Demand for agricultural research increasing

MARK COLVIN: The leader of one of the world's biggest agronomy centres hopes the current drought in America and Europe will focus global attention on the need for agricultural research.

Over the past 45 years, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT, has helped small-holder farmers in South America, Asia and Africa to improve their lives as well as their yields, and Australia has played a role too.

The centre's director Dr Ruben Echeverría says there are plenty of challenges ahead, but some big gains have also been made since CIAT was established in 1967.

RUBEN ECHEVERRIA: It was set up because at that time there was food price spikes. That sounds familiar now. So it was kind of a little panic on what's going to happen, population growing, lack of food. So CIAT was created to look at the humid tropics, how to increase food, reduce poverty in the humid tropics. 

Originally in Latin America but after 10 or 15 years of operations CIAT became global. So we've been working in Africa and Asia for the past almost 30 years.

ANNA VIDOT: What would you consider some of the great achievements, some of the things that CIAT's been able to achieve over that time? 

RUBEN ECHEVERRIA: So from the very beginning CIAT first had to map what CIAT was going to do and they found out that rice and beans are what poor people eat in the tropics, at least in Latin America at the time.

So the Rice and Bean Research Program started, then they move into cassava and then into forages. And the largest documented impact has been in rice; about 80 per cent of all rice in Latin America has some attribution to CIAT research.

And then the other three commodities we have documented the impacts of, improving yields, improving the agronomy. Lately, working all the way into more sophisticated things like drought tolerance.

In Africa CIAT has been very, very active on beans. And that has been a huge success, also documented in Africa, climbing beans. And then in Asia mainly has been forages and cassava. 

ANNA VIDOT: And of course it's 45 years on now but it's not the end of the process at CIAT. So what are the priorities for the organisation going forwards? 

RUBEN ECHEVERRIA: Well, first you talk about time lags, most of the research results that we're seeing now are the investments of funding that we got in the '80s or in the '90s.

It takes 15 years, for example, to develop a new rice variety perhaps or improve it here and there. So there's a huge pipeline of research that cannot be turned on and off and that's one of the major issues that management of these centres are facing all the time; is how to continue to have funding long term. 

ANNA VIDOT: Here within Australia we've had a debate about the role of government versus the private sector in funding agricultural research. From that global perspective, in terms of tropical agricultural, what kind of investment is there from governments and from the private sector for work like yours? 

RUBEN ECHEVERRIA: First of all both investments are needed; both are needed because they do different things. In the tropics, where we were and with poverty, there's not too much private sector to speak of. 

Our funding comes from grants from the World Bank, from Asia, AusAID and so on; either bilateral agencies who put together money to say okay do research for this area, for this crop for two or three years. 

But it's still a struggle. I think now we are facing the perfect storm. We have a growing population globally, less water, less land and the investments in research to face those challenges is not increasing fast enough.

If the drought, the current drought in Europe and in the US continues you're going to see quite a bit of a food price increase which will remind everybody what happened with agricultural research. 

I am an optimistic and I think the perfect storm has a solution which is through science. And we also hope that we ourselves do a bit of homework; how to use better the money that we are given to do it, particularly the taxpayers' money, which is hard to find. 

TIM PAMER: Dr Ruben Echeverría, the director of CIAT, the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, which is based in Colombia. And he was speaking to Anna Vidot on a recent trip to Canberra.

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