Icrisat's 'Alliance' effort bears fruit

The 'Alliance of Future Harvest Centres' adopted last year by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (Icrisat) and 14 international agricultural research centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), for improving agricultural productivity through research and rural livelihood has yielded good results.

Underlining the keyrole played by Icrisat in the adoption of the global agricultural research alliance, William Dar, director general, Icrisat, said, "We conceptualised the alliance last year and it has grown to address complex issues pertaining to improvement in research efficiency and effectiveness."

The CGIAR is an international consortium of 65 members including agricultural research institutes.

Addressing the media on the eve of the conclusion of the annual day celebrations of Icrisat, Dar said, "This year was a watershed for Icrisat, where we could enhance capacities of our partners such as the civil service organisations and the private sector."

Icrisat has been promoting early maturing and short-duration legume varieties in the Indo-Gangetic plain as it will incorporate biomass and inorganic matter in the soil in the end, he said.

It has been observed that declining fertility and productivity of the soils in the Indo-Gangetic plain was because the soils in these areas were sick, he added.

Though the global agricultural research alliance was adopted last year and the CGIAR centres had already started working on projects that aligned their strengths, it was only last week that it was formally adopted at the annual general meeting of the CGIAR held at Marrakech in Morocco.

Earlier this year, Icrisat in collaboration with five other CGIAR centres launched the 'Healing Wounds' initiative to help rehabilitate agriculture in the tsunami-hit villages of Tamil Nadu.

The alliance has taken policy initiatives in eastern and southern Africa (ESA) and west and central Africa (WCA), and was also reviewing and refining the performance indicators for the centres.

The centres were upgrading their gene banks and important databases under a $17-mn global public goods upgrading project funded by the World Bank.