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Showcasing Better Crops For Egypt

Published Date
March 23, 2021
Published by
ICARDA Communication Team
Sids Visit
Sids Visit

It is thanks to the support of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and our partners the Egyptian Agricultural Research Center (ARC) that this work is made possible.

Beni Sweif, March 22 

ICARDA and Egypt partners the Agricultural Research Center (ARC) invited leading scientists, agronomists, and farmers to a field day at the ICARDA/ARC Sids Crop Research station, to showcase climate-smart and high-yielding new varieties of crops crucial to food security in Egypt. 

Mr. Aly Abousabaa, ICARDA's Director General explained how the new crops being developed through partnerships with country research institutions are tailored to regional challenges.

“These new improved varieties contribute to improving food and nutrition security not just in Egypt, but across all the dry areas,” he said. “It is with the early inclusion of national research partners and the farmers themselves, that makes sure our innovations are tailored to the context they are meant for”.

Dr. Chandra Shekhar Biradar, who leads ICARDA’s research team on GeoAgro and the digitalization of research, emphasized the importance of field stations like at Sids to demonstrate the viability of new crop varieties to local farmers and improve national scale-up.

“This is the most efficient way for farmers to observe how sturdy and high-yielding the varieties we develop in the lab can be, once cultivated in the field,” he said, adding that broad adoption by farmers across Egypt paves the way for wider scaling of successful new crop varieties.
Sids Farmer

Dr. Mohamed Soliman, Director of ARC, took part in the field visit led by Dr. Heba Saleh, a faba bean expert at ARC whose research is mostly conducted at the Sids station. 

Bezaiet Dessalegn a Social Scientist at ICARDA who leads the GIZ-funded iNASHR project explained that in Arabic, “Nashr” means dissemination.

“And that is exactly the point of our partnerships. ICARDA, ARC and Access Agriculture help to disseminate the new technologies, new seeds and new farming practices to build trust in the people who count – farmers. That trust is the only way to ensure food and nutrition security across Egypt”
iNashrLogos

 

 

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