The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is opening a new regional office to cover agricultural research and training in the Arabian Peninsula. The office will be in Dubai, but will cover the whole Arabian Peninsula region.
The siting of the office in Dubai has been made possible through the generous cooperation and assistance of the H.E. Saeed Al-Raqabani, the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The formal opening of the new Regional Office of the ICARDA Arabian Peninsula Program will take place on 8 January 1997 in the presence of high-ranking officials from the UAE. ICARDA's Director General, Prof. Adel El-Beltagy, will attend with a delegation of senior staff.
"ICARDA's mode of operation is based around cooperation with national programs, without which we would not achieve much. I am very grateful to H.E. Saeed Al-Raqabani and his colleagues for their wholehearted cooperation and encouragement," said Prof. El-Beltagy before the official opening. "The West Asia and North Africa region where ICARDA and its partners work has a generally harsh environment for agricultural production, but the conditions in the Arabian Peninsula are the harshest of them all. It's a worthwhile challenge for anyone who cares about sustainable agricultural development in difficult, fragile environments."
Founded in 1977, ICARDA is part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which has 16 international agricultural research centers in different parts of the world. The CGIAR operates under the umbrella of the World Bank, but has other co-sponsors, including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). ICARDA itself is based at Aleppo, Syria, but has five other regional programs besides the Arabian Peninsula, covering North Africa (based in Morocco and Tunisia), West Asia (based in Amman, Jordan), the Highland regions (based in Ankara, Turkey), the Nile Valley and Red Sea (based in Cairo, Egypt), and Latin America (based in Mexico). ICARDA's responsibility is to attain a sustainable increase in the productivity of agriculture in the dry areas within the context of the natural-resource base; that is, the available soil, water and genetic resources. It also has a global responsibility for on-farm water-use efficiency, for small-ruminant and rangeland management in dry areas, and for the improvement of crops such as lentil, barley, and faba bean; and a regional mandate for improvement of wheat and chickpea. However, in the case of the Arabian Peninsula Regional Program, the stress will be on meeting special research priorities identified by national agricultural research programs and responding to their particular needs.
Phase I of the project (1988-1995) was financed by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD), and was run from ICARDA's Aleppo headquarters. Phase II of the Project is co-financed by AFESD and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and involves seven countries in the region.
The partners will work towards food security in the Arabian Peninsula through increased productivity of field crops and livestock, based on optimization of water-use efficiency, conservation of native plant species, prevention of soil degradation and desertification, and strengthened cooperation among participating countries with regional and international organizations. Much work will be done for the benefit of the whole region on research stations at Al Zaied, Al Ain and Ras Al Khaimah in collaboration with the UAE Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and UAE University.
In a Regional Steering Committee Meeting involving the member countries, held at ICARDA during 25-26 September 1996, it was agreed that the following priority research areas will be emphasized for regional cooperation: on-farm water-use efficiency; crop tolerance to abiotic stresses such as drought; rangelands and forages; and protected agriculture.
To mark the beginning of Phase II, ICARDA has appointed a new Regional Program Coordinator. He is Dr John Peacock, a plant physiologist with many years of experience both with ICARDA and earlier with its sister Center, ICRISAT, based in Hyderabad in India. "I am looking forward to coordinating this project," he said, prior to the formal opening.