Here programmers and GIS experts use images from satellites hundreds of kilometres above Earth to track deforestation in Latin America in near-real time. Sipping coffee from a Star Wars mug, Terra-i team leader and principal developer Louis Reymondin invites me on a virtual tour of the continent’s forests to demonstrate the power of the system.

Terra-i works by using the satellite images of Latin America taken every 16 days, overlaying them onto Google Maps, and analysing any changes in vegetation cover. With the help of some bespoke algorithms courtesy of Reymondin et al, these changes show up as different coloured pixels on the map. Yellow indicates the earliest changes dating back to 2004, warming up through shades of orange and red and finally to magenta, the most recent, in 2012. Each pixel represents an area of land equivalent to about eight football pitches.

You can fly all over Latin America in seconds, zooming in on places of interest, seeking out past and present deforestation hotspots.

“If we go to Pando department, in Bolivia, we can see intense pressure right up against the border with Brazil,” says Reymondin. And off we go, taking a southern trajectory from Colombia, into the western reaches of the Amazon Basin in Brazil, and continuing due south to Pando. When we arrive, clusters of yellow, orange and red pixels tell a story of prolonged forest clearance. “It’s probably driven by livestock production,” he says, zooming in on the Brazil-side of the river border to reveal large, disorderly swaths of cleared land, with a sparse scatter of standing trees. “If the land clearance was for crops we’d expect to see something much more orderly and organised.”

Slightly east, and crossing into Peru, Terra-i picks up more pressure on the forest, the satellite images revealing striking scarring along a section of the Madre de Dios river, which itself is the colour of pale caramel. “This is typical of gold mining,” says GIS expert and Terra-i team member Alejandro Coca. “Sudden, heavy sedimentation is one of the effects as miners destroy the river banks in search of gold.” A review of existing research revealed that it is indeed a gold mining area, and the Terra-i images clearly show new areas of deforestation further along the river, almost certainly a sign that the activity is spreading. The Terra-i team has plotted rates of deforestation in the area that perfectly match the rise in the international gold price, and the price of mercury – used to recover gold from silt.

It was while flying around the region from the comfort of his swivel chair that Reymondin recently spotted an unusual pattern of deforestation in Pará State, Brazil – home to some of the highest rates of forest destruction in the Amazon. He’d stumbled upon the Parakaña indigenous area, an oasis of almost perfectly intact forest. Judging by the thick clusters of coloured pixels all around it – and particularly to the south and west – the forest nearby had recently met a rather bitter end. But for some reason deforestation stops abruptly at the border to the Parakaña area.

“You’d expect to see at least a small amount of forest clearance inside,” he says. “But it’s completely intact. We’d love to know how they’ve managed to protect the forest so effectively. That kind of information would be great for us and the rest of the world to know – particularly policymakers developing REDD+ programmes. Hopefully they’re reasons to be positive about the prospects for conserving the forests and the protecting the environmental services they provide.”

Immediately outside the zone he searches for clues as to what’s driving the deforestation. The map reveals more of the disorderly swaths of land with occasional standing trees: more livestock production, he reckons. As we glide slightly west, Reymondin pauses over what looks like a clearing, probably less than a kilometre from the border of the indigenous area. As we zoom in, a saw mill is unmistakable, with lots of large tree trunks stacked up in several distinct piles near a large hangar-like structure with a metal roof.

“Even with the saw mill right on the doorstep, the borders of the indigenous area are being respected – so much so that you can see them clearly, from space. There must be lessons to be learned there.”

At our next destination, it quickly becomes clear that a designated indigenous area on its own is not enough to preserve the forest. As Reymondin flies southwards and zooms in on Brazil’s Mato Grosso State, we arrive at the Xingu indigenous area where immediately Terra-i reveals clusters of red pixels clinging to ribbons of the Xingu River, indicating relatively recent forest clearance.

Whatever the land use changes happening here, there don’t seem to be any signs of gold mining, so it’s highly likely that the logistical value of the river itself is tangled up in the list of causes. Reymondin and Coca say it’s something they see a lot – forest clearance fanning out from transport routes, especially rivers and newly built roads. Roads and rivers allow for easy transport of people and machines coming in, and timber, crops and livestock going out. Parakaña has neither a river, nor a significant road running through it. Perhaps that helps to explain why its forest is still standing.

It turns out that the latest hotspots in the Xingu area are so new it’s not possible to zoom in closer to try and work out what’s happened. But Reymondin and Coca have their suspicions: moving north to deforestation hotspots nearby, the map reveals highly organised, homogenous patchworks of rectangular fields. They look at each other: “Soybean.” In one of the fields the deforestation is so recent you can even see the scatter of felled trees, lying like tiny matchsticks on the dark soil.

Since Terra-i is open-source and free to use, Reymondin expects that as the system attracts more and more users, anomalies like the Parakaña indigenous area will pop with increasing frequency – little patches of intact forest that seem to buck the broader trend of land clearance. “We need to find a way to explain these,” he says. “At the very least they show that, while there are many reasons to be concerned about the fate of the forests in Latin America, there are also some bright spots that give us reasons to be optimistic.”

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Terra-i was developed by CIAT, The Nature Conservancy, King’s College London and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland.

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The devastating epidemic of Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD) has already made it halfway across the continent, with reports of new outbreaks in DR Congo – the world’s third largest producer – and Angola, where production has boomed in recent years. Around 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa depend on cassava, where it is a vital staple food and the second-most important source of carbohydrate.

(pic by Dr E Kanju, IITA)

Little known until as recently as 2003, CBSD has suddenly become the most dangerous cassava virus in Africa, with the potential to wipe out entire harvests. An unseen killer, the disease consumes the cassava roots while they are still in the ground, without producing visible symptoms in the rest of the plant. Only at harvest do farmers discover the blighted, inedible roots which, when cut open, reveal trademark brown blotches of destroyed flesh that give the disease its name.

“Cassava is already incredibly important for Africa and is poised to play an even bigger role in the future,” said Claude Fauquet of CIAT, and a coordinator of the Global Cassava Partnership for the 21^st Century (GCP21), an alliance of the world’s leading cassava scientists, donors and private industry, which will declare war on CBSD and other cassava diseases at a week-long conference at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, which begins today. “We’re particularly concerned that the disease could spread to West Africa and particularly Nigeria – the world’s largest producer and consumer of cassava – because Nigeria would provide a gateway for an invasion of West Africa, where about 150 million people depend on the crop.”

As well as a staple food, cassava starch is used to make biofuel, paper, and even beer. Nigeria is the first country in Africa to attempt to tap the potential of cassava for industrial starch production, with increasing investment from foreign-run starch processing factories supplying the global starch industry. Nigeria hopes to mimic the success of countries in SE Asia, where a cassava-driven starch industry now generates USD$5 billion per year, employing millions of smallholder farmers and numerous small-scale processors.

Scientists have attributed the sudden boom in CBSD in Africa to an explosion in whitefly numbers – insects that carry the pathogen and infect the cassava plants while feeding on the sap, or phloem. A persistent pest, whitefly populations have rocketed in the region in recent years, which scientists have linked to rising temperatures resulting in more favourable breeding conditions.

“We used to see only three or four whiteflies per plant; now we’re seeing thousands,” said James Legg, a leading cassava expert at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). “You literally have a situation where human beings are competing for food – with flies.”

The spread can be accelerated by humans too – through the movement and planting of infected stem cuttings – the most common way to propagate cassava.  While scientists note it would take several years for the disease to spread across the continent via whiteflies alone, the movement of cassava stakes could spark outbreaks in new areas overnight.

This is worrying news for cassava, regularly championed here as the “Rambo root” for its extraordinary ability to survive extreme temperatures and tolerate poor soils. CIAT research published last year showed it could be one of the most climate change-resilient crops that African farmers can plant if its susceptibility to pest and disease outbreaks can be effectively tackled. As well as CBSD, scientists will also focus on cassava mosaic disease, which has plagued Africa from more than a century, each year bringing about losses in the region of 50 million tonnes.

The GCP21 meeting at Bellagio, Declaring war on cassava viruses in Africa, will aim to accelerate research to find long-lasting solutions. These include selective breeding to develop cassava varieties with greater disease resistance, such as those recently released in Tanzania. It will also involve going back to South America, where cassava originated, and working with scientists to mine the cassava gene bank at CIAT in Colombia – the biggest  repository of cassava samples in the world – in order to find and develop genetically superior cassava plants that are completely resistant to CBSD and other diseases.

“It’s time for the world to recalibrate its scientific priorities,” continued Fauquet. “Cassava has the greatest potential to reduce hunger and poverty in Africa – more than any other crop – but these diseases are crippling yields and destroying this potential. We need to treat CBSD and other destructive viruses like the smallpox of cassava – formidable diseases, but threats we can eradicate if everyone pulls together.”

Conference participants will also discuss developing a regional strategy to gradually, village by village, replace farmers’ existing infested cassava plants with virus-free, resistant varieties, as well as ways of controlling whiteflies that are cost effective and environmentally sustainable. They will also consider the need for new research into the potential threat African cassava producers face from the introduction of new pests and diseases from elsewhere.

“It’s a tale of two continents,” said CIAT’s Agrobiodiversity Research Area director Joe Tohme, who jointly co-ordinates GCP21. “We’ve seen in the very recent past the devastation caused when cassava pests ‘jump’ from Latin America to Africa, so we need to be realistic and plan for the inevitability of outbreaks of new diseases in Africa by developing plants resistant to frog skin disease, for example, a major viral disease of cassava in South America which, luckily, is not present in Africa. Past events show very clearly that even though these two continents are far apart, cassava pests and diseases will somehow, eventually, find a way of getting from one to the other.”

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 You can read the official conference press release here.

There is a revolution taking place in East Africa. At its center, lies the humble white pea bean – and a market-led approach that is transforming agriculture, stirring institutional change, and stimulating economic growth.

At Tuka Langano village in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, Milko Bati sits on her veranda. She used to live a hand-to-mouth existence, barely able to grow enough food to feed her seven children, let alone send them to school. Today, her children are at the top of their class; she has built a new two-room home complete with an iron sheet roof; and she has expanded her 2-hectare farm to include oxen, donkeys, cows, sheep, and goats – all thanks to beans.

Milko’s story is not unique. She is one of thousands of smallholder farmers who switched to improved white pea bean varieties, kick-starting the evolution of Ethiopia’s bean industry into a US$50 million – and growing – export business.

Laying the building blocks

Before 2004, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), in partnership with CIAT under the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA), developed high-yielding bean varieties suitable for Ethiopia’s diverse growing conditions and released them. The beans were well received by farmers, but the normal channels through which seeds were disseminated couldn’t even meet 1% of farmers seed needs.

Kidane Tumsa, head of the Ethiopian National Bean Research Program (ENBRP) at EIAR explains: “While the market was demanding better quality beans, most farmers were still growing poor-quality, lowyielding beans and using poor crop management practices. What farmers needed was support to grow good quality produce more efficiently. Improving access to seed wasn’t enough; we also had to address the bottlenecks along the value chain.”

In collaboration with CIAT, EIAR formed a partnership with all the players in the bean industry, including farmers, research institutes, grain traders, community associations, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), seed producers, and policy makers. Together they identified the major obstacles preventing growth in the industry – including limited access to improved bean seed – and decided to take joint responsibility for developing the sector.

A partnership for change

As the bottlenecks to seed production and distribution were removed, the ENBRP started working with NGOs and farmer cooperatives to promote good agronomic practices, such as adequate planting density and timely weeding. The partnership then began developing links between farmers and grain buyers, which helped to stabilize previously volatile prices.

From there, the ENBRP engaged with policy makers, who, recognizing that beans could benefit farmers, traders, and the country, listed them on the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange, guaranteeing farmers the international market price for their beans.

Between 2004 and 2012, the area of land used for growing beans in Ethiopia increased from 181,600 to 330,000 hectares, and bean production more than tripled to 387,000 tons per year. Similarly, average yields increased from 0.62 tons per hectare to 1.5 tons; farmers increased their income (more than sixfold) from US$120 per ton of beans to $750; and the number of people employed to sort, process, and transport beans quadrupled to 12,000.

Domino effect

The development of Ethiopia’s bean market is just the tip of the iceberg. The approach has been so successful that not only has it been applied to other crops in Ethiopia, including chick pea, wheat, and sorghum, but it’s also spreading to other countries.

Kennedy Muimui, a bean breeder from the Zambia Research Institute, said: “Just 2 years after we released new bean varieties suitable for canning onto the market, the Zambian Government declared that all seed sold by breeders and seed suppliers must be of certified quality – for all agricultural products. By engaging with the government from the outset, we’ve already had a huge effect on Zambia’s agriculture. It’s an amazing outcome. We’ve still got a lot of work to do to develop the industry, but the future is looking very bright.”

Introducing new, improved varieties is only part of the solution to enhancing food security and incomes for Africa’s bean farmers. By looking at the bigger picture and working with partners to embed the strengthening of supply chains into the national agenda, CIAT is helping to create sustainable change, allowing farmers like Milko Bati back in Ethiopia to think about investing in a horse cart next bean season instead of worrying about how she will feed her children.

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PABRA is funded by a donor consortium that includes the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), and the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA).

A new public-private partnership across Latin America promises to boost rice productivity and could help bolster the region as an emerging food basket for the world.

Launched in 2012, the Hybrid Rice Consortium for Latin America (HIAAL, by its Spanish acronym) brings CIAT researchers together with other rice scientists, traders, millers, and farmer organizations in 13 countries to develop high-yielding rice hybrids specifically adapted to the region. The move reflects the high importance given to hybrid rice by the CGIAR Research Program on Rice, also known as the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP), whose research aims to help meet the ever-growing world demand for rice.

Hybrid rice involves crossing two distinct inbred rice lines to obtain genetically superior offspring that are up to 20% more productive. While well-established in Asia – over half of China’s rice comes from hybrids – and to a lesser extent in Africa, hybrid rice accounts for less than 2% of Latin America’s rice area.

More vigorous rice

Rice is self-pollinating, containing both male and female parts that produce offspring genetically identical to the parent plant. While this ensures the passage of particular characteristics from one generation to the next, it limits the options for crop improvement. To produce superior, hybrid rice that combines the beneficial traits of distinct rice varieties and takes advantage of “heterosis” – the tendency of crossbred varieties to outperform the parent plants – scientists first have to develop rice varieties with male sterility so that cross-pollination can occur.

As well as higher yields, the hybrid rice varieties developed by the Consortium will combine multiple additional traits that target some of the most critical constraints in the region. These include resistance to diseases, such as rice blast and rice
hoja blanca virus, and the need for high grain quality – essential for rice traders and processors. The varieties will also be developed to be better suited to the practice of direct seeding – the machine planting of rice seed straight into the ground, rather than the manual transplanting of seedlings common in Asia and Africa. Direct-seeded rice needs to have deep roots to avoid lodging – the windblown toppling of plants – and strong stems to bear the weight of heavy panicles.

HIAAL’s hybrid rice research could combine all of these traits into single “super varieties.”

Building on the best

In the newly established Consortium, CIAT will make the initial test crosses based on rice varieties in its own collection, those of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, and the top-performing commercial rice varieties and experimental “elite lines” developed by participating institutions in Latin America. After initial testing, CIAT will distribute the hybrids to Consortium partners for subsequent testing and further improvement.

A system of royalties has been established to reward participating institutions when their rice varieties are used as parents of the new hybrid plants. The payments help ensure that participating institutions provide the breeding program with their best varieties and partners receive a steady stream of funds for continued investment in the initiative. “It’s high-risk, expensive research, but the benefits are potentially huge,” said Edgar Torres, leader of CIAT’s Rice Program. “But by forming a public-private partnership of this kind, we have two main advantages: access to the best germplasm – a lot of which is well adapted to the region – plus a strong, extensive testing network to test the varieties in different regions and environmental conditions. This is extremely expensive for private companies to do.”

One potential issue is that the benefits of the hybrid varieties only last one generation, before yields begin to drop and variability in the traits begins to creep in. For this reason, farmers will need to buy hybrid seed each year, instead of keeping a portion of their harvested seed for planting. For Torres, this is actually one of the advantages of hybrid rice in the region:

“It means that farmers will have high-quality, certified seed each season, which will help to ensure consistently high yields and limit the spread of diseases and problems such as red rice. It also means that a seed market can be established, enabling us to reach many more farmers.

“With the deeper roots associated with lodging tolerance, we expect the hybrids to be able to access nutrients deeper in the soil, so the cost of buying the seeds will be partially offset by reduced expenditure on fertilizer.”

The first varieties to result from the partnership are expected to be formally released in 2016, with the establishment of a robust seed system to supply farmers with seed on a large scale, in around 5 years.

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HarvestPlus, the joint CIAT- International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) programme to develop nutritionally-improved – or “biofortified” – staple food crops in Africa, Asia and Latin America, marked its ninth year with a number of new crop releases and improved systems to get the crops into the hands of smallholder farmers.

Achieving a year ahead of schedule its target to reach 100,000 new households with new varieties, HarvestPlus now expects 500,000 households will benefit from its portfolio of improved rice, wheat, cassava, sweet potato, maize, bean, and pearl millet by the end of its current phase in 2013.

In Rwanda – where four nutritionally-improved bean varieties have already been released, five new kinds of iron–rich climbing beans were released in 2012, targeting over 130,000 households. The beans provide up to 30 per cent of the daily recommended iron requirements of women and children, and the work complements government efforts to tackle iron-deficiency, which affects around 40 per cent of children and a large number of women in the country.

HarvestPlus now aims to reach an additional 150,000 households in Rwanda with the improved climbing beans, and a further 75,000 in DR Congo with improved climbing beans and bush beans. The iron-rich beans, which have already been released in neighbouring Uganda, are currently being tested for their suitability in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Burundi.

Other releases in 2012 included new varieties of vitamin A-rich maize in Zambia and Nigeria, and high-iron pearl millet in India. In Latin America, where the work is conducted by AgroSalud, new bean varieties with higher levels of iron were released in Nicaragua. The release schedule for 2013 includes the launch of high zinc wheat in India and high zinc rice in Bangladesh.

Ahead of the curve

Reaching the target for disseminating new varieties a year ahead of time was partly achieved by fine-tuning channels of seed distribution and testing new ones. One novel way of distributing the new vitamin A-rich cassava crops in Nigeria, for example, involved the commitment of farmers receiving the new varieties to pass stem cuttings to at least two of their neighbours.

While dissemination of improved beans in Africa continues to focus on the use of small, popular and affordable seed packs for farmers – around half-a-million packs have been sold in Rwanda alone in the last two years – HarvestPlus has also been trialling a new “payback system”. Under the system, which specifically targets some of the Rwanda’s poorest producers, around 130 tonnes of high-iron beans were sold to local agricultural offices and distributed free-of-charge to cash-strapped farmers, who then grew the beans under the supervision of extension workers and the HarvestPlus team. After harvest, the farmers paid back their initial quota in the form of grain, while consuming or selling any surplus. This initiative helped get nutritionally-improved beans into the hands of an additional 20,000 farmers very quickly.

Under a new arrangement also established in 2012, some of the grain received by HarvestPlus through the payback system will now be sold to the UN’s World Food Programme, as part of its Purchase for Progress initiative, which seeks to source seed from smallholder farmers in developing countries for use its emergency relief programmes. HarvestPlus will plough the proceeds from this arrangement back into seed multiplication for smallholders.

Following the CGIAR reform process, HarvestPlus is now a major partner in the Consortium Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), officially launched in 2012. The program brings together researchers across the agriculture, nutrition, and health spectrum to jointly develop solutions to key challenges in the developing world.

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The team, led by entomologist Soroush Parsa, filmed a protocol for evaluating whether friendly fungi can be introduced into plants to boost their resistance to pest attacks.

The work is part of a proof-of-concept project funded by a Grand challenges Explorations grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Focusing on beans and cassava, the project aims to establish whether the Beauveria bassiana fungi – commonly found in commercially-available bio-pesticides – can be introduced to live harmlessly within the crops, while simultaneously boosting their resistance to attacks from the cassava mealybug and the bean weevil – two devastating pests of global importance.

If successful, the approach known as endophytic biological control, could represent a low-cost, eco-efficient strategy for protecting crops in farmers’ fields, substantially reducing reliance on chemical pesticides.

This is the second peer-reviewed video produced by CGIAR scientists and published in JoVE. In June 2011, a team of CIAT entomologists – also led by Parsa – produced a video protocol for characterizing herbivore resistance mechanisms, focusing on the spittlebug and its taste for the forage grass brachiaria.

So far this video has received nearly 17,000 hits worldwide.

“By publishing these protocols as videos, and making them free to access and easy to follow for scientists everywhere, we’re ensuring the technology has as wide an application as possible,” said Parsa. “They’re not just of interest to entomologists working on beans and cassava; they can be used to develop similar techniques for boosting the productivity of other vital food security crops.

“We wanted the protocol to be very detailed and easy to follow, this is why the video is 20 minutes long – this was an enormous amount of work for the team. But the end result is a thorough, accurate, independently verified protocol that scientists anywhere can follow step-by-step.”

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Tall, compact and likened in appearance both to asparagus and Marge Simpson’s hair-do, cassava’s productivity could be about to shift up a gear if CIAT’s experiments go well.

Ngo Van Hung is poised to quit his job as a builder in Vietnam’s Ea Kar District. Around six years ago he started getting a lot of work in the village of Chu Cuc, a community of smallholder farmers. He’d build a new home here, another one there; all of them big stone houses replacing the smaller wooden ones.

By the time he’d built his twentieth new home in the village, he knew the farmers’ secret: they had implemented a livestock system that was earning them thousands of dollars. Now he wants to do the same.

Until recently, livestock husbandry in this part of Vietnam’s Central Highlands was not very productive. Animals were intermittently sold to free-up cash to put towards weddings or large purchases, and the rest of the time they were left free to graze on native pasture and crop residues.

In 2000, CIAT researchers, in partnership with Vietnam’s Tay Nguyen University (TNU) and with funding from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), looked for ways to revitalise the region’s livestock sector. They assessed farmers’ needs, tested different kinds of improved forages selected in Southeast Asia in earlier work and, most importantly, developed improved management strategies with farmers. The partnership continued to grow through a subsequent project funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), resulting in the development and adoption of a new livestock system, like the one in Chu Cuc.

Cut-and-carry

The system hinges on confining cattle to lots and providing them with high quality feed. Extension workers recommend that part of the cropland is planted with nutritious forages suited to the area, such as varieties of elephant and napier grass, brachiaria and stylo. Also, farmers are encouraged to invest in more productive crossbreeds that respond better to the improved nutrition.

The forages are cut and carried to the lots twice-a-day as part of an intensive fattening program that lasts around six months per animal. Clubs formed around groups of cattle-fattening farmers then assist individual members to get in touch with traders and stay informed about developments in the cattle market.

While Chu Cuc used to be coffee land – part of the government’s drive to become a major Robusta exporter – the soils there are poor and coffee prices were often unpredictable. “Sometimes it would cost us more to produce and pick the coffee than what we would get for it at market,” said farmer Wang Van Ting, who switched to the new livestock system in 2006.

He’s one of the farmers in the village with a new house, and tells us he earns so much from his cattle that the government no longer classifies him as poor. The legacy of coffee lives on though: an irrigation reservoir built for Chu Cuc’s coffee plantations now serves dry-season forage cultivation.

Ting’s neighbour went one step further. In three years he’s earned enough money from fattening his nine cattle – and by trading his own and others’ – to pay the USD$25,000 to construct his nearly-completed new home. This is also where we meet his builder, Ngo Van Hung, who has seen the impacts of the livestock system unfold in front of him.

Further up the road we met Nguyn Hui Nhon, one of Chu Cuc’s pioneer farmers, also with a modern new home. She told us her eldest son is studying advertising at university in Ho Chi Minh City; her second-oldest is a photographer. She beams as she returns to her plot to cut some more king grass.

These are impressive stories from a village where each household only has around a hectare of land.

Ripple effects

According to Truong Tan Khanh, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Animal Science and Animal Health at TNU, over 500 farmers are now using the intensive cattle fattening system in Ea Kar, with those in Chu Cuc hosting exchanges of interested farmers from further afield. Despite its success so far, Khanh says the new project needs to expand to involve more marginalised farmers from some of the country’s many ethnic minority groups.

With the lessons from places like Chu Cuc, the new CIAT-led Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam Livestock Project (CLVLP) – also funded by IFAD, and officially launched in 2012 – is now working to promote the adaptation and adoption of improved livestock production systems in neighbouring provinces across the area known as the Cambodia-Lao-Vietnam Development Triangle.

“The aim is to transform livestock from a cash reserve into a productive asset, drawing on the successes in places like Chu Cuc,” explained CIAT’s Adrian Bolliger, the CLVLP coordinator. “We don’t want to introduce livestock where animals haven’t been kept before, but rather improve systems where farmers already have animals.”

As well as extending suitable forage and livestock husbandry practices the four-year project takes a broader, value chain approach to ensure improved smallholder livestock production results in better returns at market.

Back in Chu Cuc, builder Ngo Van Hung says that switching careers to livestock production will mean he can work half the hours for double the money, while being his own boss and being able to put money aside for his family. Although he’s as well-positioned as anyone to see the impact of the new system, even if he doesn’t decide to become a livestock farmer, it seems to be good time to be a builder in Ea Kar too.

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His long journey of commitment began in 1962, when he joined the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in El Salvador. For 2 years, he supervised projects dealing with the production of vegetables, tropical fruits, and small livestock. After earning an MSc at New Mexico State University, Tony returned to the Peace Corps in 1967, serving first as an assistant director in Paraguay and then as a training officer in California until 1970.

Like so many Peace Corps volunteers, Tony realized that to make lasting contributions he needed more knowledge. So, he embarked on doctoral studies in the Department of Entomology with a minor in Plant Breeding at Cornell University. After completing his PhD, Tony joined CIAT in Cali, Colombia, initially as a Rockefeller Foundation post-doc. He developed an extraordinarily productive career as Cassava Program entomologist, including an 18-month sabbatical at Embrapa, Cruz das Almas, Brazil – and also served at times as acting program leader. His work resulted in more than 300 scientific publications. After his retirement in 2006, Tony was awarded emeritus status but continued contributing generously to mentoring and occasional consultancies.

Tony leaves a legacy of enormous professional accomplishments. Through research teams formed with skill and care, he advanced the knowledge of cassava entomology from its infancy to maturity, opening the way for major contributions to improved livelihoods for cassava farmers. Tony’s single greatest scientific achievement involved his role in the introduction of a parasitic wasp from Paraguay to sub-Saharan Africa for biological control of the devastating cassava mealybug. The documented economic benefits of this work are valued in the billions of dollars.

Tony leaves a huge void in CIAT and around the world, having formed friendships and professional relationships through an international career that spanned more than half a century, including 40 years at CIAT. Tony led a rich life outside of work too – as an avid reader, New York Yankees fan, and congenial, supportive companion to a very large circle of friends in Cali.

More details about Tony’s life and work are available on a special page of CIAT’s website, where friends and colleagues can share their thoughts, memories, and photos. Please join us in honoring this true hero of science and incomparable friend to so many.

The family announces that Tony will have a mass on March 21, 2013 at the Church of Saint Clare, 110 Nelson, Ave., Staten Island, NY. His remains will be buried with his Mom and Dad at the Resurrection Cemetery, Staten Island. The family suggests donations to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Light the Night,  61 Broadway, Suite 400, New York, NY  10006, in memory of Anthony Bellotti.

Please feel free to share this message with others.

We will miss you Tony!

Ruben

Director General

With over forty years of research under his belt and more than 300 scientific papers, there are few others who know as much about the subject as Tony did, and even fewer who can talk about bugs with as much lucidity and charm as he could.

Each time I arrived at his office to discuss the latest outbreak or study, I’d receive the equivalent of my own personal – and often extended – TED Talk. To Tony it didn’t matter that I was a cassava novice – he enjoyed answering my questions, shepherding me through the issues, and – perhaps unsurprising given his lifelong passion for baseball – being thrown the occasional curveball.

Tony’s single greatest scientific achievement involved his role in the introduction of the parasitic wasp Anagyrus lopezi from Paraguay to sub-Saharan Africa for biological control of the devastating cassava mealybug. The documented economic benefits of this work are valued in the billions of dollars, and the research is helping cassava producers in Southeast Asia tackle the same problem today.

It was around September last year that I saw Tony at the CIAT coffee shop, catching up with colleagues, and making a passing, light-hearted quip about a having a cold that he just couldn’t seem to shift. I don’t think any of us suspected that it was an early symptom of the cancer he succumbed to today.

While the world has undoubtedly lost a leading entomologist, CIAT a distinguished scientist, and his many acquaintances a laid-back, affable friend, Tony’s four decades of research will inevitably survive him – helping the current generation of cassava scientists and future ones – continue to tackle some of the greatest threats to one of the most important crops in the world.

You can share your experiences and memories of Tony as a scientist, mentor and friend, by leaving your comments here or at the In Memoriam online forum.

Very soon we were in one of CIAT’s vast fields of experimental cassava. I wondered what exactly we’d find: cassava roots with mildly amusing shapes? Multicoloured roots, perhaps? But Hernan wasn’t carrying a harvesting tool; it was the plants themselves that would be strange.

As we walked I hoped I’d be able to oblige Hernan’s conspiratorial charm by instantly recognising what it was about the plants that was strange. Hopefully it would be obvious to the cassava novice and not some hard-to-photograph quirk premised on a scientific technicality.

I wasn’t disappointed. Anyone who’s seen a “normal” field of cassava knows that the plants grow a few feet high, a few feet wide, are bushy – perhaps even a bit spindly – with finger-like leaves extending in all directions from the trunk, on the end of slim stalks – or petioles. A whole field of cassava is normally impenetrably dense. After passing trials of what I considered normal-looking cassava, one plot stood out immediately.

Rather than bushy, these were soaring columns of cassava – sturdy, compact, and standing nearly ten feet-high, the leaves growing straight out from the trunk with no petioles whatsoever. For want of a better analogy, they reminded me of Marge Simpson’s towering beehive hair-do, in a rich, racing green. According to Hernan, the CIAT researchers refer to the plants as “Asparagus Cassava.” They weren’t just strange; they were the strangest cassava plants I’d ever seen.

Hernan himself was clearly quite excited. Using cuttings maintained at CIAT’s gene bank, the centre’s cassava scientists had inbred the plants to see what kinds of hidden traits they would express – characteristics that normally lie dormant in their DNA.

The resulting tall, slim plants mean you can quadruple the number of plants per plot, Hernan told us. Assuming the yield per plant of Asparagus Cassava planted at high densities is comparable to conventional varieties at normal densities, you could be looking at a big boost in yields. That would be a boon for smallholders growing cassava for food, he continued, those supplying the ever-growing industrial demand for cassava starch, and due to increased production on the same area of land, would help reduce the workload of women producers in Africa.

The fact that Asparagus Cassava can be planted in neat rows, easily accessible and navigable by farmers also means they could be harvested mechanically, said Hernan. While machine harvesting is not suited to some parts of the cassava-producing world, industrial producers will surely take note.

An additional benefit is for livestock: mechanical harvesting of the Asparagus Cassava leaves – free of the fibrous petioles – would be much easier, and the resulting feed of higher quality.

Hernan is not the kind of scientist to use the phrase “green revolution” lightly in relation to his own research. But during our half-hour excursion to see the “strange” cassava, it kept popping up in relation to the crop’s potential. He told us that with Asparagus Cassava, the CIAT team would like to replicate the success of maize scientists, who increased the crop’s tolerance to “crowding”, enabling planting densities to increase three-fold with major gains in yields.

Few would dispute that a tripling of cassava yields would very likely signify the revolution the crop has been waiting for for so long. When high-density Asparagus Cassava trials begin in May 2013, Hernan will be able to put his hypothesis to the test.

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“In terms of roots that can last for months after harvest, the dream is over,” he told delegates at a workshop of the CGIAR’s Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB) research program, at CIAT’s headquarters in Cali, Colombia, today. “Cassava will not turn into a potato,” he said, a reference to the latter’s excellent storage quality.

But encouragingly, his current research suggests that developing cassava roots that can last just a week without spoiling – longer-life rather than long-life – could enable farmers to overcome one of the most significant bottlenecks in the cassava processing chain.

Cassava roots perish very quickly after harvest and are normally completely spoiled after three days. This process, known as post-harvest physiological deterioration (PPD), is a major constraint for cassava producers – both big and small – who have to rush the roots to markets or starch processors. It’s a challenge complicated by poor rural infrastructure in many cassava producing areas, and a major obstacle to cassava fulfilling its potential as one of the most climate change-resilient crops for sub-Saharan Africa.

In early 2009, CIAT scientists made the chance discovery that a cassava variety conserved in the organisation’s gene bank that contained naturally high levels of beta-carotene, was able to resist PPD for up to two months. If the scientists could establish a causal link between the antioxidant properties of beta-carotene and PPD tolerance, new cassava varieties with much longer shelf-lives could be developed, and cassava roots could become as easy-to-store as potatoes.

But subsequent CIAT research found that despite the roots lasting longer, their starch content fell gradually over time – and it’s the starch that makes cassava such a valuable food and industrial crop.

“After you harvest it, the root is still breathing; the starch turns into carbon dioxide and water, and some starch is turned it into its basic component, sugar,” Hernan told me during the break. “The roots are not spoiled, but the quantity of starch is falling. After a couple of weeks you have, maybe, 10 per cent less starch than at harvest. In a month, we estimate that the starch content is 30-40 per cent less. Losing that amount of starch is not acceptable.

“So now we’re focusing on roots that can survive the first week-to-ten days after harvest – that’s where 90 per cent of the losses occur in the cassava processing chain. It means that if a truck breaks down and a farmer can’t get the roots to the processing factory, they won’t lose everything. The starch content of the roots will end up slightly lower, but they will still be valuable and the farmer will have a few days to get the truck fixed.

“It’s buying time at the most sensitive time in the processing chain.”

A doubling of the cassava shelf-life is certainly not to be sniffed at, and can also mean a lot to cassava processors. During the discussion, Bussie Maziya-Dixon, cassava breeder at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), said that the quality of gari – a popular West African food made from mashed and fermented cassava roots – decreases drastically when the root processing is delayed by one-to- two days after harvest. Longer-life cassava could make a big difference.

While Hernan himself also believes it’s possible that one day there will be a market for sweeter cassava products, made using long-life roots whose starch has turned to sugar, he reiterated that “the dream of roots that store for months and months is out of the picture now.”

The Strategies for improving livelihoods through RTB post-harvest technologies workshop runs all week at CIAT’s headquarters in Colombia.

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Based on satellite information from NASA, Terra-i can zoom-in on the region’s forests to a resolution of 250m x 250m. It’s smart enough to distinguish between natural losses and those caused by human activity – and can also monitor habitat change in non-forested areas, such as savannahs and deserts. Anyone can log in and watch what’s happening – from anywhere in the world – and with images updated every 16 days, little escapes the all-seeing Terra-i.

Developed by CIAT, The Nature Conservancy, King’s College London and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Terra-i is aimed at helping governments and decision makers in Latin America formulate new policies on forest and habitat protection – and test the effectiveness of existing ones. With agriculture a major driver of deforestation in the region, Terra-i can also help identify high-priority areas for the implementation of REDD+ schemes, which aim to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation and forest degradation by engaging local communities to protect the forests.

While Brazil has had its own hi-tech deforestation monitoring system in place since 2008, Terra-i is the first to cover Latin America as a whole, from Mexico to Argentina.

Already it has enabled scientists to focus on areas that often slip under the deforestation radar, for example, the Gran Chaco – a highland, dry forest spreading across Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia and parts of southern Brazil. The second-most densely forested area in Latin America after the Amazon, it’s a biodiversity hotspot and a living museum of pre-human plants, but its plight has been overshadowed by international focus on its neighbour, the Amazon itself.

Launch in mid-2012, Terra-i revealed that around 1 million hectares of forest had been lost in the Gran Chaco between 2004-2010, driven by the expansion of soy plantations, together with the displacement of cattle ranchers into the region by industrial agriculture at the perimeter.

“The rates of deforestation in The Chaco were a huge surprise to us,” explained Terra-i team leader and CIAT researcher Louis Reymondin. ”There’s so much focus on the Amazon – and rightly so – but what we witnessed in The Chaco was much more severe than anywhere in the Amazon.

“If governments are going to develop policies to tackle these kinds of threats to forests, biodiversity, and environmental services, they have to understand the dynamics of each region, and what the drivers of deforestation and habitat change are. Terra-i can help them do this accurately.”

Open source and free-of-charge, Terra-i means lower-income countries in Latin America now have the chance to monitor deforestation themselves. At the end of 2012 the Terra-i team trained technicians from the Bolivian government on how to use the system.

“Until now, satellite-based deforestation monitoring has been prohibitively expensive for many developing countries – and many of these countries are the most vulnerable,” continued Reymondin. “With Terra-i, we’re aiming to put the technology in the hands of the people who need it most.”

In 2013 the team hopes to rally support to develop the system for other parts of the world, helping monitor deforestation high-risk areas in Borneo and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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First the letters have to be arranged into words, the words into sentences and paragraphs to produce a coherent, accurate chapter. There are 18,000 chapters in each book, and 5,000 books make the full story.

The story is the complete genetic history of cassava.

Making biological sense of that pile of letters – otherwise known as sequencing the cassava genome – might seem like a daunting prospect, but the result should be a precise genetic fingerprint of the plant and all its known variations. It promises to accelerate the development of improved varieties by helping scientists home-in on the genes responsible for increasing yields, boosting starch or protein content, and improving resistance to notorious pests like whitefly, diseases like brown streak.

“Genome sequencing generates an enormous amount of data – at the moment we just have an ‘alphabet soup’ of information that we need to arrange into the right order,” explained CIAT cassava geneticist Luis Augusto Becerra. “But once all those letters are in order, it means we will really, truly understand cassava.”

The first draft of the cassava genome was completed in 2009, by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), and 454 Life Sciences. While it only sequenced one cassava variety – the equivalent of one single book in the set – it was enough to help scientists isolate the gene responsible for “waxy” roots, a major breakthrough for the development of high-value cassava for industrial use.

Crucially, the first draft also provides a firm foundation for speeding up subsequent sequencing, since many cassava varieties contain similar characteristics to the draft, with only small variations in the sequence responsible for particular characteristics. In just three years, the first draft has enabled a further 200 varieties to be quickly decoded.

Using cassava varieties conserved in gene banks around the world – including domesticated “landraces” and undomesticated wild relatives – a further 1,000 varieties will be sequenced in 2013, funded by CGIAR’s Roots, Tubers and Bananas research program. The aim is for all 5,000 cassava varieties – representing 95% of the crop’s global genetic diversity – to be sequenced by 2017.

Launched in mid-2012, The Global Cassava Genome Initiative, jointly coordinated by CIAT and the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), with support from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), RIKEN, DOE JGI and the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (CATAS), will pool the expertise of scientists and the technical capacity of participating institutions around the world to try and put speed up the process of putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

“This initiative will really help to accelerate the work to decode cassava,” continued Becerra. “So it’s not a matter if we’re going to find, say, the gene responsible for resistance to whitefly, or increasing yields – it’s a matter of when. That makes the process tremendously exciting; it could be cassava’s Green Revolution, both as a cash crop and a food crop.”

Once the cassava genome is fully decoded, scientists will be able to breed cassava in silico (on the computer) to establish the most effective combinations of parent plants to produce offspring with the most valuable traits.

It could enable them to help cassava fulfill its enormous potential as both a food security crop and an industrial crop – in a fraction of the time required by conventional breeding methods.

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Grain Legumes – one of the 16 multi-partner CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) – will develop new varieties of chickpea, common bean, groundnut, lentil, soybean, pigeon pea, cowpea, and fava bean. It aims to boost yields by more than 20 per cent – the equivalent of more than 7 million additional tonnes of food.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ciat/4108205169/

Often referred to as “the meat of the poor”, grain legumes are a vital source of protein for hundreds of millions of people unable to either afford or produce meat. But they have long been considered “orphan crops”, with international research focusing more on other globally-important staples such as rice, wheat and maize.

By developing improved varieties of grain legumes, the new partnership between lead centre ICRISAT, CIAT, ICARDA, IITA and several public and private organisations (including EMBRAPA from Brazil and ICAR from India), hopes to boost the role of grain legumes in the provision of dietary protein. By virtue of their ability to trap atmospheric nitrogen and transfer it to the soil, grain legumes also promise to improve soil fertility and reduce the need for chemical fertilisers.

Starting with a three-year initial phase, the program eventually expects to generate benefits to smallholder farmers in the region of USD $4.5 billion, primarily from increased food production and reduced fertiliser use.

CIAT’s role

With its headquarters in Latin America – the ancestral home of the common bean – and with substantial bean research impacts in Eastern and Southern Africa, CIAT will help develop improved common bean varieties, focusing on three specific traits: tolerance to drought and low phosphorous soils; heat tolerance; and improved nitrogen fixation. This should enable beans to be more resilient to some of the unpredictable and extreme weather expected to intensify as a result of climate change, and the persistent problem of low soil fertility that plagues vast areas of the tropics.

CIAT’s work will rely heavily on the collection of over 37,000 bean varieties conserved at its gene bank in Colombia. As the largest collection of wild and cultivated beans in the world, it contains many varieties that have already helped scientists develop improved beans. These include drought-tolerant bush beans in Nicaragua as well as several varieties of the very popular, high-yielding, disease resistant climbing beans in East and Central Africa – especially Uganda and Rwanda.

The CIAT-coordinated Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA), a network of bean research institutions that supports bean improvement work in 29 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – with the support of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) – will also be critical to CIAT’s role in the new Grain Legumes program.

PABRA will help ensure new bean varieties are accessible to African farmers via local institutions, and that “starting materials” – bean samples currently held in the gene bank – are available to African scientists, whose breeding programmes can help further adapt the beans to local conditions.

The Grain Legumes programme was officially launched at ICRISAT’s headquarters, near Hyderabad, India, last week. CIAT Director General Ruben Echeverría, who attended the event, said: “This is an unprecedented opportunity for collaboration to improve these long-neglected, but vitally important smallholder crops.”

“This program shows that by integrating previously fragmented research efforts there will be a substantial increase in impacts for smallholders – one of the objectives of the recent CGIAR reforms.

“By working together we should be able to fulfill the promise of grain legumes as nutritious staple foods with strong markets, excellent resilience to climate change, and as reliable, eco-efficient options for smallholder farmers struggling with low soil fertility. This should see grain legumes coming out of the shadows of scientific research and into the mainstream, where they belong.”

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ICRISAT – International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics

CIAT – International Center for Tropical Agriculture

ICARDA – International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas

IITA – International Institute of Tropical Agriculture

EMBRAPA – Brazilian Enterprise for Agricultural Research

ICAR – Indian Council of Agricultural Research

That’s because a new study just published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change shows that worms may be a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions, in what it describes as the “earthworm dilemma”.

The findings could soil the reputation of a creature, which, as one of nature’s ugliest, has beaten all the odds to find its way into the hearts and minds of gardeners and ecologists the world-over, by virtue of its much-championed role as a custodian of soil fertility.

In the study, scientists from Wageningen University, CIAT, and UC Davis reviewed existing literature and found that earthworms – through the supposedly benevolent act of breaking down organic matter and boosting soil health – could be responsible for as much as one-third of the carbon dioxide emissions from soil, and 42% of soil-based emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas 300-times more potent than C02.

Crucially, they also bring into question the long-established idea that earthworms help trap CO2 in the soil – thought to have at least partially negated their greenhouse gas footprint drilosphere. Instead they found that worms may contribute to global warming by helping release CO2 from the soil into the atmosphere.

And that’s not all: the study also questions the increasingly popular “no-till” farming practices that eschew ploughing in order to protect soil structure, but which help preserve earthworm habitats, enabling them to thrive. Couple that with the increasing use of organic fertiliser – a veritable banquet for earthworms – and their greenhouse gas emissions could be set to rise further still.

Slippery subject

But according to CIAT soil scientist Steven Fonte, one of the authors of the study, when it comes to dishing the dirt on earthworms, the creatures still have a significant amount of, well, wriggle room:

“These are really important findings that challenge a long-held consensus of the precise role of worms in climate change mitigation,” he said.

“But earthworms should definitely not be seen as pests – they’re still vital to farm productivity and food security. They help to move nutrients through the soil, providing food for plants, and by improving soil fertility, they can also reduce the need for chemical fertilisers. They can help quickly restore seriously degraded land to make it productive again, which, for a smallholder farmer, can mean the difference between a failed harvest and a bountiful one.”

For Fonte, the jury is definitely still out: “While our findings are provocative, they are mostly based on laboratory studies and largely ignore the potential for earthworm benefits to plant growth and nitrogen use, which could counteract the negative trends observed here”.

While further research might help vindicate the humble earthworm, it could be some time before they grow back their good reputation.

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“Greenhouse-gas emissions from soils increased by Earthworms” by Ingrid M. Lubbers Kees, Jan van Groenigen, Steven J. Fonte, Johan Six, Lijbert Brussaard & Jan Willem van Groenigen, was published in Nature Climate Change on 3rd February 2013.

An Upward Spiral – the story of climbing beans in Rwanda from CIAT Colombia on Vimeo.

With a pressing need to sustainably boost food production in the country, An Upward Spiral showcases one promising initiative – the introduction and widespread adoption of improved climbing beans.

By virtue of growing several feet high, climbing beans can be up to three times more productive than commonly-grown bush beans, on the same area of land.

Beans being crucial to the Rwandan diet as a source of protein, but “climbers” also help protect against soil erosion, and some of the new improved varieties released in the country by the Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB) – through the CIAT-co-ordinated Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA) – are disease resistant and higher in essential nutrients like iron and zinc.

In just a few years the improved varieties have become the beans-of-choice for many smallholders, and their high productivity has transformed beans in Rwanda from subsistence to cash crops. As you’ll see in this photofilm, the country has quickly become a bean exporter.

While far from a magic bullet, improved climbing beans could be one in a broad package of measures that could help ease the effects of intense – and increasing – population pressure in Rwanda.

See also:
CIAT Blog – War for food, war for space – the future of Central Africa?
The Guardian – Climbing beans improve life for Rwandan farmers – in pictures
CGIAR Stories of Change – Rwanda: Climbing beans – an upward spiral

Soon you can kiss the headaches goodbye. The coordinating team of the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA) has just finished designing a “mega-database” to hold its vast vaults of bean research. Once up and running, all PABRA research, including which beans have been released and where, the impact of new farming techniques adopted in different countries, and progress in breeding nutrient rich varieties, will be available online for anyone to access.

The database was one of a number of activities discussed by the PABRA coordinating team in Arusha, Tanzania, last week. They also discussed progress in 2012, the forthcoming PABRA stakeholder forum – where members will chart the way forward for the next five years of bean research in Africa – and started planning for the next phase of PABRA, beginning April 2014.

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Tropical Grasslands – Forrajes Tropicales will be an open-access, online journal, featuring articles in English and Spanish. It will be published three times-a-year, and the submission, review and publication of articles will be free-of-charge.

Published by CIAT, sponsorship for the journal comes from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (CATAS), together with a substantial contribution from an anonymous private donor in honour of the late Dr. José M. Toledo, who led CIAT’s Tropical Pastures Program during the 1980s.

According to Michael Peters, leader of CIAT’s Tropical Forages research program, the decision to launch the journal reflects the increasing recognition of the critical role of improved grasslands in sustainable agriculture, and the need to ensure the supporting science is widely available.

“Over 70% of agricultural land in the tropics is forages – mostly in the form of grazing lands,” he said. “If you want to show you’re serious about food security, poverty alleviation, the environment and climate change, you have to show that you’re serious about grasslands.

“For the last three years there has been no specialised scientific journal entirely focusing on tropical forages research and utilisation. It’s time to change that.”

Tropical Grasslands – Forrajes Tropicales will follow in the tradition of the Spanish-only CIAT journal Pasturas Tropicales, last published in early 2007, and the Tropical Grasslands journal of the Tropical Grassland Society of Australia, last published in 2010. Lyle Winks, himself the former editor of Tropical Grasslands, will feature as the new journal’s English editor; CIAT’s Rainer Schultze-Kraft will be in charge of submissions in Spanish.

“We’re well aware that livestock production is currently responsible for some of the most damaging environmental impacts in the agricultural sector,” said Bob Clements, formerly director of ACIAR. “But science can help show that well-managed improved pasture and forage systems based on improved forage grasses can help reduce this burden and demonstrate that livestock production can be both profitable and sustainable.

“Tropical Grasslands – Forrajes Tropicales will ensure that the latest research is properly validated and instantly accessible to all.”

The journal, which was formally launched by CATAS, ACIAR and CIAT in Haikou, Hainan, China, earlier this month, is now inviting submissions via its website. It also expects to produce a special edition second based on the 22^nd International Grasslands Congress, in Sydney, Australia from 15-19^th September 2013.

So it’s great to see that a recent documentary about climate change and smallholder coffee production in Colombia finally unites these two beacons of CIAT’s climate change research with the former US Vice President, Nobel Laureate and climate change activist.

Aired as part of The Climate Reality Project – founded and chaired by Mr Gore himself – the five-minute film featured in a recent 24-hour online stream of specially-commissioned climate change documentaries and panel discussions, aimed at raising awareness of climate change and building a global movement to tackle it. Last year 9 million people tuned in to watch.

In advance of this year’s broadcast, Andy, Peter and a film crew from the Project travelled to Colombia’s Cauca department, to lift the lid on the impacts of climate change on coffee production there. To watch it, click the screen above and scroll to 05:28. You’ll almost certainly recognise a few familiar faces from our 2010 photofilm series Two Degrees Up, as well as seeing Andy and Peter in action. Mr Gore is part of the panel discussion that immediately follows the documentary.

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