ILRI weighs in on agricultural research e-consultations

Posted on September 28, 2009 by ILRIComms

What’s Needed? What’s Missing? What’s New? in Asia

What should be the future agriculture and natural resource research agenda? That is the big question being asked in a series of electronic consultations being held in different regions of the world. The answer will determine the way that millions of dollars are spent in the coming years by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The regional e-consultations will feed into a Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD), to be held in Montpellier, France, in March 2010.
This Global Conference is being designed as a multi-year process creating new ways of working together that significantly enhance the development value of agricultural research. The organizers are designing GCARD to be open and inclusive and to help reshape agricultural research and innovation for development through an agreed action plan and new framework. In doing so, they are also ambitious to increase the resources for, and benefits of, such research. Iain Wright, Regional Representative for Asia at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), made the following responses to nine questions posed in September 2009 in this GCARD 2010 e-consultation for the Asia-Pacific region.

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Smallholder dairy tool box

Posted on July 7, 2009 by ILRIComms

This CD by ILRI and on Smallholder dairy tool box was released on 7 July, 2009.

This CD: a new ‘tool box’ has been developed to make it easier for organizations to provide easy-to-understand information to anyone involved in smallholder dairy production. Known as the Smallholder Dairy Tool Box (SDTB), its software allows users to access useful information and provide it in formats that are appropriate to a whole range of stakeholders – from farmers and delivery agents to planners and policy makers. The tool box is intended to overcome the fact that the training and information materials currently available are often inadequate and difficult to access – especially for farmers and extension workers who have very little spare time.

Renewing African agriculture

Posted on November 21, 2008 by ILRIComms

Making Africa's diversity and complexity work for, rather than against, its small farmers

As 2008 draws to a close, I and other colleagues of mine in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which supports my Africa-based institute, the International Livestock Research Institute, have been reflecting on a ‘New Deal’ for African farmers, who face special agricultural conditions that demand special attention.

Rural Africa remains largely hungry and poor despite decades of improved agricultural technologies, crop varieties and management and policy options generated by agricultural science to help solve the continent’s special agricultural challenges.

What’s been missing is an integrated approach to African agriculture that is radically collaborative, holistic and futuristic—an approach that embraces rather than ignores the complexity of small-scale African farming and marketing and the continent’s special agro-ecological and cultural diversity.

We need not only new and better adapted crop varieties and more productive and more efficiently managed livestock, fisheries, tree crops and forests, but also new ways of serving small farmers, new and more efficient market chains that encourage smallholder participation, and new ways of spurring innovation at all levels, from farms to communities to institutions.

We need an integrated approach to Africa’s special agricultural conditions that follows neither the highly intensified farming systems of the West, which now are also being rethought because of their high human and environmental costs, nor mere incremental improvements to Africa’s traditional subsistence mixed crop, tree, fish and livestock farming systems, which can merely lock people into farm poverty for generations.

Experts reckon that doing these things will require a doubling of current investments in science. Such augmented levels of investments would indeed enable the scientific community to advance developing-country agricultural research. And it still wouldn’t make a difference to most of Africa’s food producers and sellers.

We need a New Deal for African agricultural research that involves every major stakeholder in development of this vast sector. Central to the new deal is adequate support for national and regional research and the farm input services that enable the agricultural sector to perform.

We need to learn how to connect all the dots—how to integrate the work of science groups with that of the many other players in developing-country agriculture in ways that deliver all the given specific pieces needed to support, improve and sustain African farming in specific circumstances. Betting on a single farm component or group of actors, whether a new technology or a world body, to transform Africa’s agricultural sector is not going to work.

We’re not going to banish crises such as the fertilizer crisis, the food crisis, the fuel crisis and now the financial crises that we’ve experienced over the past year, but we can learn to prepare for and manage them faster and better. This will require all research institutions to start talking to development institutions, to start building new kinds of partnerships, and to start taking on some radical new ways of doing business. It’s bound to be a messy process. But a necessary one.

These new partnerships must embrace Africa’s diversity as a strength in revitalizing and reforming Africa’s food systems as a whole—from how we grow food to how we transport and process it to how we cook and eat it. With the era of cheap energy drawing to a close, old approaches will not work as before. We need new thinking, new systems, new diversification, new markets, new policies and new actors to build a 21st-century food system that works.

This will require not so much a new development pathway as an abundance of mix-and-match development pathways suiting Africa’s greatly diverse agro-eco- and socio-economic conditions. We need nuanced and differentiated solutions for Africa’s highly differentiated farming systems and household conditions.

To do this, we’ll need new skills and tools and to determine what options best suit which particular circumstances. Doing this should allow agricultural researchers, for the first time, to make Africa’s diversity and complexity work for Africa, as a wealth of resources, rather than against Africa, as a wealth of problems.

Many agree that major international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund require major overhauls to remain relevant in tackling our current and future global challenges. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which supports 15 centres working for sustainable agricultural development in poor countries, has been engaging in this throughout 2008. At its annual meeting, in Maputo, Mozambique, 1–5 December 2008, it furthered the process of reinventing itself by reorganizing its structure and processes to form a cohesive, coherent and—above all—collaborative foundation on which to build anew the international agricultural research for development enterprise.

Carlos Seré
Director General
International Livestock Research Institute

Helping Asia’s dairy farmers take advantage of rising demand and prices for dairy products

Posted on October 22, 2008 by ILRIComms

FAO workshop and strategy say fair prices, appropriate policies and strategic investments and partnerships are key for the sector's development.

A report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in April 2008 concludes that policy decisions impinging on the smallholder dairy sector should be taken with a broad understanding of their direct and indirect implications on rural as well as urban populations.

The report indicates that the recent control of milk prices in several Asian countries could be counter-productive to supporting the dairy incomes of smallholders and rural development generally. With prices at record levels for both dairy outputs (milk) and inputs (feeds, energy costs), fixed and administered prices tend to hold back big as well as small dairy producers from responding quickly to the changing price signals.

Price controls particularly hurt dispersed smallholders, who often lack social networks to help them find and sell to milk collectors offering the highest prices. On the other hand, equitable and remunerative prices for farm-gate milk encourages smallholders to adopt improved and sustainable technologies and management systems that improve their milk quality as well as quantity.

The recent and rapid escalation of commodity prices is the perfect environment in which to test what policies are most conducive to the development of the agricultural sector. Low food prices over the past 20 years led to an underinvestment in agriculture, particularly in smallholder dairying, which, unlike rice and other staples of food security, has been a neglected and relatively unsupported area of research and development.

Fair pricing policies, says FAO, are the first step to this sector’s development.

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The sudden rise in dairy prices that took the market by surprise in late 2006 was due to the elimination by the European Union of subsidized dairy exports as well as to drought in many large dairy-product exporting countries and higher feed prices worldwide. Throughout 2007, prices for dairy products rose faster than those for any other agricultural commodity group, finally reaching a plateau in late 2007 and abating only in early 2008.
This recent increase in dairy prices potentially offers an opportunity for hundreds of millions of poor, and in many cases, landless, smallholder dairy producers to benefit from these structural, or permanent, shifts in the global demand and supply of dairy products.

This is particularly true for Asia, where growth in both milk production and consumption has been the strongest in the world; nearly 80% of the 238 million tonnes of milk produced in 2007 was supplied by farmers with 1 to 5 cows.

While developing countries in Asia and elsewhere consume only 40% of global milk production, these countries import nearly three-quarters of global shipments of dairy products, including 80% of milk powder exports from developed countries. With the world’s largest net trade milk deficit, Asia is projected to increase its milk production by 3% a year over the next decade, slower than the previous decade but still double annual global growth rates.

This is supported by expectations that, although dairy product prices have been easing in the first half of 2008, increased prices are here to stay. Commodity projections by both FAO and the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute indicate that milk prices over the next decade will remain 50% higher than historical averages.

Smallholder farmers have the capacity to respond quickly to higher milk prices because of their ample scope for rapid yield increases. Current average milk yields in developing countries are just one-fifth that in developed countries because most smallholder farmers feed their dairy animals well below their potential.

With enabling pricing policies and technical support to producers on improved feeding, on-farm management and reducing spoilage, milk yields in poor countries could increase dramatically to meet the rising global demand, bringing millions out of poverty in the process.

How policymakers in region have responded to higher commodity prices
To date, most of the policy responses in Asia to escalating food prices have focused on rice, maize, wheat and other food staples. Some countries, such as India in 2007, briefly limited dairy product exports to ensure domestic price stability. Many importing countries reduced import tariffs on both livestock products and feed inputs and many put in place price caps on milk and other dairy products.

Asian policy responses to escalating food prices

• China imposes price caps on meat, milk, eggs, grain and edible oils (Jan 2008)
• China subsidizes meat consumption for the poor (for 6 months)
• Thailand imposes price controls on dairy products, chicken, eggs, beef and pork.
• Pakistani cities set retail fluid milk prices below the cost of production.
• Thailand reduces the tariff rate for soybean meal from 4 to 0% to reduce the costs of feeding local animals.
• Indonesia eliminates import duties on soybeans (for 6 months).
• Indonesia subsidizes tempe and tofu producers.
• Korea cuts import duties on corn and soybeans.
• China reduces the tariff rate for soybeans from 3 to 1% for 3 months (Oct 2007–Mar 2008).
• Indonesia takes a series of measures to stabilize food prices.
• India abolishes the import duty on corn (Jan–Dec 2007)
• India bans the export of pulses (Jun 2006–Mar 2008).
• Vietnam reduces tariffs on meat, offal, eggs, milk products, vegetable oils and animal feeds by 30–50% and reduces the import tax rate for corn used for animal feed from 5 to 2%.

The different policy responses and the way they are implemented alter economic incentives for the different actors along the dairy marketing chain and have differential impacts on food security in urban and rural areas. Policy responses that seek to ensure food security and access by controlling markets, such as through setting ceiling prices, usually lower prices, preventing potential gains from being realized, and hurt rural livelihoods.

The dairy sector in most developed countries is highly supported through regulated prices and high tariffs to ensure stable and high incomes for dairy producers. This is not the case in developing countries, where dairy policies are less prevalent and price controls are often used to ensure low prices for urban consumers.

A recent FAO review on lessons learned in smallholder dairy development reveals that government interventions in the dairy sector—particularly price policies that create or remove incentives for producers to increase yields—strongly impact rural livelihoods and food security for better or worse, as well as, importantly, the investment climate for the sector.

A key question for policymakers is to what extent the international dairy prices are being transmitted into local economies. FAO’s investigation of price movements in a few countries in Asia identifies some of the factors conditioning the transmission of the prices. Domestic policies influence market signals while the costs of doing business determines the extent to which individual producers respond to those market signals.

The first determinants of how international prices translate into local prices are exchange rate movements and a country’s net trade position. While world dairy prices have increased substantially in recent years, these have been accompanied and partly caused by a substantial depreciation of the US dollar against many currencies.

The exchange rate factor means domestic prices don’t necessarily rise as much as international prices. The impacts of international prices on local prices are highest in countries with stable currencies, such as Indonesia and Bangladesh. In countries whose currencies have been appreciating, milk importers such as the Philippines have benefited from cheaper imports while milk exporters such as Thailand have suffered from reduced export earnings.

Prices of dairy products throughout Asia have increased over the past two years. From 2006 to 2008, farm gate prices of fluid milk rose from 10% (Malaysia) to 14% (Nepal) to 30% (Vietnam) to 69% (Mongolia). In the Philippines, which, after China, imports more dairy products than any other Asian nation, the government stopped all support for dairy activities two decades ago, deciding to import all its dairy requirements. While the government has accorded the sector more interest in recent years, its low tariffs (1–3%) on dairy imports, instituted to assure adequate supplies of milk products for its urban consumers, encouraged milk imports.

Despite these challenges to Philippino dairy producers, the smallholder sector, comprising some 96% of the dairy farming sector, has managed to compete favourably in the open market, due to its enterprise-focused approach to dairy development and the laissez-faire pricing policy, which allows markets to determine prices. The rise in international milk prices was transferred into the Philippino wholesale market for milk powder with only a slight delay (despite the peso’s appreciating 33% against the value of the US dollar, making imports less expensive). And farm gate prices, ranging from US$0.30–0.33 from 2001 to 2006 have risen to the current range of $0.40–0.49.

Sri Lanka has also kept tariffs low on imports of dairy products to keep milk, considered ‘essential’ for food security and nutrition, affordable. As a result, price trends in international markets are transmitted almost fully to the domestic market. With relatively stable exchange rates and imports making up 72% of domestic consumption, one could assume that high international prices would lead to higher prices for local suppliers.

However, pricing structures largely determined by a state-owned milk processing company mean the higher international prices translated into nearly 50% rises in packages of locally sold whole milk powder but only a 25% increase (US$0.20–0.25 per litre) in farm gate fluid milk prices in 2007.

Sri Lankan milk producers have thus not been given sufficient incentives to invest in their dairying despite the fact that the country’s total milk collection increased by 13% in 2004 due to higher prices being paid then for milk. Also constraining incentives to engage in the Sri Lankan dairy sector are high production costs that mean that a farmer needs to keep at least three cows and produce at least 15 litres a day to earn a reasonable income from dairy.

As Asia’s fifth largest producer, Pakistan accounts for nearly 13% of global production, most of which is sourced from the country’s 8.4 million dairying households owning an average of 1 to 10 cows and most of which is consumed within the country.

Dairy’s contribution to Pakistan domestic product surpasses all the major crops and the sector has grown by more than 3% annually over the past decade, mostly due to expanding numbers of dairy animals producing low yields.

Over 2007, prices for fluid milk rose from US$0.31 to %$0.37 per litre. The price setting, however, which in Pakistan is done at district level, doesn’t take into consideration the rising costs of feed and other imports.

In both Pakistan and Sri Lanka, these prices have risen about 8 to 10% per year. Some municipalities are setting price ceiling below the cost of production. So while official milk prices in Karachi are set at RS32 per litre, black market rates in peak season often reach RS42 per litre. In response, farmers reduce or stop making new investments in their dairying, particularly their purchase of buffalo calves, whose price has risen 30–40%, a fact that may spell shortages of milk and cows in future.

Strategically positioning Asia to benefit from growing opportunities:
The Asian Smallholder Dairy Development Strategy and Investment Plan
To facilitate a timely response to this new and big opportunity for the poor, FAO and the Animal Production and Health Commission for Asia and the Pacific (APHCA), with the financial support of Common Fund for Commodities, initiated development of a regional strategy for dairy development. They started by holding a workshop in Chiang Mai, Thailand, 26–29 February 2008, attended by over 50 key policymakers and senior executives of some of the largest dairy companies in Asia. Participants included regional experts from 18 Asian countries and from the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

At a time of record-high international dairy prices, the workshop dairy experts agreed that Asia needs concerted regional collaboration to enable its tens of millions of small dairy producers to derive the full benefits from the dairy value chain through greater productivity, better milk quality and maximum market access.

To help unleash dairy’s potential to transform rural economies in Asia, workshop members and government and private-sector representatives pledged to:
• Strengthen the ability of smallholders, who currently account for 70% of regional milk production, to supply and market quality milk to the region;
• Actively participate in a regional dairy information and exchange network that will be a channel of best practices on smallholder dairy development;
• Support the development of national action plans that would build on the pillars of the regional strategy.

In response to the outcome of the workshop, FAO committed itself, under the umbrella of APHCA, to the immediate development of a knowledge networking system on small-scale dairy development, addressing such issues as production, marketing, and processing. The results of this workshop were further elaborated the following April into an Asian Smallholder Dairy Development Strategy and Investment Plan, which has as its objective: ‘a glass of good-quality, safe Asian milk per day for every Asian child and more efficient, productive and profitable dairy food chains providing dairy producers with higher earnings.’

In November 2008, ILRI’s Markets Theme director, Steve Staal, will participate in a follow-up workshop in Bangkok with about 30 other experts, including policymakers, researchers, private sector agents and global development thinkers on dairy development and chain analysis. This informal expert consultation aims to build a body of practical knowledge on enabling policies for development of smallholder dairy. It will feed into and support the broader objectives of FAO’s regional strategy for smallholder dairy development in Asia, which is to promote investment into Asia’s dairy sector.

FAO has been working in many countries in the region to help develop national training centers for small-scale dairy processing and genetic improvement of dairy cattle. Like FAO, ILRI strongly supports pro-poor dairy policy and development. ILRI has been working to enhance smallholder dairying in Africa and Asia since early 1990s through collaborative R&D projects with national partners. ILRI’s central interest is the traditional ‘raw’, or unpasteurized, milk and dairy markets of these regions, which are huge and booming. Traditional markets make up an extraordinary 98% of total milk sold in Tanzania, 90% in Uganda, and 86% in Kenya; in South Asia, these informal markets constitute 98% of milk sold in Pakistan, 76% in India and 40% in Sri Lanka. The dairy products traded in these informal markets are often liquid raw or soured milk and traditionally processed products such as the ubiquitous milk sweets of India.

ILRI’s collaborative smallholder dairy projects are looking for win-win options that enhance the welfare of small farmers and market agents while improving the nutritional status of poor households and enriching exhausted soils on smallholder mixed crop-and-livestock farms.
A smart way to meet this triple bottom line is to pay scrupulous attention to already vibrant local dairy markets—to what products local people are already selling and buying. As ILRI veterinary researcher Nick Hooten says:

‘What all of us tend to vastly underestimate is the huge and growing size and viability of local dairy markets in developing countries, with their traditional products designed for local preferences rather than Western appetites. These local markets should be our starting point for enlarging dairy pathways out of poverty.’

A collaboration path toward action
Embarking on such an ambitious initiative requires collaboration and cooperation between governments, institutions and other local and regional partners. FAO and ILRI have a long history of working together on smallholder dairy development and a regional umbrella supporting dairy development in Asia necessitates partnerships that focus on merging research results into development action in the field.

A recent ILRI/FAO publication, Dairy Development for the Resource Poor—A Comparison of Dairy Policies and Development in South Asia and East Africa—outlines an agenda for pro-poor dairy policy and development. The authors suggest that, generally speaking, dairy development policies that build on traditional production systems, with a particular focus on employment generation and food safety and quality, are likely to be pro-poor. Solid knowledge of policies and their impacts on the structure of the dairy sector throughout the region will provide the stage for future initiatives.

ILRI and FAO look forward to collaborating with interested partners in the region to further the goal of ensuring that every day Asian children have access to at least one glass of Asian milk.

Related Information:
Proceedings of an FAO/APHCA/CFC-FUNDED workshop on:
Developing an Asian Regional Strategy for Sustainable Smallholder Dairy Development

Strategy and Investment Plan for Smallholder Dairy Development in Asia

Asia Pacific Dairy Strategy Project information

APHCA Brief: Dairy prices, policies and potential opportunities for smallholders in Asia, April 2008, by Nancy Morgan, Livestock Policy Officer, FAO Regional Office in Bangkok, Asia-Pacific Dairy Strategy Project

ILRI’s presentation to the workshop, ‘Dairy development for the resource poor: Lessons for policy and planning strategies’, by Nick Hooten, 27 February 2008.

Further Information Contact:
Nancy Morgan,
Livestock Policy Officer, FAO Regional Office in Bangkok
Asia-Pacific Dairy Strategy Project
Email: Nancy.Morgan@fao.org

Steve Staal
Director of Enhancing Market Opportunities Theme
ILRI-Nairobi
Email: s.taal@cgiar.org

Evolution of Uganda’s dairy systems: Popular zero-grazing dairying does not suit all

Posted on October 17, 2008 by ILRIComms

What’s needed is to make better use of cow manure to fertilize the country’s impoverished soils.

Is Uganda outgrowing its popular zero-grazing dairy model? Reports from a recent research study suggest that Ugandan policymakers may want to revisit their policies supporting the country’s booming dairy sector to sustain increasing yields of smallholder mixed crop-and-dairy production over the long term.

Before the 1980s, milk production in Uganda occurred largely in two contrasting production systems. There were the large, mostly government-owned, commercial dairy farms located in the wetter parts of the country on which exotic and cross-bred dairy cattle were kept and grazed on natural pastures. Then there were the pastoralists, who kept large numbers of local cattle under traditional management systems in the drier eastern and northeastern parts of the country.

From the mid-1980s, development agencies in Uganda began introducing zero-grazing systems, in which high-yielding genetically improved cows (pure or cross-bred with local cattle) are kept in stalls and fed with fodder cut and carried to them daily. These more ‘intensive’ dairy systems were promoted among Ugandan farmers along with training on managing dairy breeds and growing fodder. This gave many smallholders an incentive to buy exotic dairy cows or to upgrade their indigenous cows by cross-breeding them with exotic stock. Some of Uganda’s small farmers adopted strict zero-grazing practices while others combined grazing paddocks with stall feeding, a hybrid dairy production system that came to be known as ‘semi-intensive’.

As a result, there has been a steady increase over the last two decades in the numbers of improved dairy cows in Uganda’s national herd with concomitant increases in national milk production yields, smallholder contributions to national milk production, dairy’s contribution to the national economy, and per capita milk consumption.

Ugandan dairy support
Sixteen years ago, in 1992, the government launched a ‘Milk Master Plan’ to improve (simultaneously) rural incomes, farm living standards, national self-sufficiency in milk production, and yields of surplus milk for export. With the liberation of the sub-sector in 1993, when the government’s monopoly on milk processing was broken, many medium and small-scale private milk processors emerged on the scene. To realize the objectives of its ‘Milk Master Plan’, Uganda in 1998 established a Dairy Development Authority.

With the rapid rise of dairying among smallholder farmers, people began to question whether intensification was the best option for Ugandan farmers and whether these mixed dairy-crop production systems could be sustained.

To respond to these concerns, an in-depth study funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) was carried out between 2001 and 2005 by the Ugandan National Agriculture Research Organization (NARO), Makerere University, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences (DIAS).

The study, focusing on dairy economics and nutrient cycling, was carried out in three districts—Mbarara, in southwestern of Uganda; Masaka, in southern Uganda; and Jinja, in the southeast, which is much smaller than the other two districts but with the highest human population.

Results of the research study indicate that Uganda may be ‘outgrowing’ its successful, and ever popular, zero-grazing model. The results show that Uganda’s booming dairy farming is profitable regardless of the level of ‘intensification’ that farmers employ through use of feeds and other inputs. This finding suggests is that a high-input / highly intensified production system like Uganda’s popular and heavily policy-supported ‘zero grazing’ system is not necessarily the best option for all of the country’s small-scale crop-and-dairy farmers. Even the country’s most progressive dairy farmers, who have adopted zero-grazing en masse, may want to revisit their choice of production system to sustain their crop as well as dairy production over the long term.

Another finding of the study is that all of Uganda’s dairy farmers, whether intensive, semi-intensive or agro-pastoral, tend to under-use their animal manure as organic fertilizer for their crop fields. The study found the quality of the soils on Uganda’s mixed dairy-crop farms already below a level considered critical for crop production and continuing to drop. This deteriorating situation is fast eroding the long-term sustainability of these farming systems; if nothing is done, food insecurity and poverty in the country are likely to worsen. This is despite these farmers having adequate amounts of manure from their dairy cows to use as fertilizing soil amendments. It is likely that Uganda’s dairy farmers are under-using their livestock manure to fertilize their crop soils because they lack the labour needed to save, transport and apply the manure.

RESEARCH RECOMMENDATION:• This study revealed how surprisingly little research can yet tell us about the advantages and disadvantages of African farmers applying livestock manure as fertilizer on their mixed-production farms. We still lack, for example, sufficient comparative data on its effects on small-farm economics, nutrient cycling, practicability, and labour trade-offs.

• We don’t yet know enough about these matters to recommend best-practice manure management and application methods for Uganda’s many small dairy producers. We ought to. We need to research manure management in the context of Africa’s complex small farming systems so that we can offer the continent’s farmers recommendations validated by research.

Download the Research Report: http://hdl.handle.net/10568/257

Download the Research Brief: http://hdl.handle.net/10568/3808

Partners:

Ugandan National Agriculture Oragnization (NARO)
Makerere University
Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences (DIAS)

Further Information Contact:
Isabelle Baltenweck
Scientist
International Livestock Research Institute
Nairobi, Kenya
Email: i.baltenweck@cgiar.org
Telephone: +254 (20) 422 3000

Sarah Mubiru
National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO)
Kampala, Uganda
Email: smubiru@naro-ug.org

Rising milk and meat prices bring threats and opportunities

Posted on May 22, 2008 by ILRIComms

More equitable trade policies and substantial investments in agricultural research are urgently needed to help poor farmers seize new market opportunities.

Soaring food prices are dominating headlines. Rising prices represent threats for poor consumers as well as opportunities for poor milk and meat producers. The politics of food have grown complicated with almost as much speed as the rise in food prices. For many people who are poor, this has become an immediate crisis in their lives. It has suddenly become much more difficult for them to secure sufficient nutritious food.

ILRI’s director-general, Carlos Sere, says that governments should start focusing on the livestock sector to combat famine. He warned that the prices of livestock products will skyrocket if the prevailing conditions do not change.

But for some 800 million smallholder livestock farmers, this crisis could turn into an opportunity. Given the right support, they could earn more income from milk and meat, giving them more hope for the future.

The surge in prices of milk and meat, as well as rice, wheat and other cereal grains, is a global problem that will have the greatest impact on the world’s poor. Increasing milk and meat consumption are contributing to the spike in milk and meat prices. More people in the developing world are consuming larger quantities of animal source foods, while consumption in industrial countries is flattening out. The main driver in the increase in milk and meat prices has been the surge in demand for the products in China and India, where,fortunately, hundreds of millions of people are improving their diets as well as their incomes.

Many other factors are also contributing to the high prices. Rising global oil prices have had a negative effect on agricultural production, transportation and fertilizer costs; diversion of food grains and agricultural land to biofuels means more grain and land is being used for energy production and so less is available for food and recent bad weather, such as in Australia and New Zealand where severe droughts have hampered agricultural production.

Demand soars in Asia’s rapidly emerging economies

Over the last decade, consumption of livestock products in the emerging economies of China and India has grown dramatically. As incomes of the poor rise from USD2 a day to USD10 a day, people typically switch from a predominantly starchy diet to a more varied diet that includes more vegetables, milk, meat and eggs.

In 1985, Chinese consumers ate an average of 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of meat, equivalent to half a pound per person per fortnight. This has increased 40 per cent and today they eat an average of 50 kilograms (110 pounds) per year. This is equivalent to half a pound per week. However, many poor people are too poor to eat meat – or eat only tiny amounts. In contrast, people in the US are consuming over half a pound of meat per person every day. US per capita red meat and poultry consumption increased 8 per cent between 1980 and 2005, and now stands at 187.5 pounds per person.

Poor consumers will be hardest hit by rising prices

Higher meat and milk prices will have the greatest effect on world’s poorest 2 billion people, who live on less than USD2 a day. For most of the 800 million people who live on even less – USD1 a day – these price increases mean they will go hungry more often and their diets will not be as nutritious. Threats and opportunities exist and this depends on whether the poor are net consumers of these foodstuffs or net producers, interestingly more rural farmers are net consumers.

In some areas, the price of milk has doubled. This is bad news for consumers in high milk consuming countries such as Kenya and India. For example, the price of milk in northern India has risen from 17 to 24 rupees in last 2 years, an increase of 50 per cent. Meat prices, while not rising quite as dramatically, are expected to keep increasing in large part because the corresponding price jumps of cereal grains used to feed livestock raised in industrial systems.

The world’s growing population will keep up the pressure on demand. Some estimate that by 2030, global food demands will double from current consumption. This does not mean that the result is all bad news for the poor. Many poor farmers with a surplus to sell could benefit from rising prices. For these farmers and their families, the rising prices of milk and meat offer new opportunities to climb out of poverty as they produce and sell more livestock and livestock products. India is a great example. With its sprawling crowded cities and population of over one billion, tens of millions of people could use dairy products to get themselves and their families out of poverty. Recent food price rises are also encouraging poor farmers in northeast India to expand their production of small local pigs. The soaring price of grains along with higher transportation costs is reducing the supply of exotic pigs from northeastern Indian states and stimulating demand for local black pigs that do not need costly feeds and can thrive on locally produced fodder and kitchen wastes. With the right support and infrastructure, poor farmers could seize the new market opportunities and climb out of poverty.

Food grains for people or for livestock?

With soaring demands for milk and meat comes more livestock and this brings more stress on the environment. ILRI’s long-term research aims for sustainable animal agriculture that helps poor farmers intensify their production systems while conserving their land, water and other natural resources. Livestock farming in poor countries is radically different from the industrial, grain-fed, feedlot form of livestock production practiced throughout the West. In industrial systems, it takes 8 kilos of grain to produce 1 kilo of meat. The ruminant livestock of poor countries do not compete with people for their feed, as they eat mainly grass, forages and crop wastes.

Food grains for people or for biofuels?

Another complicating factor in efforts to increase food production is the diversion of grains and oilseeds to produce ethanol and biodiesel. The World Development Report 2008 estimates that filling up a typical 4×4 SUV with ethanol uses enough maize to feed a person for a year. The report also found that biofuels would raise the prices of grain globally. This will lead to higher rates of malnutrition among the poor in the world’s least developed countries. Governments are reassessing their biofuels policies as there is growing concern about grain and oil-based crops, such as maize, soybean and oil palm, being used for producing biofuels while millions of poor people simply do not have enough food to eat. Not all biofuels are bad for food production and support is gathering for biofuels produced from non-consumable products such as wastes from sugarcane and sweet sorghum residues.

Recommendations

There are no quick fixes for today’s soaring food prices and their negative impacts on poverty levels and food security and availability. An international commitment to fairer and more equitable trade, together with substantial investments in agricultural research and development, are urgently needed to cope with current and future demands.

Fairer and more equitable trade
A major concern is that the spike in commodity prices could pit the globe’s poorer South against the relatively wealthy North, elevating demands from the South for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies. It could also pit neighboring countries against each other. Trade barriers, production subsidies, import subsidies and export bans will all hit the poor the hardest.

ILRI recommends:

Develop smart subsidies for the most vulnerable groups. Put more funds into the hands of the poorest people to buy the food they need instead of resorting to protectionist trade barriers to keep prices low.

2. Cut subsidies to European and US farmers and open rich markets to poor suppliers.

3. Get higher prices into the hands of small-scale livestock producers to encourage them to produce more.

Increasing investments in agricultural development and growth
Food productivity increases are critical for meeting rising food demands. Without the necessary increases in productivity, the global food crisis will worsen, prices will continue to rise and it will be even more difficult for poor people to access nutritious food. It is critical that governments substantially increase their investments in agricultural research.

ILRI recommends:
1. Invest in rural market transport and infrastructure to ensure food supply from rural producers, especially of perishable, high value products, including livestock products.

2. Use options identified by scientific research to refine the integration of crops and livestock so as to raise smallholder productivity.

3. Exploit the fact that the new prices now make many livestock technologies developed over the last 30 years financially feasible.

Sweet sorghum: Utilizing every ‘drop’

Posted on August 22, 2007 by ILRIComms

Poor livestock keepers in the drylands point to feed shortages as one of their biggest animal production constraints. Research in India is demonstrating that sweet sorghum's traditional use as a dual-purpose food and feed crop and its modern day use as a bio-fuel need not be mutually exclusive

Sweet sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) is well adapted to the semi-arid regions of the tropics. One of its main advantages is that it is very water-use efficient It has long been used by farmers as a multi-purpose crop from which they extract grain for human consumption and stover for livestock feed. Today, sweet sorghum is becoming increasingly used in industrial bio-fuel production in India. It is one of the most efficient dryland crops to convert atmospheric CO2 into sugar and is therefore a viable alternative for the production of ethanol.

Sweet sorghum’s role in India’s bio-fuel plans
‘All countries, including India, are grappling with the problem of meeting the ever-increasing demand for fuel within the constraints of international commitments, legal requirements, environmental concerns and limited resources. In this connection fuels of biological origin have drawn a great deal of attention during the last two decades.

‘India wishes to consider the use of bio-diesel and ethanol for blending with petro-diesel and petrol. Oil provides energy for 95% of transportation and the demand for transport fuel continues to rise. The extract from the third assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that global oil demand will rise by 1.68% from 75 million barrels per day (mb/d) in the year 2002 to 120 mb/d in 2030. Energy input in agriculture is also increasing. Part of this energy should come from bio-based fuel, which is short term renewable.
‘Ethanol is used as a fuel or as an oxygenate to gasoline. In India, raw material used for producing ethanol varies from sugar, cereals (sweet sorghum), sugar beet, and molasses. Brazil uses ethanol as 100% fuel in about 20% of vehicles. Use of a 5% ethanol gasoline blend is already approved by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and is in a progressive state of implementation in India.’

Excerpted from: ‘Development of Value Chain for Bio-fuel in India’, National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP). NAIP website: http://www.naip.icar.org.in

Win-win situation
Increasing industrial usage of sweet sorghum for ethanol production does, on one hand, provide important income for dryland farmers, but it can also divert biomass away from livestock, thus adding to the feed scarcity problem being faced by livestock keepers. However, scientists are demonstrating that full use of all parts of the sweet sorghum plant can meet both industrial and livestock feed needs.
Collaborative work between the International Crop Research Center for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the Rusni Distillery in Sanga Reddy Medak District, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research’s National Research Center for Sorghum (NRCS), in Hyderabad, and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is demonstrating the feasibility of manufacturing marketable sweet sorghum feed blocks using the stripped leaves and the crushed stalks (bagasse) remaining after juice extraction for ethanol. A bagasse-based feed block has been manufactured in collaboration with Miracle Fodder and Feeds in Hyderabad and is currently being tested with large and small ruminants with very promising results.
Full utilization of crops and their by-products in the balanced production of food, feed and industrial products is likely to become increasingly important in developing countries. Total utilization of all parts of the sweet sorghum plant for use in the manufacturing and food industries would help compensate for fodder loss and provide an additional source of income for farmers.

Value-added products from by-products

Surveys of fodder markets in Hyderabad showed that stover from ordinary grain sorghum is widely traded as livestock fodder. This stover is sourced from several Indian States, transported over distances of more than 350 km and fetches retail prices that are about half the value of the sorghum grain. Higher quality stover fetches premium prices ranging from 3.1 to 3.9 Indian rupees per kilogram of dry stover.
The fodder quality of feed blocks made from sweet sorghum leaf strippings and bagasse is similar to premium stover made from grain sorghum. Scientists estimate that this feed could fetch prices of 6 rupees per kg and more. The manufacturing of feed blocks could therefore offer attractive additional income along a sweet sorghum utilization chain. The feed blocks could be made more nutritious by adding sorghum grain distillery by-products—where the grain is used for biofuel production—and/or by targeted fortification with other supplements. The end product would be an attractive sweet sorghum by-product based feed block of good quality and with a high density, making

Germany helps Africa fight bird flu by investing in its people

Posted on August 17, 2007 by ILRIComms

Substantial GTZ support provided to ILRI and AU-IBAR has provided 80 laboratory staff in 37 African countries with specialized knowledge in rapid detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza

This program of the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) for early detection of bird flu in Africa did more than train people in advanced techniques for diagnosing a new disease. It invested in people, connecting them in a ‘who’s who’ of skilled African laboratory staff as well as a handful of international bird flu experts focusing on Africa. It united these laboratory experts in a common cause.

As Carola von Morstein, coordinator of the GTZ Task Force on Avian Influenza, puts it, ‘This—remarkably the first regional training in Africa to diagnose avian influenza—is helping to improve transparency, communication and information exchange in bird flu campaigns. We will publish in print and on the web a training manual so we can widely share the lessons learned in this training. One of those lessons is the great advantage to be gained in coordinating work to prevent and control bird flu across the continent.’

Staff at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Africa Union’s Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR), who organized the series of intensive training courses conducted over the last year across the continent, are interested in continuing their work with GTZ to sustain this cooperation among agricultural, veterinary and medical experts. Such inter-sector cooperation in disease control is regrettably unusual in all countries but particularly so in those lacking resources to bring together experts from different ministries and disciplines.

ILRI’s research director John McDermott is excited about this cooperative aspect of the project. ‘The network of African veterinary and human diagnosticians created by this training over the past year has great potential. It has fostered “diagnostic champions” in Africa who are being consulted by their colleagues. The benefits of this will go beyond avian influenza to other important infectious diseases of both people and animals.’

ILRI’s director general Carlos Seré also sees opportunity to build on the momentum that has been created. ‘We’re interested to explore with others how this regional emergency training might be transformed into long-term indigenous capacity-building for better control of infectious diseases in Africa.’

Other partners involved in organizing the training courses or providing training materials were the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Animal Health Organization (OIE), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the U.S.-based Centres for Disease Control (CDC). ILRI and AU-IBAR worked closely together to conduct a basic 10-day training course that they held in three countries: Cameroon, Kenya and Senegal. They drew trainers from OIE/FAO/WHO avian influenza reference laboratories, ILRI, AU-IBAR, CDC-Kenya, the Institut Pasteur, the Centre Pasteur and African universities and research organizations.

These courses revealed that most African countries have the capacity to collect samples of bird flu virus, including the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus, and ship these to designated laboratories for analyses. Some of these labs can also perform basic serological tests for bird flu virus. But few of them are equipped with the advanced diagnostic tests in molecular diagnosis and virology or with the BL3 facility (a laboratory built to a secure biosafety level 3) needed to handle the deadly live H5N1 virus. ILRI and AU-IBAR staff organizing the training courses targeted the few labs that did have these facilities to serve as regional reference laboratories and provided 20 of their staff with two advanced training courses (one in English, the other in French) conducted at South Africa’s ARC-Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute (OVI), in Pretoria, which is equipped with all the facilities needed for diagnosis of avian influenza. (OVI had previously trained staff in southern African countries.)

Funding for this project was provided by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by GTZ within its ‘Poverty Reduction in Rural Areas’ project. The latter works to boost—in a sustained manner—the capacity of developing countries to prepare for and respond to outbreaks of bird flu. With uncommon foresight, this German project further helps countries implement preventive measures that help their farming communities maintain their livestock, the mainstay of livelihoods of the rural poor. Among the farm animals at risk from zoonotic diseases and conventional programs implemented to control them are many local poultry breeds kept by the poorest of the poor.

Carola von Morstein, leader of the GTZ Task Force conducting this pro-poor work fighting avian and human influenza, visited Nairobi this week to consult with ILRI and AU-IBAR directors and scientists who organized the training and tailored the English and French courses to suit African circumstances.

In early July, the first follow-up training took place in three veterinary laboratories in Ghana. Staffs of the laboratories in Accra, Pong Tamale and Kumasi were trained by the German Friedrich-Löffler-Institute (FLI). This Federal Research Institute for Animal Health has a Task Force for Epidemiology. GTZ and FLI are together providing training to affected countries such as Ghana. GTZ also procured for these laboratories equipment, such as Quick Tests Influenza Kits, V-bottomed Microtest-Plates and Pipettes, to ensure that the country is equipped for diagnosis of bird flu.

For more information about this GTZ project, email the GTZ task team:
carola.morstein-von@gtz.de> or
kerstin.schoell@gtz.de

or the Rene Bessin at AU-IBAR:
rene.bessin@au-ibar.org

or Duncan Mwangi or Roger Pellé at ILRI:
d.mwangi@cgiar.org and r.pelle@cgiar.org

Advancing agricultural research in Africa

Posted on July 20, 2007 by ILRIComms

Under the theme of 'productivity and competitiveness of African agriculture in a global economy', the 4th Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) General Assembly identified key resolutions for stakeholders to action over the next three years.

‘The fourth FARA General Assembly, with its large, diverse and vigorous participation, provided a fertile source of information and knowledge on the opportunities and problems currently facing African Agriculture’ said the South African Minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs, Ms Lulama Xingwana.

The General Assembly took place in Johannesburg, South Africa on 10–16 June 2007 and drew together over 670 delegates including ministers and deputy ministers of agriculture and development partners from all over Africa, together with international collaborating institutions.

The General Assembly, which coincided with the Africa Agriculture Science Week and South Africa Day, closed with a number of key resolutions for advancing agricultural research in Africa.

FARA General Assembly key resolutions included:

Developing adequate veterinary capacity and livestock disease surveillance, epidemiological and response systems and interlinking them with human disease counterparts to enable nations to cope with disease outbreaks, especially zoonotic diseases, and to comply with international health and safety standards
Promotion of intra-African trade in food staples and international trade in high-value products by creating commercial environments that will engage both the private and public sectors, to produce tools to help smallholders invest in change and manage risks
Development of endogenous innovation capacity, including the ability to identify and adapt potential foreign innovations to maximize the impact of agricultural research and development, by providing policy makers with evidence-based pragmatic options, preferably developed jointly by researchers and policy makers
Mainstreaming indigenous science into agricultural research and development and making the necessary personal and institutional adjustments that are required to enable communication and joint learning between practitioners of the different sciences
Recognizing sub-Saharan and North African civil society organizations, support and strengthen them to fulfill their missions
Advocating and facilitating the strengthening of research and management, as well as strengthening agricultural sciences
Recognizing research on peri-urban agriculture as a mainstream activity, but one that requires new approaches to research

According to the FARA executive secretary Monty Jones, ‘this year’s general assembly was undoubtedly the most successful to date and stakeholders were thrilled with the resolutions that were presented.’

An article in this month’s New Agriculturist (UK) provides a selection of participants’ viewpoints on ways forward including strengthening support systems, the role of institutions and partnerships and ensuring market orientation and access.

Points of view: Transforming agriculture in Africa. New Agriculturist (UK). July 2007

Further information about the FARA General Assembly resolutions is available on the FARA Africa website at http://www.fara-africa.org

ILRI hosts consultations on World Development Report 2008

Posted on November 13, 2006 by ILRIComms

ILRI's director general opens a two-day consultation on the World Development Report 2008.

The theme of the 2008 World Development Report is Agriculture for Development. ILRI and the World Bank are hosting a two-day consultation, starting 13 November 2006, to inform this flagship policy publication, by discussing key issues and challenges that confront agriculture and how it can be the real engine for development.

The World Development Report (WDR) is the annual flagship development policy publication of the World Bank which serves as an invaluable guide to the economic, social and environmental state of the world today and is widely read by the broader development community. As the last WDR dedicated to agriculture was produced over two decades ago (WDR 1982), the 2008 report offers a major opportunity to provide new thinking on agriculture for development. The 2008 report seeks to assess where, when and how agriculture can be effective instruments for economic development, especially development that favours the poor.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is one of many players in this consultative process that will set the stage for World Development Report 2008. ILRI and the World Bank are hosting a two-day consultation at the ILRI campus in Nairobi, Kenya (13-14 November 2006). The WDR 2008 aims to explore pathways out of rural poverty and how to make these pathways more effective through rational public policies directed to agriculture. Consultation participants include academics, researchers, development practitioners, policy-and decision-makers, donors organizations, government, NGOs and the private sector.

ILRI’s role in agriculture for development
World demand for food is expected to double within the next 50 years, while the natural resources that sustain agriculture will become increasingly scarce, degraded and vulnerable to the effects of the climate change. The potential of livestock to reduce poverty is big. Livestock contributes to livelihoods of more than two-thirds of the world’s rural poor, and it can be an important lever for reducing poverty and boosting the economy in developing countries, a priority of WDR 2008.

In 2002, ILRI revised its strategy to focus its livestock research efforts on poverty reduction. ILRI and its partners maintain strength in the mixed crop-livestock system practised by poor livestock keepers. In view of an ongoing using increase in demand for livestock products in developing world, a shift to more work with peri-urban and landless systems is proposed.

Livestock—A Pathway out of Poverty: ILRI’s Strategy to 2010

World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development

Growth in agriculture makes a disproportionately positive contribution to reducing poverty. More than half of the population in developing countries lives in rural areas, where poverty is most extreme. By illuminating the links between agriculture, economic growth, and poverty reduction, this report offers a timely and nuanced assessment of how and where agriculture can best foster development.
– François Bourguignon, Sr. Vice President, Chief Economist, The World Bank

The World Bank recognizes that ‘a reconsideration of agriculture’s role in development has been long overdue. Developing-country agriculture is caught up in the far-reaching changes brought by globalization, the advent of highly sophisticated and integrated supply chains, innovation in information technology and biosciences, and broad institutional changes—especially in the role of the state and in modes of governance and organization.’

Publication of WDR 2008 is expected in September 2007. In the meantime, the WDR 2008 website will contain the report outline, various drafts, and information on the consultations.
Detailed information about World Development Report 2008 and the team preparing it are available at the link below:

World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Developement

Click here to view the presentation given by ILRI's director general Dr. Carlos Seré, during the opening of the two-day consultation.

African animal feeds: Two decades of research now freely available on the web

Posted on October 26, 2006 by ILRIComms

The most comprehensive and authoritative web-based resource on the nutritional values of livestock feeds in African agriculture has just been launched.

This month sees the launch of the ‘Sub-Saharan Africa Feed Information System’. This new web-based resource provides free access to a comprehensive database providing the nutritional values of feedstuffs used by small-scale farmers in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. SSA Feeds provides data on 14,571 samples of 459 livestock feeds, including herbaceous forages, fodder trees and shrubs, cereals and legumes, roots and tubers, other food crops, concentrate feeds and agro-industrial by-products, mineral supplements and other less common feeds. These feeds were analyzed in the animal nutrition laboratories of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the information made available through an initiative of the Systemwide Livestock Programme (SLP) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

SSA Feeds: Authoritative, comprehensive and freely available online
This unique resource is the culmination of 26 years of extensive research and data collection. The newly launched product makes available twelve years of initial data collection that started in 1981. This resource is now being updated with thousands of additional entries encompassing 14 years of subsequent research. This makes SSA Feeds the Web’s most comprehensive and authoritative resource on the nutritional values of livestock feeds in African agriculture.

Salvador Fernández-Rivera, a Mexican livestock nutritionist based at ILRI’s principal campus in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, who coordinates SSA Feeds, is excited. ‘This is the first time that we have pulled together more than two decades of our research on animal feeds. SSA Feeds will be an invaluable resource for extension and development agents as well as livestock researchers. SSA Feeds will help them design optimal and scientifically based feeding systems for meat, dairy and draft animals. Better nourished and healthier livestock will enable Africa’s small-scale farmers improve their food and economic security.’

What the experts have to say about SSA Feeds
SSA Feeds was developed in conjunction with world experts in animal nutrition. These experts are already using the new resource and benefiting from having access to such depth and breadth of critical information on African animal feeds.

Adugna Tolera, an expert in animal nutrition and associate professor at the University of Hawassa, Ethiopia, advises his country’s feedlot industry on use of local feed resources.

SSA Feeds is an important and rich source of information on the nutritive value of a wide range of sub-Saharan African feed resources. It is user-friendly for searching and summarizing the data on a given feed and enables the user to see the average value as well as the variability (range and standard deviation).

It would be useful if the database were further enriched by including similar data accumulated in many of the national agricultural research systems in this region of Africa.

—Dr Adugna Tolera

Hank Fitzhugh, former director general of ILRI and its Addis Ababa-based predecessor, the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA), is an animal geneticist and livestock production systems specialist. He is leading a project to improve meat and livestock exports from Ethiopia. The project, which is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Texas A&M University, will fund the upgrading of the SSA Feeds database.

SSA Feeds demonstrates impacts from research.

This important database moves over 20 years of research off the shelf and into use by African livestock producers responding to the ‘livestock revolution—the huge increase in demand for meat and milk by consumers in developing countries.

— Dr Hank Fitzhugh

David Hutcheson is a worldwide expert on beef cattle nutrition, involved in projects in several countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. With a long and distinguished career in the university system and US beef industry, he also served on the Committee of the National Research Council (NRC) of the United States that established the current “Nutritional Requirements of Beef Cattle".

I have used SSA Feeds to develop a “Best Cost” ration concept for Ethiopia Feedlots. The database is user friendly and easily adapted to the “Best Cost” Excel program. The arrangement of the nutrient analyses and summary statistics allow for easy manipulation and export of the data into different programs, for applications in both research and producer situations.

— Dr David Hutcheson

Click on the graphic to visit the SSA Feeds website

World’s most diverse forage collection comes under new treaty

Posted on October 17, 2006 by ILRIComms

On Monday 16 October 2006, world leaders in agricultural research signed agreements that guarantee long-term access to some of the world's most important collections of agricultural biodiversity.

In a ceremony that took place on World Food Day, 11 centres belonging to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) placed all their ex-situ genebank collections under the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, now ratified by 105 countries.

A livestock forage genebank maintained by one of these CGIAR centres, the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), conserves more than 18 thousand accessions of forages from over 1000 species. This is one of the most diverse collections of forage grasses, legumes and fodder tree species held in any genebank in the world and includes the world’s major collection of African grasses and tropical highland forages. In 1994, the germplasm collection held by ILRI was placed in trust under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as part of their international network of ex situ collections. Now, 12 years later, this trust collection comes under the purview of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture following the 16 October 2006 landmark agreement between CGIAR Centers and the governing body of the treaty.

As part of its commitment to maintaining the collection as a global public good, ILRI claims no ownership nor seeks any intellectual property rights over the germplasm and related information. Rather, ILRI conserves its diverse forage collection to make it and relevant information freely available to scientists and the national agricultural research systems of developing and other countries.

ILRI maintains both an active and base genebank at its site in Addis Ababa.

Active and base genebanks

The active genebank is used for current research and distribution of seeds. Seeds are dried in a dehumidified drying room and packed in laminated aluminium foil bags for storage in the active genebank at 8°C. All seeds in the active collection are freely available in small quantities to bona-fide forage research workers and distributed both directly and through networks.

The base genebank is used for long-term security storage of original germplasm collections. The base genebank acts as a repository of materials that have been reasonably characterized and which may or may not have current interest or use by plant breeders. Collected materials are preserved until such time as there are enough resources available for them to be characterized and evaluated. Materials are stored in the base genebank at -20°C.

Forage diversity activities at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

Forage diversity as a global public good

ILRI and the other centres of the CGIAR hold more than 600,000 samples of crop-plant diversity. This includes wild relatives and more than half of the global total of farmer-created varieties, which are such a rich source of sought-after characteristics, for example to meet the challenge of climate change.
‘This really is an investment in food security,’ said Emile Frison, Director General of International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI), which is responsible for the world’s banana collection. ‘The genetic diversity created in the past by farmers and researchers is the foundation of improvements to meet the challenges of the future.”’

’Unless we can meet those challenges,’ Frison added, ‘there will be no food security.’
Mahmoud Solh, Director General of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), said that the new agreements would ‘allow breeders and other researchers to tap the collections for solutions to the most pressing problems, such as drought, desertification, and food and nutritional security.’

Centre directors ‘warmly welcome’ the agreements and ‘commit themselves to supporting and implementing the Treaty’. A statement issued by the Alliance of CGIAR Centres sets out the centres’ common understanding of certain provisions of the agreements and indicates some actions that the centres will be taking to implement them.

Click here to view the statement of the CGIAR centres regarding implementation of the agreements between the centres and the governing body of the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.

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