The CGIAR Mission

To achieve sustainable food security and reduce poverty in developing countries through scientific research and research-related activities in the fields of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, policy, and environment.

Why agricultural research matters

Rising food prices, concern over global climate change, the energy crisis and new interest in the potential of biofuels have ushered in a new era of challenge and opportunity for agriculture and natural resource management.

These global trends, while affecting people everywhere, have particularly high risks and consequences for the approximately 2.1 billion people who live on less than US $2 a day. About three-fourths of these people live in rural areas and depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Furthermore, higher food and energy prices will force poor consumers to make tradeoffs in their spending, drastically reducing their possibilities for improved well being.

Climate change, by worsening growing conditions for crops, will further strain the capacity of agricultural land and threaten the productivity growth vital for reducing poverty. Scientists estimate that rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns could cause agriculture production to drop by as much as 50 percent in may African countries and by 30 percent in Central and South Asia.

Strengthened investment in agricultural science at national and international levels is essential to meet these new and multi-faceted challenges. Moreover, there is a need to scale up such research to foster innovations for increased agriculture productivity to benefit the rural poor while conserving natural resources such as water, forests and fisheries.

According to the World Development Report 2008, investment in agriculture research has “paid off handsomely,” delivering an average rate of return of 43 percent in 700 development projects evaluated in developing countries. Clearly, strong programs of relevant and effective research must be at the top of the international development agenda, if the Millennium Development Goals of halving hunger and poverty by 2015 are to be met and if these gains are to be expanded in the decades to come.

An evolving strategic partnership

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), established in 1971, is a strategic partnership, whose 64 Members support 15 international Centers, working in collaboration with many hundreds of government and civil society organizations as well as private businesses around the world. CGIAR Members include 21 developing and 26 industrialized countries, four co-sponsors as well as 13 other international organizations. Today, more than 8,000 CGIAR scientists and staff are active in over 100 countries throughout the world.

The CGIAR generates cutting-edge science to foster sustainable agricultural growth that benefits the poor through stronger food security, better human nutrition and health, higher incomes and improved management of natural resources. The new crop varieties, knowledge and other products resulting from the CGIAR’s collaborative research are made widely available to individuals and organizations working for sustainable agricultural development throughout the world.

The priorities of CGIAR research are:

• Reducing hunger and malnutrition by producing more and better food through genetic improvement
• Sustaining agriculture biodiversity both in situ and ex situ
• Promoting opportunities for economic development and through agricultural diversification and high-value commodities and products
• Ensuring sustainable management and conservation of water, land and forests
• Improving policies and facilitating institutional innovation

A critical task for 11 of the CGIAR Centers is to maintain international genebanks, which preserve and make readily available the plant genetic resources that form the basis of food security worldwide.

In addition, the CGIAR implements several innovative “Challenge Program” designed to confront global or regional issues of vital importance. Implemented through broad-based research partnerships, Challenge Programs mobilize knowledge, technology and resources to solve those and other problems such as micronutrient deficiencies, which afflict more than three billion people; water scarcity, which already affects a third of the world’s population; and climate change, which poses a dire threat to rural livelihoods across the developing world.

The CGIAR is constantly striving for excellence. During 2008 a Change Management Initiative is in progress designed to ensure that in this rapidly changing external environment described earlier, the CGIAR is positioned to deliver new technologies and new knowledge which will deliver the best possible results. The Initiative will culminate in a forward looking strategy for the CGIAR.

The CGIAR is open to all countries and organizations that share a commitment to achieving sustainable agricultural development and are willing to invest financial, human and technical resources toward this end. Membership has expanded and diversified over the years, and the CGIAR is poised for further growth. CGIAR expenditures amounted to US$506 million in 2007, the single largest investment made to mobilize science for the benefit of the rural poor worldwide.

Benefits for the poor and the planet

International agricultural research has a strong record of delivering results that help confront the central development and environmental challenges of our time.

The science developed by the CGIAR-supported Centers and their partners has delivered significant gains in terms of reduced hunger and improved incomes for small farmers throughout much of the developing world. CGIAR research is much broader than agricultural productivity alone, encompassing a range of initiatives related to water, biodiversity, forests, fisheries and land conservation. It has advanced sustainable management and conservation practices in these sectors, therefore protecting millions of hectares of forest and grasslands, safeguarding biodiversity, and preventing land degradation.

Among the outcomes of that research are the following:

• Successful biological control of the cassava mealybug and green mite, both devastating pests of a root crop that is vital for food security in sub-Saharan Africa. The economic benefits of this work alone, estimated at more than $4 billion, are sufficient to cover almost the entire costs of CGIAR research conducted so far for Africa.
• New Rices for Africa, or NERICAs, which combine the high yields of Asian rice with African rice’s resistance to local pests and diseases. Currently sown on 200,000 hectares in upland areas, NERICAs are helping reduce national rice import bills and generating higher incomes in rural communities.
• More than 50 varieties of recently developed drought-tolerant maize varieties being grown on a total of about one million hectares across eastern and southern Africa.
• A flood-tolerant version of a rice variety grown on six million hectares in Bangladesh. The new variety enables farmers to obtain yields two to three times those of the non-tolerant version under prolonged submergence of rice crops, a situation that will become more common as a result of climate change.
• Widespread adoption of resource-conserving “zero-till” technology in the vital rice-wheat systems of South Asia. Employed by close to a half million farmers on more than 3.2 million hectares, this technology has generated benefits estimated at US$147 million through higher crop yields, lower production costs and savings in water and energy.
• An agroforestry system called “fertilizer tree fallows,” which renews soil fertility in Southern Africa, using on-farm resources. More than 66,000 farmers have adopted this technology in Zambia, where it has strengthened food security and reduced environmental damage, and the system is spreading in four neighboring countries.
• Information and tools used by conservationists to monitor some 37 million hectares of forest, resulting in better management of this diminishing resource and contributing to more sustainable livelihoods for forest dwellers.
• A new method for detecting aflatoxin, a deadly poison that infects crops, making them unfit for local consumption or export benefiting farmers throughout sub-Saharan Africa. This technology, together with a novel biological control method that has proved able to reduce aflatoxin by nearly 100 percent, is helping to curb this major threat to human health, especially in children, and to save millions of dollars in lost sales of food for export.
• A simple methodology for integrating agriculture with aquaculture to bolster income and food supplies in areas of southern Africa where the agricultural labor force has been devastated by HIV/AIDS. Under large-scale testing in Malawi, the method doubled the income of 1,200 households and dramatically increased fish consumption.
• A new approach to predicting the likely impact of climate change on major crops’ wild relatives, which are a key source of genes needed to enhance climate resilience, as well as valuable findings on the likely consequences of biofuels development in China and India for increasingly scarce water supplies.
• Increasing smallholder dairy production in Kenya improving childhood nutrition while generating jobs. This award-winning project with smallholder dairies has contributed up to 80 percent of the milk products sold in the country and strengthened local capacity to market milk products.

Click here for our page on Scientific Recognition.

The CGIAR Genebanks

CGIAR scientists play major roles in collecting, characterizing and conserving plant genetic resources. Eleven Centres together maintain over 650,000 samples of crop, forage and agroforestry genetic resources in the public domain. Read more on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and on the Standard Material Transfer Agreements (SMTAs).

Data on the identity, sources, characteristics and transfers to users of the germplasm samples held in Centre genebanks are available through the CGIAR System-wide Information Network for Genetic Resources (SINGER). To access SINGER, click here.

CGIAR Stakeholder Perceptions In 2006, the CGIAR commissioned GlobeScan Inc., a global public opinion and stakeholder research firm based in Canada, to study the perceptions of its key stakeholder groups (CGIAR Members and Center Partners). The survey shows that quality research is by far the most important driver of the CGIAR's overall reputation, while also identifying opportunities for improving the CGIAR's perceived performance. A report with the key results can be found here.