What kind of a future do we envision for the world, and how can CIMMYT and its partners help build that future? During part of 2002 and nearly all of 2003, my staff and I took precious time out from the daily rush of our research to develop a new strategy for the Center.¹ The actual exercise involved the entire CIMMYT family, with a survey of more than 170 external stakeholders, a detailed analysis of global trends, reports by 20 internal work groups and task forces, and many, many meetings and conferences with staff, consultants, and Board members.

What drove us to the effort? There were a number of things, but a key point was this: despite the impressive advances in crop production throughout the developing world since the mid-1960s, the landscape of agriculture in developing countries continues to worsen in many areas, often wrapping subsistence farmers and their families in a strangle-hold of hunger and poverty.

Adding Value to
Development

CIMMYT helps free them through research on maize and wheat farming systems. Those systems occupy nearly 200 million hectares—a composite area larger than all of Mexico—throughout the developing world. Maize and wheat themselves account for roughly four-tenths of the world’s food and a quarter of the calories consumed in developing countries.

Our area of expertise is in applying quality science. At the same time, our focus on livelihoods means looking at where CIMMYT can apply science to add value—from field to market, to partnerships and
through participation, and to global public goods such as crop varieties or knowledge of resource-conserving farm practices. Adding value can also mean adding options, adding opportunities for employment, or adding diversity to cropping systems and diets.

Adding Value from
Field to Market

For farmers in developing countries, crops have both social and financial value and contribute in manifold ways to livelihoods. Household food security and economic resilience require not just high yields, but stable yields under all conditions. Crops able to withstand diseases and pests without the protection of agrochemicals contribute as well to the resilience of ecosystems. So we work hard to offer farmers maize and wheat varieties that carry such resistance in the seed itself. Grain must also have preferred characteristics—color, suitability for local dishes, among others—to be acceptable, and this has a direct bearing on farmers’ management of local genetic diversity, as is evident in the case of maize in southeastern Mexico. Moreover, food quality itself affects health and productivity, markedly so among the poor. Thus, CIMMYT and partners work to increase the nutritional value of maize and wheat in places, such as Ethiopia or Turkey, where these crops are mainstays of the poor.

Adding Value
through Participation

Cultivating broad, diverse, and healthy partnerships is another way the Center contributes to improved livelihoods. Partnerships constitute the muscle of our new strategy, but partnerships are not developed overnight. Since its inception, the Center has added value to partnerships, among other ways through training and collaboration, to ensure that research has results in people’s lives. Staff have creatively sought intervention points in impact pathways—places where a relatively small effort will open access to seed, knowledge, or other useful assets. Another way to open impact pathways is by identifying and abetting local champions of innovation. Through training and material support, the Center has assisted individuals with the vision, energy, and desire to catalyze change. Finally, the complexity and scale of certain challenges require multi-partner, multi-donor collaboration. Few organizations are in a position to establish such initiatives, but CIMMYT’s global network—recognized by external stakeholders as one of our key assets—goes from the ground up, including farmers, researchers, ministry of agriculture officials, and regional and national decisionmakers, among others.

Adding Value through
Research on Public Goods

Global public goods developed and freely offered by CIMMYT and partners include maize and wheat varieties, better cropping practices, other types of knowledge, capacity building, and publications, to name a few. Perhaps easiest to measure is the economic value of improved varieties. Use over the last few decades of rustresistant wheats have brought farmers economic benefits worth 5.3 billion 1990 USD, for an investment that is a mere fraction of that amount. CIMMYT is also applying—and helping others to apply—cutting-edge techniques to develop better crop varieties. And better cropping practices constitute a type of public good of particular relevance to farmers. With support from the Center and its partners, farmers from Kazakhstan to Uttar Pradesh are testing and adopting the practice of sowing on raised soil beds. As a result, they are increasing yields, saving tractor fuel, improving the efficiency of water use, and diversifying their cropping systems.

People Are
the Real Story

The heart of CIMMYT’s new vision is very simple: people. We see a world where the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor will be able to grow or buy the food they need. Where small-scale farmers who depend on maize and wheat will be able to move their families from subsistence to surplus. Where such farmers and their families are empowered to overcome vulnerability, to withstand the shocks that currently buffet their lives, to influence circumstances in their favor, and to recapture hope.

The stories in the pages that follow illustrate how CIMMYT is achieving its new vision. They also suggest that good science need not take place in a vacuum or remain hopelessly distanced from the realities of the poor; that research can actually be linked to livelihoods and make a difference. We are very excited about the possibilities opened by our new strategy, and hope you also feel excited when you read about this vision and about our work. Above all, we hope you feel moved to comment, question, and get involved.

Masa Iwanaga
Director General

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November, 2004