By IANS,
Hyderabad : International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, based at Patancheru near here, will lead two international programmes to boost food, nutrition and income security of the poor people in dryland areas, it was announced Tuesday
The fund council of Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the world’s largest international agriculture research coalition, recently approved two ten-year research programmes aimed at improving the food, nutrition and income security of billions of poor in the dryland tropics of the world.
“The two global research-for-development collaborations are vital in sustainably increasing production of grain legumes and dryland cereals, improving the poor’s nutrition, and identifying policies and institutions necessary for smallholder farmers in rural communities, particularly women, to access markets and improve their livelihoods,” said ICRISAT director general William Dar.
The CGIAR research programmes on grain legumes have a combined three-year budget of $223.4 million, and are part of CGIAR’s effort to contribute in reducing world hunger, malnutrition and poverty while decreasing the environmental footprint of agriculture.
Legumes are the cheapest option to improve nutrition of poor people who rely on inexpensive but nutritionally-imbalanced starchy diets. Dryland cereals are often the only possible crops in harsh dryland environments where more than a billion of the Earth’s poorest inhabitants live.
The grain legumes programme aims to benefit 300 million smallholder farm households from an average 20 percent yield increase by the end of its first 10-year cycle, with a projected $4.5 billion savings as cumulative benefits.
This programme focuses on improving chickpea, common bean, cowpea, groundnut, faba bean, lentil, pigeonpea and soybean crops grown by poor families in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
The dryland cereals program focuses on millets, sorghum, and barley. Demand for these crops will increase by nearly 50 percent by 2020 compared to the beginning of the millennium. About 70-80 percent of the grain produced is consumed by the poor as food, with the remainder used for feed and other non-food uses.
In 10 years, this programme targets a sustainable 16 percent increase in dryland cereal farm-level production on at least 11.8 million hectares in Africa and Asia. Improved technologies will also be made available to 5.8 million smallholder households — 34 million total beneficiaries in target regions.