set aside as private nature reserves. Furthermore, new and more sustainable palm plantations could then be established on degraded land, which is feasible, but currently not as cheap as chopping down forest.

Sounds to me like a plan.

The Nature paper is behind a paywall; more details at Biopact and Mongabay.

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Australia invests in wheat genes

You can’t keep a good man down. Dr Ken Street, who may or may not be the Indiana Jones of agriculture, has been explaining why Australia’s Grains and Development Corporation (GRDC) has given $5 million to the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Part of GRDC’s contribution is earmarked for Central Asia and the Caucasus, where wheat and other cereals were domesticated and where there are still valuable genetic resources. The Trust will help to conserve material collected in those regions, which Street says has already demonstrated resistance to three different kinds of wheat rust: leaf, yellow and stripe. GRDC is funded by a levy on Australian cereal farmers, and the genetic resources supported by the Trust will be freely available to all researchers. So, as Street neatly sums up: “the benefit to Australia is access to genes that could solve many current production constraints”.

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More doom and gloom for agricultural research

I ((This article was sent in by Danny Hunter.)) was encouraged to read a couple of interesting news stories on SciDevNet highlighting useful efforts to improve scientific capacity in developing countries, only to be disheartened by another article identifying important gaps and weaknesses in many Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in this very area. PRSPs are the multi-year plans that developing countries now have to draw up and adopt as a pre-condition of support from funding agencies such as the World Bank. Not good news for agricultural research and researchers in these countries.

The article highlights a warning for the world’s poorest nations to place more emphasis on using scientific knowledge and technological innovation if they wish to escape growing unemployment and poverty. The warning is contained in a major report — “The Least Developed Countries Report 2007: Knowledge, Technology Learning and Innovation for Development” — published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The PRSPs seek to reduce poverty through sustained economic growth, but fail to give importance to the role of scientific and technological change in achieving sustainable development. No wonder national budgets and donor aid for science, technology and innovation in general, and for agricultural research and extension and capacity-building in particular, are dwindling. ((“…although agriculture remains the principal source of livelihood in LDCs, spending on agricultural research has fallen from 1.2 per cent of agricultural gross national product in the late 1980s to less than 0.5 per cent today.”)) While there are no easy solutions to this complex problem, the report does highlight strategies for donors and LDCs that can improve capacity for science, technology and innovation,

from encouraging “technological learning” in both “farms and firms”, to making better use of international legislation on intellectual property rights, and encouraging donors to increase support for what it describes as “knowledge aid”.

However, while it is important to make such high-minded pronouncements, let us not forget that individual scientists carrying out research in LCDs have much to offer on a day-to-day basis in terms of enhancing national scientific capacity. Such capacity-enhancing activities might involve providing training and mentoring to young scientists, helping young scientists and scientific groups to form networks, ensuring young local scientists are acknowledged and included as co-authors on scientific publications, and so forth. I am sure there are other, more innovative approaches to capacity-enhancing that have been used by scientists working in the field of agricultural biodiveristy. If so, I would love to learn about them.