Dimensions of need - The challenge of food production


Rice	Barley
New high-yielding varieties of staple crops can help to provide food security for increasing populations.

Until the second half of this century, agricultural research focused largely on the needs of industrialized countries; where it reached the developing countries, it was directed for the most part towards crops that were important to the developed world. After the Second World War - and particularly after the food crisis of the 1960s - the focus began to change. International research centres were founded and local scientists trained. Sub-Saharan Africa now has four times more scientists than it did in 1961, although expenditure on research has fallen.

Research in Mexico and the Philippines in the 1950s and 1960s led to the development of the high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice that launched the Green Revolution. Between 1950 and 1980, production of food in the developing world rose by an average of 3 percent a year, outstripping population growth. India's wheat production trebled between 1967 and 1982; rice production in the Philippines doubled between 1960 and 1980. Today, high-yielding varieties cover half the world's wheatlands and most of its rice paddies. The extra rice produced, alone, feeds 700 million people.

The success of the first high-yielding varieties depended on the availability of water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides and on the use of machinery - favouring prosperous farmers and those with access to water and transport. The revolution was mostly confined to Asia and parts of Latin America, but Africa was hardly touched.

As each new variety usually lasted for only three to four years before adaptation of pests and diseases caused its resistance to break down, scientists had to keep breeding new strains. Over 1 000 new varieties of rice have been launched since 1966.

There is now a new concentration on development of crops to suit less favourable soils and climates: new varieties of wheat which will grow in drought-prone climates are being developed as are strains of rice suited to the acid soils of Latin America's savannahs and the poor lowland soils of South and Southeast Asia. A hybrid rice developed in China has raised hopes of a new miracle rice which will help to boost harvests by the 74 percent that will be needed by 2020. Such breakthroughs are urgently needed: rice yields in Asia seem to have levelled out even though the population continues to increase.

Meanwhile other international research centres, set up in the 1960s and 1970s, have focused on other crops. Recent successes include new strains of faba bean the "poor man's food" - which have transformed Egypt from an importer to an exporter of the crop; a sweet sorghum, developed in China, which is used as animal feed and for the production of alcohol for fuel; high-yielding varieties of cassava - Africa's most widely grown staple food - which doubled yields in the 1980s and are set to do so again; and a hybrid pigeon pea which offers the hope of a "green revolution" in pulses. Research has also improved methods of growing crops, such as the discovery of ways of applying fertilizer more efficiently to Chinese cabbage crops.

In all this, scientists are increasingly aware that progress depends on listening to the farmers and drawing on their own knowledge and experience.

Past focus	Recent additional emphasis

CROPS
Non-food and cash crops	Upgrading subsistence food crops
Large-scale producers	Small-scale producers
Prime land	Marginal land
Increased productivity	Sustainable production
Higher-yielding cultivars	Stress-tolerant cultivars
Mechanization	Animal traction
Monocultures	Intercropping
Irrigation	Rain-fed agriculture
Mineral fertilizers	Nutrient recycling
Chemical pesticides	Integrated pest management
Limited number of crops	Crop diversification

LIVESTOCK
Cattle	Small ruminants and other small livestock/poultry species
Large-scale producers	Small-scale producers
Traditional pastures	Improved dryland pastures
Capital-intensive production	Extensive production
Capital-intensive production	Improved feed quantity and quality

FISH
Commercial off-shore fisheries	In-shore, inland artisanal fisheries, aquaculture
Commercial off-shore fisheries	Replenishment of stock
Increased production	Increased fishing efficiency
	Reduced post-harvest losses
	Improved monitoring of stocks
	Enhancement of marine environment
Development of boats and gear	Alternative energy propulsion
Development of boats and gear	Small-scale fishing technologies

TREES
Single species plantations	Multipurpose tree crops
Industrial forestry	Community forestry/agroforestry
	Women in forestry
	Non-timber forest products
	Trees for watershed management
	Trees for environmental improvement
	Management of protected areas

CIMMYT International Centre for Improvement of Wheat and Maize, Lisboa, Mexico

ICARDA International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, Aleppo, Syria

ICLARM International Centre for Living Aquatic Resources Management, Manila, Philippines

ICRISAT International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Andhra Pradesh, India

IFPRI International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C., United States

IPGRI International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (successor to the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources, IBPGR), Rome, Italy

ISNAR International Service for National Agricultural Research, The Hague, Netherlands

Research and development has produced hardier plants with shorter growing times:

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was set up in 1971. It coordinates a global network of 16 international centres - 13 of them in the developing world - and national centres. It promotes research on food production and natural resources management and mobilizes donor support.

The CGIAR centres both develop new crop varieties and conserve the genetic resources which provide the raw material for research. They are situated in, or near, most of the richest regions of biological diversity where crops originated in the wild. They house the world's largest ex situ collections of plant genetic resources: the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, for instance, conserves over 86 000 rice varieties and wild species.

Such collections play an important part in protecting food supplies: a Turkish variety of wheat, collected in 1948 and ignored for many years, has recently been found to carry genes resistant to a whole array of diseases which threaten modern crops.

When war disrupts agriculture and farmers must eat their seeds to survive, indigenous varieties can disappear. In 1986 the IRRI reintroduced rice strains to Cambodia which had been lost during the civil war, while the CGIAR Seeds of Hope programme is replicating seeds in a bid to restore Rwanda's agriculture and genetic diversity.

CGIAR's best known work remains the development of new varieties of crops. It is breeding strains suited to poor farmers, who cannot afford heavy chemical inputs, and which will tolerate harsh conditions. Some centres concentrate on particular crop species, while the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, focuses on farm animals. Other centres are devoted to fisheries, forestry, food policy, irrigation and dryland management.


Between 1950 and 1980 food production in developing countries grew at an average of 3 percent a year, a rate that exceeded that of population growth. This unparalleled increase, largely due to the adoption of new high-yielding varieties, bought time for the development of further solutions to world food problems.	Future food security depends on high-yielding varieties of staple foods.