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International Agricultural Research
By Norman Borlaug
Science, Vol. 303 No. 5661, pp. 1137-1138
20 February 2004
A new evaluation by the World Bank of the Consultative Group for International
Research (CGIAR) and its 16 research centers has prompted me to give my
views on the importance and contributions of international agricultural
research and the confusion in which CGIAR now finds itself. The World
Bank reports that plant breeding research at CGIAR centers has declined
6.5% annually for the last decade. Moreover, growing restrictions have
been placed on the funding the centers rAeceive. International agricultural
research began in Mexico in 1943 and has grown into an international system
of collaborative research, seed exchange, and training organizations that
helped build many national agricultural research systems in developing
countries.
In only 10 years, wheat and rice harvests in Asia doubled, hunger declined,
and incomes improved. The international wheat, rice, and maize programs
that had developed high-yielding technologies became the models for a
collaborative international research network.
In 1971, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the World Bank, FAO, UNDP,
and USAID created CGIAR, a donors' club dedicated to funding an expanded
international research system. Over the next 30 years, the number of research
centers grew from 4 to 16, covering the major food crops and farming systems
in food-deficit, low-income countries. The total budget increased 10-fold--to
nearly US$400 million per year.
But somehow in this evolution, the CGIAR lost touch with its original
purpose--to feed the hungry. It has become an unwieldy and uncoordinated
beast, with too many masters and proliferating goals.
Yet, a well-focused international agricultural research system that backstops
and complements national agricultural research organizations and smallholder
farmers is a vital component in a global research system. CGIAR must return
to its original purpose and to its greatest comparative advantage--developing
improved food crop varieties, using a combination of conventional plant
breeding techniques and new techniques of biotechnology, with complementary
crop management practices, to address major productionA issues in both
the favored and the more difficult marginal lands.
Another concern stems from the spilling over of the controversy about
genetically modified (GM) varieties from industrialized into developing
countries, which has paralyzed legislative action on GM crops. We should
not underestimate the degree of resistance to GM crops in many countries,
although it is heartening to see Argentina, Brazil, China, and India moving
ahead with well-considered applications of biotechnology.
I am optimistic that multinational biotechnology companies are willing
to devote more resources to solving the problems of poor farmers and consumers.
Creative partnerships have been established between private and public
research institutions--especially universities, but also CGIAR centers--with
financial support provided by private companies, governments, and private
foundations. In addition, CGIAR, with seed collections representing much
of the genetic diversity in the major food crops, is in a unique Aposition
to negotiate with the private sector to generate GM technology that benefits
the poor, in return for access to its gene banks.
The World Bank is in a unique position, with its US$50 million of CGIAR
funding (until recently completely unrestricted; it now assigns half its
contribution to multicenter research initiatives called Challenge Programs),
to work with other donors to expand unrestricted funding in the CGIAR,
which will help greatly to rationalize priority setting. The Bank can
also help refocus the CGIAR mission on raising smallholder agricultural
productivity in the near term, rather than trying to be all things to
all people.
Norman E. Borlaug
Texas A&M University,
College Station, TX 77843,
USA.
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