2 research projects on improving food security to be launched

In a move aimed at improving food security, city-based ICRISAT along with other organisations will undertake two major research programmes to identify ways to increase food production and formulate policies.

The Fund Council of CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research), the world’s largest international agriculture research coalition, had approved two 10-year research programmes aimed at improving food, nutrition and income security of billions of poor in dry-land tropics of the world, a senior official of Icrisat said.

The CGIAR research programmes on grain legumes and dry-land cereals, led by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, have a combined three-year budget of $223.4 million.

“The two global research-for-development collaborations are vital in sustainably increasing production of grain legumes and dryland cereals, improving the nutrition of the poor. It also helps identify policies and institutions necessary for small holder farmers in rural communities, particularly women, to access markets and improve their livelihoods,” the official told PTI.

The grain legumes programme aims to benefit 300 million small holder farm households from an average 20 per cent yield increase by the end of its first 10-year cycle, with a projected $4.5 billion savings as cumulative benefits of increased food production and nitrogen fertiliser saved, the official explained.

This programme focuses on improving chickpea, common bean, cowpea, groundnut, faba bean, lentil, pigeon pea and soyabean crops grown by poor families in five regions—South and Southeast Asia, Western and Central Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Western Asia as well as North Africa.

Legumes are the cheapest option to improve nutrition of poor people, who rely on inexpensive but nutritionally imbalanced starchy diets. Meanwhile, dryland cereals are often the only possible crops in harsh dry-land environment where more than a billion of the earth’s poorest inhabitants live.

The dry-land cereals programme focuses on millets, sorghum, and barley. Demand for these crops will increase by nearly 50 per cent by 2020 as compared to the beginning of the millennium.

According to the information available with Icrisat, about 70-80 per cent of the grain produced is consumed by the poor as food, with the remainder used for feed and other non-food uses. The challenge is to raise the productivity of these crops to meet the growing demand, while retaining or even increasing their resilience against stresses.

In 10 years, this program targets a sustainable 16 per cent increase in dry-land 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 small holder households — 34.0 million total beneficiaries in target regions, ICRISAT said.