Malnutrition is defined as the insufficient, excessive or imbalanced consumption of nutrients. Poor nutrition and calorie deficiencies cause nearly one in three people to die prematurely or have disabilities, according to the World Health Organisation.  Malnutrition constitutes a global ‘silent emergency’, killing millions every year and sapping the long-term economic vitality of nations.

Food fortification is the practice of adding micronutrients to foods to ensure that minimum dietary requirements are met. The use of biotechnological methods involves inserting a gene with codes for the nutrients into the seed.  This seed is then bred with a high yield quality crop, resulting in the production of crops rich in micronutrients. Agricultural biotechnology methods, and in specific genetic modification, represent therefore a very valuable, complementary strategy for the development of more nutritious crops.

The ABS project has the potential to improve the health of 300 million people by increasing sorghum’s nutritional quality. Sorghum is the fifth most important cereal crop and the main dietary staple for more than 500 million people across the entire developing world. It is the only viable food grain for many of the world’s most food insecure people, and what’s more sorghum is uniquely adapted to Africa’s climate, being both drought resistant and able to withstand periods of water-logging. The potential for sorghum to be the driver of economic development in Africa is enormous.

So far, six successful sets of field trials of nutritionally enhanced sorghum have been conducted in the United States where the sorghum has proven stable and effective over several generations. Greenhouse trials of nutritionally sorghum have been undertaken in South Africa and Kenya. Applications for field trials are in the process of approval in Kenya and Nigeria.

Additionally to the potential health benefits, the ABS project also serves as a model of creative partnerships, bringing together public and private, South / South and North / South organisations. Each partner brings to the table their own particular strengths and helps to create an enabling environment for the use of ABS in Africa, that can be altered and fixed according to the local conditions, cultures and issues encountered in different areas. From Pioneer Hi-Bred, a DuPont business that provided the initial technologies for the project, to the national research institutes, technology organisations, policy institutions and universities involved, the project is a successful consortium whose size and diversity mirrors the complexities and extent of the challenges that Africa faces.

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Anuj Shah – A to Z Textile Mills Ltd

For almost a decade, A to Z textiles has been involved in an innovative partnership with Sumitomo to develop long-lasting insecticidal mosquito nets. Building on the experience with lessons learned through this first partnership, A to Z is now working to build a new partnership to apply a similar concept to help farmers in their fight against pests. The new venture will focus on the development of a bioactive net (i.e. insecticidal), which can be used to cover crops and protect them from pest damage.

The original mosquito net, a permethrin insecticide-impregnated net called Olyset Net, started out as a collaboration between two French institutes CIRAD and IRD, and the international R&D company Sumitomo Chemical.  It is the first ever to receive a full recommendation from the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the fight against malaria.

The technology behind the Olyset Net has proven extremely successful, showing that nets can retain their properties over long periods of time and provide effective protection. The A to Z team hopes to apply a similar method to create a cost-effective and sage method for protecting crops against major mite species and insects. Tests on cabbage crops in Benin found that using an insecticide-treated net once every three nights was more than twice as effective on the crop yield as the application of insecticides. This increased the value of their crop by an estimated 45%.

When used correctly, these agricultural nets should be able to last for five years (compared to the six-month lifespan of standard sprayed nets) and they leave no residue either on the plants or on the people who apply them. The cost of using the net is less than conventional pesticide use and requires fewer trips to market for purchase.

The success of this scheme will rely on the partnership upon which it is developed. Combining the tools of research institutions, the production capacities of local manufacturers, and the policy support and networks of public bodies, agricultural partnerships can help ensure hat they world’s farmers continue to be empowered to produce enough to feed the world sustainably.

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Marco Ferroni – Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture

The Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA) in 2009 developed a two-year public-private partnership between Syngenta and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) to rapidly identify and map genetic markers for use in wheat resistance breeding against Ug99 stem rust, a fungal disease which can cause devastating crop losses.

The project, funded by the Foundation, will combine Syngenta’s plant genetic profiling expertise with the strengths of CIMMYT’s extensive field research to develop a genetic map of wheat stem rust resistance. This will culminate in the development of wheat varieties that can better resist the disease. The results from this project will contribute directly to the global efforts to combat stem rust, which are coordinated by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative coordinated by Cornell University. The marker data arising from the research will be published.

This important collaboration brings together complementary skills and addresses a pressing need of farmers in many developing countries.  Ug99 stem rust, which first emerged in Uganda in 1999, is caused by the fungus Puccinia graminis.  It is currently spreading across Africa, Asia and the Middle East with potential to spread further, posing a serious risk to wheat, the world’s third most important food crop.

Along with rice, wheat is a major food crop and is crucial for global food security – it provides 500 kilocalories of food energy per capita per day in China and India, and can provide up to 50 percent of daily calorie uptake in Central and West Asia or North African countries. Wheat yields need to rise 1.6 percent each year to reach required global production levels by 2020, yet investments in wheat technology have lagged far behind those for other cereals.

The scientific objectives of this project are:

1) To identify, characterize and map Durable Plant Resistance Quantitative Trait Loci conferring tolerance to stem rust resistance in wheat.

2) To identify molecular markers flanking the chromosomal regions containing these durable genes to be subsequently used in marker assisted trait selection.

3) To characterise the Sr2 gene complex and understand how this complex of gene(s) interacts with other important genes in wheat.

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Gavin Onley

The Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund (AECF) is a US$50-100 million fund that supports private sector investment benefitting the rural poor in Africa. AECF is hosted by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and is funded by some of the biggest names in development finance.

A Challenge Fund is a mechanism for allocating and disbursing public funds efficiently and fairly. Organizations are invited to bid for scarce resources, not unlike a tender, but what counts is the quality of the response, not price.  The intention is to get funds to the organisations that truly need them and can use them effectively to realise the broader aims of public policy; and to do this transparently. In the case of AECF the overall policy aim is to promote new ideas that will lead to growth in the rural economies of Africa and creating new opportunities for systemic change in the markets that serve them. The challenge is to identify business ideas with a positive impact on the rural poor through increased incomes, employment, productivity and/or reduced costs. 

The Research Into Business (RIB) window is a special fund of the AECF that is open to business ideas based on the products of agricultural research.  The RIB Funding Window page of the AECF site provides an on-line application form, and guides to completing it. Applicants must also show how the concept will impact on the livelihoods of people in rural Africa. Proposals that are considered to have the greatest positive impact on the rural poor in Africa are invited to present a detailed business plan. Applicants’ Co-investment companies must invest an amount equal to, or greater than, the total funds requested from the AECF.

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Michael Hermann – Crops for the Future

The need for agricultural research and development to concentrate resources on priorities is beyond dispute. However, the nearly exclusive focus on research and development efforts on staples has lead to an over-reliance on ever fewer food crops, with only 15 species providing 90% of the world’s food energy intake. The potential for the vast diversity of non-commodity crops to contribute to greater agricultural sustainability, more diversified and better nutrition as well as rural income remains largely unappreciated and unexplored.

Policies concerned with agriculture, conservation, seed systems and trade are generally unfavourable to the wider use of NUS (neglected and underutilized species). Yet some such species have seen in recent years increased demand from niche markets.  In several cases new product development, notably for convenience uses, has helped remove demand constraints previously limiting NUS-based market development, particularly in urban contexts. Much of this encouraging development has been driven by the private sector: small and big companies and notably entrepreneurial farmers. But support to NUS-based value chains from public sector actors has been sporadic and inconsistent.

Public-private-partnerships are at their best where governments and donors focus their attention on creating enabling regulatory frameworks, and research institutions provide the scientific underpinnings of good policy making. Regulatory frameworks that facilitate the functioning of NUS value chains and generate benefits for the poor relate inter alia to effective ex situ conservation, strengthened informal seed systems, authoritative food safety assessments, improved trade policies and the IPR protection of farmer products. More research is needed to substantiate product properties, as are efforts to enhance the public awareness of the benefits of greater use of neglected agricultural biodiversity and thus stimulate the demand for its products.

- Crops for the Future is an organisation dedicated to the promotion of neglected and underutilised plant species whose activities involve increasing the knowledge base for underutilised crops, identifying and advocating necessary policy changes to promote their use and fostering capacity building.

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Launched recently in February 2010, IMAS is a project led by CIMMYT, a not-for-profit research centre working to improve maize and wheat crops, and is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID. Partners include the DuPont business Pioneer Hi-Bred, the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) of South Africa and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), who will all bring their expertise to help address the critical problem of increasing yields in poor soils.

The principal constraints on African maize yields are low soil fertility and low use of chemical fertilizers. Fertilizer use is constrained by high prices of fertilizers, which can be up to five times those in the USA. For the little fertilizer that is used, often no more than half of it is captured by the crop, the rest being leached into the soil and lost.

The new varieties will allow farmers to grow more crops, of better quality, but without having to purchase and use more fertilizer. Those developing the new varieties will be using a range of innovation methods to produce the new IMAS products, the first of which will be available to farmers within the next four years.

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In 2008, CamFAD (the Cambodia Farmers’ Association Federation for Agricultural Development) started an initiative to help adapt the sector to climate change impacts. The organisation formulated a new sustainable farming practice called ‘System of Rice Intensification’ (SRI) which helps smallholder farmers increase their yields by following the principle of ‘transplanting young seedlings singly and widely spaced’, a technique that has the advantage of requiring less seeds and minimum irrigation.

CamFAD set up training workshops to promote this practice to farmers that, through a ‘learning-by-doing’ approach, allowed them to witness for themselves the benefits of the practice. Through farmer-to-farmer training, the SRI practice led to a widespread implementation of the new system, which has optimized rice production for smallholder farmers. Today, more than 17,000 farmers in Cambodia are using elements of SRI in their farming.

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In drought conditions, plants begin to produce more of this hormone, which creates a number of changes to their physical structure. Their seeds lie dormant in the ground in order to wait out the dry period.  They slow their growth in order to conserve energy.  Tiny pores in their leaves are closed in order to prevent water from being lost.

Understanding how abscisic acid works in plants can help scientists replicate this phenomenon for farmers whose crops are suffering from drought conditions.  R&D such as this can help agricultural producers adapt to the impacts of climate change.

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The Gates Foundation has provided this video to show how one of their grantees’ low-cost treadle pumps are helping Indian farmers access irrigated water for their crops.

These water pumps are supplied by International Development Enterprises (IDE).  They are designed to be cost-effective and low-maintenance, with only one part needed to be changed each year at a cost of 20 U.S. cents. Farmers simply dig a bore hole, insert a plastic tube into the hole and then connect the pump to this tube.  Farmers then operate the pump using their leg muscles, and they can even pump extra water into adjacent reservoirs for on-going regulated use.

Only one in three farmers currently has access to irrigation in India.  Accessing this technology helps smallholder farmers make more long-term investments, such as improved seeds and fertilizers, for their fields.  Farmers might even be able to begin growing more lucrative cash crops such as fruits or vegetables.

In an innovative promotional campaign, IDE shares this knowledge with farmers by bringing movie screens into rural communities in the back of a van.  Farmers are incentivised to watch a short presentation about the treadle water pumps by the promise of a free movie feature which is aired after the presentation finishes.

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The tool can be applied to a variety of crops, including corn (maize), cotton, soybeans, and wheat.  It helps farmers to assess their land use, energy use, water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and soil loss per unit of output vis-a-vis state or national averages.

This calculator is part of an ongoing project helping to promote sustainability throughout the agricultural supply chain.  Further metrics are being developed for later versions including biodiversity, water quality, and socioeconomic trends.

The ‘Field to Market’ team is also looking for feedback from farmers so check it out here.

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