ICRISAT calls for public-private-people partnerships

This is the Inaugural Address for the International Conference on Plant Nutrition being held 11-13 August 2010 at the Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh campus of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT. The main organizers of the conference are ICRISAT and Infinitus Agri; the theme is “Plant Nutrition for Another Green Revolution.” The Chair of the organizing committee is William Dar; the Convener is Y Durgaprasad of Infinitus Agri. The original title of the manuscript is “Soil Health and Plant Nutrition: Critical Drivers for Food Security.”

William D Dar
Director General, ICRISAT

In this part of India, you will see first-hand the severity of the problems of plant nutrition and soil health in the tropics, and how we in the Institute strive to address them to ensure the food and nutritional security of the poor and hungry.

Being experts in the area of plant nutrition, you are well aware of its intricacies and importance in sustainable food production. Your work in plant nutrition is so critical and important because of the need to ensure food for the more than six billion people on earth today.

But more important is the need to appreciate and internalize the urgency to help the one billion poor people who go hungry to bed every night.

Most of the world’s hungry and poor live in rural areas in Asia and Africa. Together, China and India account for over 363 million hungry people, followed by 204 million in sub-Saharan Africa.

The FAO estimates that the number of undernourished people as of 2009 was 1.02 billion. Childhood malnutrition is higher in dryland Asia than in Africa (42% vs 27%). And most of the hungry and malnourished people live where the soils as well as water resources are degraded.

The 21st century has thrown up more challenges at us -- increasing land degradation and desertification, growing water scarcity and the need to produce more food to feed an ever-growing population.

To compound matters, a perfect storm of warming temperatures, droughts, floods, loss of biodiversity, rising food prices, zooming energy demands and population explosion are creating extreme challenges to feed the world.

Unless we find a way of tackling these crises confronting agriculture today, there is little hope for the poor.

But first, we must change our attitude towards the poor. Many of us fail because we only see the world from one perspective. You have the “the bird’s point-of-view” and “the worm’s point-of-view.” Like the eagle, we could fly high and quickly across great distances and from the air see many things that the worm on the ground cannot.

Yet, the worm’s perspective, its understanding of the actual conditions on the ground and mindset of the poor and the oppressed cannot be ignored. We need to strike a balance between these two perspectives to arrive at policies, plans and programs to support the poor and the hungry.

Sustainable and resilient agriculture involves the successful management of agricultural resources to satisfy human needs, while maintaining or enhancing the quality of the environment and conserving natural resources.

Soils in the dryland tropics are not only thirsty but hungry too and are under very high pressure as large numbers of people are dependent on it for their food, fiber, and fuel needs.

Plant nutrition is very tightly linked with soil organic matter content as it drives the complete cycle of plant nutrient release and availability. The challenge lies in improving soil organic matter content of tropical soils.

With climate change upon us, the need to enhance our work on capturing more carbon into the soil is essential. There are indications that this strategy will contribute a lot in addressing climate change.

However, merely finding scientific solutions to problems of soil health and nutrition will not do! More important is the need to make this knowledge available to billions of small, marginal and illiterate farmers in Asia and Africa and elsewhere in a cost-effective manner.

How else will they handle balanced plant nutrition on their farms? Unless scientists and change agents work with farmers, they will not be able to fully appreciate their problems.

Over the last 10 years, ICRISAT scientists have been involved in farmer participatory work with 250-600 small farmholders in more than 300 micro-watersheds (500 to 1000 ha) in Asia and Africa, to develop cost-effective and scientifically proven soil sampling techniques which are stratified using the toposequence and socioeconomic status of the farmers.

For instance, you will be surprised to know that our on-farm participatory soil analytical research in different states of India revealed that farmers’ fields in these states were not deficient in potash (in less than 10% of the fields); however, widespread deficiencies in zinc, boron, and sulphur were recorded (in 50 to 100% of the fields), along with nitrogen and phosphorus. In some districts even with subsistence agriculture and poverty, large numbers of farmers’ fields were showing sufficient levels of phosphorus resulting in phosphorus buildup. Such information is crucial for farmers to be able to manage plant nutrition schedules.

We have initiated the process of taking the science of soil analysis to the doorstep of farmers to equip them with timely and appropriate information they can use, the right inputs to be used at the right time and in appropriate quantities.

Another challenge lies in mapping nutrient deficiencies over vast areas. It is not enough to invest and establish laboratories; more importantly we need to train human resources to collect samples, analyze them and communicate the results to millions of small landholders who also need capacity enhancement.

So, the roadblocks are not at the level of scientific solutions but at the delivery and operational levels. Once we have evidence and solutions in place, convincing policymakers to come out with appropriate policies for sustainable development is critical.

In spite of policies in place, there are situations where timely supply of plant nutrients to farmers becomes a bottleneck, calling for public-private-people partnerships (PPPP). Hence, to get the desired impact of our scientific technologies, we need to adopt end-to-end approaches and consider the value chain of the impact pathway.

Based on this understanding, ICRISAT’s new Strategic Plan to 2020 focuses on harnessing markets to reduce poverty and hunger. We call this strategy IMOD, for “inclusive market-oriented development.” We see it as a dynamic progression from subsistence towards market-oriented agriculture.

It starts by increasing the production of staple food crops, converting deficits into surpluses that are sold into markets.

As food security is achieved, market connections are expanded to raise incomes further through high-value crops like fruits, vegetables, export crops, industrial raw materials, and other income-boosting products. Farm families have to be empowered and assisted along this development pathway.

During the course of this conference, I urge you to keep the small and marginal farmer at the center of your debates and to try to devise end-to-end solutions for the sustainable intensification of systems in the tropics and subtropics.

Ladies and gentlemen, the time to pull the small farmer out of the poverty trap has come. Concentrate your energies on developing sustainable nutrient management options. Let us together pledge to end poverty and hunger today!

Technorati Tags: public-private-people partnerships,marginal farmers,sustainable agriculture,plant nutrition,nutrient management,hunger,food