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"Agriculture is the engine driving the economic growth of most developing countries, and plays a key role in poverty alleviation," said Prof. Dr Adel El-Beltagy, Director General, in his address to the distinguished guests to ICARDA on its Presentation Day on 25 April. The guests included high-ranking government officials, leaders of the national agricultural research systems in the countries of Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA), members of the diplomatic corps, members of the press, and other distinguished visitors.
He warned that human activity continues to create 'new' deserts at the same time as demographic pressures increase the demand for more food from the water-scarce areas of Central and West Asia and North Africa. Dr El-Beltagy underlined the role that ICARDA could play in defeating desertification, poverty and malnutrition.
"We have a strong conviction that agriculture can play a key role in poverty alleviation," he told visitors to the annual ICARDA Presentation Day at the Center headquarters near Aleppo, Syria.
Although just 70 square meters is the minimum area of arable land required to feed one person, even a medium-rate increase in population growth will make land scarcity a reality for about four billion people by the year 2050. Dr El-Beltagy pointed out over 800 million people already go hungry and two billion are malnourished in today's world.
Good arable land is lost to desertification through wind and water erosion, overgrazing, unsustainable farming practices that damage soil health--such as salinity and depletion of soil nutrients--and urbanization. The world loses over 6 million hectares of land per year to desertification. These deserts in more than 100 countries differ from the 'natural' deserts in being a result of human activity, and they can be controlled if the causes are recognized early enough.
ICARDA contributes to the control of desertification and overgrazing, biodiversity conservation, and developing new crop varieties tolerant to drought and heat. There is great potential for collaboration between ICARDA and international organizations such as JIRCAS of Japan in these areas, particularly in genetic transformation in ICARDA mandate crops to increase their resistance to the harsh climatic conditions of the dry areas--barley, lentil, faba bean and forage legumes on a global level and regionally for bread and durum wheats and chickpea--using the genes for drought and heat tolerance.
In spite of its scarcity, water continues to be misused in the CWANA region, said Dr El-Beltagy. As a result, the water table is falling, and aquifers are being depleted to exhaustion. "We must pay increased attention to water conservation to avoid any further worsening of this situation," he added.
Unabated population growth, projected to reach 8 billion by 2020, compounds these problems. About 86% of the projected population growth will take place in developing countries. Currently, more than one billion people inhabit the dry areas of the world. The five most economically disadvantaged states in the region are Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. GNP for more than 510 million people is less than 2 dollars a day per capita, and some 271 million live on one dollar a day.
Dr El-Beltagy did not underestimate the challenge to research institutions such as ICARDA. If per capita consumption of all grains remained constant at 1995 levels to the year 2020, the population projections showed a total aggregate grain consumption of about 323 million tonness in 29 CWANA countries. The expected total grain production by 2020 is about 247 million tonnes with 2% annual production growth rate.
Take away Turkey and Kazakstan and the 27-country CWANA grain gap in 1995 was about 54 million tons. This deficit could easily reach 114 million tonnes by 2020, worth US$ 14.8 billion at a grain price of $130/tonne
ICARDA's research is directed to improving crop yield and water-use efficiency in a variety of ways. Research on supplemental irrigation demonstrates that reducing the irrigation by 50% of the full irrigation requirement causes a yield loss of only 10%. Water saved can be used to irrigate additional areas that would otherwise remain unirrigated and less productive. With this strategy Syrian farmers participating in ICARDA trials have increased total wheat output by an average of 38%.
A multidisciplinary approach allows ICARDA to use both conventional and modern technologies. A three-year project on using remote sensing and geographic information system, or GIS, has identified areas of water-harvesting potential in Syria. Similar techniques are used in the Marsa Matrouh Resource Management Project in Egypt to identify sites for water harvesting.
A digital agroecological atlas has been developed for Syria, and a land suitability atlas is also being developed for Morocco, in collaboration with Moroccan researchers, to help develop appropriate strategies for drought mitigation in Morocco.
ICARDA is now heavily involved in a new partnership with the Central Asia and the Caucasus (CAC) region, comprising Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.
The region has 255 million hectares of rangelands, but the total number of small ruminants has dropped from 60 million in 1990 to 28 million in 1998 because of feed shortages. ICARDA has developed technologies for Central Asia, but these need to be fine-tuned to meet the specific requirements of the region. In this connection the Center is implementing a new project on crop-livestock integration in Central Asia, with funding from IFAD.
Another strategy is to develop new forage legume production systems for improved livestock productivity with better nutrition. The system introduces vetch in rotation with a cereal to replace cereal monocropping. Vetch provides good-quality feed for sheep and goats, besides raising yields of the following barley or wheat crop because of improved soil fertility and breaking the cycle of cereal diseases and pests. Vetch has been successfully introduced in China, Jordan, Morocco, Syria and Turkey.
Participatory research, involving farmers in selecting crop genotypes, is increasingly used by ICARDA. For example, in Eritrea where farmers are selecting barleys for further development, the likelihood of variety adoption is much improved.
More than 100 cultivars of barley developed from ICARDA-supplied germplasm have been released in 34 countries. Improving the nutritional and technological quality of wheat is another important objective in ICARDA improvement work. Biotechnological tools permit the use of the enormous amount of variability existing in the Center's collection of barley landraces for developing improved varieties.
ICARDA's biotech team is working on Hessian fly resistant durum varieties through the Dryland Durum Wheat Improvement Program, a joint effort with sister center, CIMMYT, and national partners in the region. Morocco has developed new cultivars resistant to Hessian fly, and is addressing the problems of root rot, leaf rust and wheat aphids; Tunisia is working on improving durum for resistance to drought; Algeria focuses on crop adaptation to the Atlas high plateau and on grain quality; while Turkey focuses on adaptation to severely-cold areas of the Anatolian plateau, crop nutritional disorders and grain quality.
Over 80 varieties of wheat have been released in WANA and South Europe. By almost quadrupling yields in Syria since the 1970s, about 3.5 million hectares of land has been saved, and total impact exceeds more than 500 million dollars per year. Good progress has been made in developing high-yielding and disease-resistant lentil lines in the major lentil-producing countries in WANA as well as South Asia. In Ethiopia, new, improved varieties and production packages of lentil resulted in a 70% yield increase without costly inputs, leading to 42% of farmers in the target areas adopting the new varieties.
The Center works with national programs on packages of faba-bean technology based on both new cultivars and improved agronomic practices. Farmers in Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia now obtain up to 200% extra yield.
ICARDA has been working to develop improved cultivars of grasspea that are nutritionally safe. These varieties will help prevent the development of lathyrism (paralysis of the legs) in human beings, caused by a neurotoxin contained in local grasspea varieties. In 1999, several promising lines were identified and shared with national program scientists. Also, through in vitro techniques, new clonal lines are being developed.
Dr El-Beltagy also drew attention to ICARDA's role in promoting in situ conservation of genetic resources of food and fruit crops important in the region. The Center is coordinating a major project on Dryland Agrobiodiversity, in which Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon are partners. The Project is supported by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) of the United Nations Environment Programme.
Training is also an essential activity in ICARDA's agenda. Since its inception, ICARDA has trained some 8000 researchers from national programs, including 715 from 45 countries in 1999.
Dr El-Beltagy expressed ICARDA's indebtedness to the donors who have been supporting its work. "On behalf of the Center I would like to say 'thank you' to all of them," he said.
For more information, please contact: W.Erskine@cgiar.org
About ICARDA: Established in 1977, ICARDA serves the entire developing world for the improvement of barley, lentil, and faba bean; and dry-area developing countries for the on-farm management of water, improvement of nutrition and productivity of small ruminants (sheep and goats), and rehabilitation and management of rangelands. In the Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA) region, ICARDA is responsible for the improvement of durum and bread wheats, chickpea, pasture and forage legumes and farming systems; and for the protection and enhancement of the natural resource base of water, land, and biodiversity.
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