Nairobi — The state of food and nutrition security in the Global South masks the great strides and investments made to increase agricultural yields to feed a rapidly growing population. As discussions deepen at the ongoing CGIAR Science Week, plenary discussions on Wednesday (April 9) explored transformative strategies and innovations driving agricultural resilience across Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
UN statistics show one in five people in Africa sleep hungry. To halt and reverse the pace of rising hunger on the continent, the African Union (AU) has adopted a new agricultural development strategy that will see the continent increase its agrifood output by 45 percent by 2035 and transform its agri-food systems as part of its new plan to become food secure in a decade.
The AU earlier this year adopted the 10-year Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Strategy and Action Plan and the Kampala CAADP Declaration on Building Resilient and Sustainable Agrifood Systems in Africa, which will be implemented from 2026 to 2035.
“On aligning Kenya’s agricultural agenda with the AU’s strategy and action plan, as the national agricultural research organization that supports farmers in this part of the world, we are aligned by developing technologies, innovations, and marginal practices that support our farmers to increase productivity and improve their resilience,” said Dr. Eliud Kiplimo Kireger, the Director General and Chief Executive Officer of Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO). “Due to the effects of climate change, in the last few years, our focus has been to develop drought-resilient crops.”
“Also, with climate change, we have new emerging pests and diseases,” Kireger explained, adding that a lot of work done had become obsolete because of climatic changes. “Areas that were dry are (now) drier and areas that were of high potential are flooded.”
Putting Technology into Farmers’ Hands
In addition to these challenges, farmers also face difficulties accessing technology–although developed, the technologies are still in the hands of scientists and institutions and haven’t been shared with the farmers.
“So, how do we get these technologies to the farmers to increase their productivity? Kireger asked, adding that where the technology exists, it has been built with the challenges of providing digital services to a remote rural community in mind.
“We have digitized most of our technologies and made them available on a mobile platform to support e-extension services, which are the weakest link between research and farmers. This is because the researchers are unable to physically reach all farmers.”
Climate, AgriFood Complexities in Latin America and the Caribbean
Further afield, participants heard about how the Latin American and Caribbean countries are coping with the complex, multiple challenges confronting their agrifood systems. For the region, it is a unique setting of scarcity and surplus.
Nearly 74 percent of Latin American and Caribbean countries are highly exposed to extreme weather events–affecting food security. In Latin America and the Caribbean, one in 10 children under the age of five lives with stunting.
Latin America and the Caribbean region is the world’s leading net food exporter. Yet, a few countries are doing better than most. For instance, as the largest nation in the region, Brazil generates almost half of all Latin American exports, hence the substantial disparities and inequalities in agriculture, food, and nutrition security. It is these pockets of inequalities, hunger, and malnutrition that experts are finding innovative solutions for.
Potatoes, Genebanks and New Markets
Regional experts spoke about ongoing collaboration and the potential to scale solutions. In this regard, there was an extensive discussion on genebanks and the potato, a staple food in approximately 160 countries, where they are consumed by more than two-thirds of the world’s population.
“We have the world’s largest gene bank on potatoes that serves over 100 countries in the world. The International Potato Center (CIP) base in Peru is called the Center of Origin of Potato, and the communities in the Andes Mountains are the guardians of that diversity and of that global resource,” said Dr. Simon Heck, Director General and Senior Director of the Center of Origin of Potato/CGIAR.
CIP’s potato and sweet potato collections are the world’s largest, and they contain nearly all of the potatoes’ wild relatives. The in vitro genebank is the largest and one of the first to get ISO 17025 certification for safe germplasm transport.
Genebanks conserve living plant samples of the world’s important crops and their wild relatives. They ensure that the genetic resources that underpin the world’s food supply are both secure in the long term for future generations and available in the short term for use by farmers, plant breeders, and researchers.
In light of climate change and emerging pests and diseases, these collections are important to ensure that crop plants that may contain genes to resist disease, provide enhanced nutrition, or survive in changing or harsh environments do not become endangered or extinct over time.
“One question we have is how do we mobilize their capacity to help solve problems within the Latin American and Caribbean regions, but also elsewhere? And how do they receive benefits from that?” Heck posed the question, citing an example of expanding the Agri-LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean) model to Asia. “We have been working in Vietnam to develop a tropically adapted potato. Potato production globally is now moving into Asia.”
Heck told participants that more than half of the world’s potatoes are grown and consumed in Asia. Within Asia, the potato is moving into subtropical and tropical environments like India and Vietnam, and the question is about determining what kind of potato is needed to make this movement successful.
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“And so, the answer to that question takes us back to Peru. It takes us back not just to the CIP genebank, which is one of the largest in vitro genebanks in the world and contains the global collection of potatoes, but into the mountains of Peru. We have struck a partnership with Vietnam, with Peru, and with one of the world’s largest potato breeding companies based in the Netherlands,” Heck explained. “And together, we have developed new types of potato, tropical potato, and the first varieties have now been released in Asia. This strain is really a physical combination of genetic material from the highlands of Peru and commercial germplasm from European potato companies.”
What’s more, they demonstrated that it can work technically.
“We have excellent potato varieties now in the lowlands of Asia. (These varieties) can work in terms of market segmentation.”
The inaugural CGIAR Science Week coincides with the first G20 meeting to be hosted in Africa later this year, providing a particularly unique opportunity to leverage CGIAR commitments from the Science Week and to provide input to the G20 agenda of transforming agri-food systems for greater climate resilience, increased productivity, and addressing the drivers of food insecurity at the global level.
IPS UN Bureau Report,
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