Keith Armstrong has provided us with an overview of fodder oats worldwide with particular emphasis on the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region. In this brief connecting paper I want to highlight two points:

(i)            Firstly, I can add to Keith’s paper by distributing some statistics from the FAO database, which will provide you with information about the area of oats worldwide in the period 1990-2001. [See below for data on world harvested oats area (ha), oats production (Mt) and oats seed (Mt). To these I would add that the world's oats in hectares has declined from 38,260,751 ha (in 1961); 30,677,761 ha (1970); 24,530,30 ha (1980); 20,591,695 ha (1990) to 13,211,700 ha in 2001. According to a recent ESCORENA publication the number of hectares of oats in the world has decreased by more than half over the last 50 years owing to the reduction of oat acreage in USA, Canada and Europe, oats having been replaced by other crops such as maize and barley. Not withstanding this, and although oats have mainly been grown for grain production, oats has some importance as a green fodder and for making silage and haylage. As we have seen in the Hindu Kush-Himalayas it is this forage or fodder aspect on which we want to focus.

(ii)          So secondly, I want to stress that as we have heard, two key areas are a) the problem of fodder deficits and b) the need for new fodder technologies. Fodder oats offer a real opportunity for farmers to provide feed during periods when little green feed is available. Particularly for small farmers with dairy animals, the lack of feed in the winter months is a real problem. With supplies of fodder oats available in these winter months (as illustrated in the booklet you have already received copies of, by Dost Muhammad: Fodder Success Story) milk production can be maintained. Tsering Gyaltsen has also mentioned that oats may have a role in providing winter feeds as hay in the yak system at 4000m. As fodder oats has this considerable potential possibly we should be thinking as a Group of how we might proceed to evaluate various fodder oat cultivars that might have potential in these mountain regions and which could bring improved livelihoods to some of the poor farmers who live throughout this region. Each country brought quantities of seed of their best fodder oat cultivars. We hope that each country will take away seed of cultivars from all other countries for bulking in their own country. Tsering Gyaltsen will be organizing this so please ensure that you sign the undertaking regarding use of cultivars initially for trial purpose only and have labeled bags to take away with you, which you will initially bulk up so that you have sufficient seed to carry out trials. We can further discuss this and especially tomorrow when we have the business session and discuss possible WG Activities. If the idea of an active fodder oat network is endorsed we could be thinking of a series of trials at different elevations in the different countries, mainly on farmers on fields to evaluate the various cultivars.

Possible steps in the Fodder Oat Network could be:

-               Adoption of the concept in our business session;

-               All countries sign the undertaking regarding use of seed of trial purpose only (and non-commercial use);

-               With appropriate phytosanitary certification seeds of various cultivars are taken by the National Coordinators and representatives form each participating country;

-               Countries agree to initially establish plots of each cultivars in somewhat isolated areas on their central research station, for observation, evaluation, selection of the most promising cultivars and then multiplication to generate sufficient seed for the later trials;

-               Adopt the trial protocol drafted by NZ scientists for the FAO TAPAFON Fodder Oat Network;

-               Establish trials at different elevations/in different systems if possible on farmers fields with their full participation (plus research station if desired) and possibly also use various combinations such as oats and vetch; undertake trials if possible within existing oat evaluation programmes so that the work is institutionalised and not conducted separately from national programmes; 

-               Data feed back to FAO

-               Continued involvement of Keith Armstrong;

-               Discuss and evaluate progress and results at the next TAPAFON meeting;

-               Continue trials for at least 3-4 years.

Therefore before we listen to the country fodder oats papers by participants from Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Tibet (China) it was felt that it would be good to introduce the idea of possibly having a Fodder Oat Network to evaluate fodder oat germplasm throughout the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region. Introducing the idea now will give you the opportunity to discuss this as you listen to more papers in this session and before we have the closing plenary session where we will discuss Working Group activities.

So at this stage I wish to introduce Mr. Keith Armstrong once more who will present a paper entitled: “Fodder Oats: How trials might be initiated in the Himalayan region to evaluate germplasm”.

Oats data from the FAO databases