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International farm research — Why India should step up funding

If India wants to make its presence felt in the global geopolitical system, it must contribute more towards financing CGIAR institutions, especially as the demand for food is going to increase in the future.

Harish Damodaran

CIMMYT, IRRI, ICRISAT, ICARDA — these are acronyms that hardly ring a bell in popular recall. But they refer to institutions that have done more for the world than the UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, FAO and assorted other bodies whose expansions are known to any well-informed school-student.

CIMMYT is Spanish for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre at Mexico. Roughly three-fourths of the area under modern wheat varieties in developing countries today is based on germplasm or genetic material selected and improved by breeders at CIMMYT. The two semi-dwarf wheat strains — Lerma Rojo-64A and Sonora-64 — that launched India’s Green Revolution in the mid-1960s were developed by CIMMYT scientists led by the Nobel Laureate, Dr Norman Borlaug.

What CIMMYT and Dr Borlaug are to wheat, the Manila-based IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) and Dr Gurdev Khush have been to rice. In 1976, IRRI released IR-36, which, by the early 1980s, occupied over 11 million hectares globally, making it the most widely grown variety of any food crop the world had seen.

By the late-1980s, Dr Khush and his team had followed up IR-36 with two more blockbusters (IR-64 and IR-72) yielding three times more paddy per hectare and maturing 30-35 days earlier than the traditionally grown tall cultivars.

Likewise, we have ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) near Hyderabad and ICARDA (International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas) at Aleppo, Syria, that work on chickpea (chana), pigeon-pea (arhar), groundnut, pearl millet, sorghum, lentil and other dry-land crops. ICRISAT’s short-duration, fusarium wilt-resistant chickpea varieties such as ICCV-2 have produced a mini-revolution in Andhra Pradesh.

From the early 1990s, the State (which does not traditionally grow chana) has seen its area under the crop expand from some 60,000 hectares to 400,000 hectares, with output rising from 28,000 tonnes to 6,30,000 tonnes alongside a trebling of yields.

More recently, ICRISAT has essayed a breakthrough in hybrid pigeon-pea technology, capable of giving 3-4 tonnes a hectare and which, to quote the eminent scientist, Dr M. S. Swaminathan, can herald “a pulses revolution just in the same way as the dwarf varieties triggered the wheat and rice revolution in the 1960s”.

Global research system

CIMMYT, IRRI, ICRISAT, ICARDA and 11 other such centres are part of a network called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). They represent a global public sector research system, whose basic mandate is to generate knowledge and technology in the field of agriculture that is freely accessible to users (farmers or other research institutions).

This is unlike, say, Monsanto, which produces research as a private good, protected through exclusive right of use and not shareable unless specifically licensed by the company. The CGIAR system’s strength derives from its ability to pool genetic and scientific resources on a global scale and disseminate the know-how generated in collaboration with national research institutions.

Its centres maintain over 6,50,000 accessions of the world’s most important crops. ICRISAT’s gene-bank alone houses 1,20,000-odd samples of pearl millet, sorghum, chana, pigeon-pea and groundnut from 130 countries. It is material screened from this vast germplasm collection that goes towards breeding of new varieties incorporating desired traits.

The CGIAR institutions have specially benefited countries with established national agricultural research networks, such as India. The presence of publicly funded centres under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and State Agricultural Universities has enabled the country to effectively leverage the knowledge resources of the CGIAR system and adapt them to its local environments.

An example of this is the Lerma Rojo-64A and Sonora-64 wheats that, notwithstanding their high yields, found poor domestic acceptance — the reason being the deep red colour of their grains. The Indian scientists, then, applied ‘mutation breeding’ techniques to obtain a light-coloured grain mutant, Sharbati Sonora, from Sonora-64 and Pusa Lerma from Lerma Rojo-64A.

Similarly, PBW-343 — a workhorse variety covering 80 per cent of the wheat area of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — was a selection from CIMMYT’s ‘Attila’ lines. Unfortunately, this unique system of international public sector research is today under stress. For one, the exchange of germplasm material between the CGIAR centres and the national agricultural research institutions is not free the way it was in the heyday of the Green Revolution; the institution of the new global intellectual property regime has only furthered this tendency.

Under pressure

IRRI and ICRISAT have, in fact, already begun granting exclusive licenses for the use of their parental lines, with seed companies (including in the private sector) being allowed to bid for these and market the derived hybrids/varieties in those countries for which they have procured the rights.

Secondly, a large part of cutting-edge farm research — more so in the areas of plant biotechnology and transgenic breeding — has over the last decade moved to the private sector. Since 1996, the area under genetically modified (GM) crops worldwide has soared from 1.7 million hectares to 102 million hectares.

The development of GM cotton, soybean, maize and canola has largely been courtesy the likes of Monsanto, Bayer CropScience and Syngenta.

On the other hand, IRRI’s almost two-decades-long efforts to commercialise a Super Rice — a ‘new plant type’ promising a 25 per cent yield jump over the first-generation semi-dwarfs — have yet to show tangible results on farmers’ fields.

Even in hybrid rice, the real lead has come not from IRRI, but from China’s indigenous public sector breeding programme and seed companies.

Funds crunch

Much of the above fatigue has to do with a drying up of funds: In 2006, the combined budget of all the 15 CGIAR centres, at $458 million, was below the $780 million invested in farm R&D by Monsanto. Between 2005 and 2006, donor support to the system fell from $450 million to $426 million.

The main contributors to the $426 million were the US ($60.7 million), World Bank ($50 million), the UK ($44.1 million), rest of Europe ($124.8 million), Canada ($26.9 million), Australia ($10.1 million), Japan ($9.1 million), Rockefeller Foundation ($8.4 million) and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($7 million).

The developing countries put together gave $14.6 million, of which India’s share was a measly $4.1 million. A detailed break-up reveals the following project-wise funding by India: ‘Transgenics in chickpea & pigeon-pea for management of Heliothis and transgenics in groundnut’ ($0.50 million); ‘Transgenics in rice’ and ‘Varietal improvement of potato for biotic resistance’ ($0.20 million each); and ‘Quality Protein Maize’, ‘Lentil Improvement’ and ‘Kabuli chana improvement’ ($0.10 million each). If such were the sums committed, why commit at all!

India’s role

Clearly, a country aspiring for global leadership and a place in the UN Security Council ought to be doing much more for a system in which it (and the developing world as a whole) has a direct stake. The US President, Mr George Bush’s recent statements blaming rising consumption by Indians and Chinese for the spike in world food prices have drawn rightful condemnation.

It is a fact, though, that in the coming years, the country’s demand for food will, and should, go up significantly. Meeting this calls for huge investments in agricultural research and extension. The first wave that set in motion the Green Revolution was bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation, World Bank and Western governments — at a time when support to global public goods was viewed a strategic necessity, both as a hegemonic project to counter Soviet influence along with genuine concerns of food shortages fomenting social unrest in developing nations.

There are no such geopolitical compulsions driving the western world today to finance the CGIAR institutions. As a result, these centres find themselves not in a position to engage permanent staff, with scientists under constant pressure to identify projects and donors. Being literally forced to ‘earn’ their salaries by billing these into projects leaves them little freedom to do open-ended research of any long-term strategic importance.

The time has come for India to play a more meaningful role in the running of the CGIAR system that has served its interests all these years. A country with $300 billion-plus forex reserves can certainly commit upwards of $50 million a year for these institutions and in the process acquire greater say for those who are ostensible beneficiaries of their research.

Strategic investments of this nature would ultimately also help enhance India’s ‘soft power’ — much more than Bhangra, Beauty Queens and Bollywood.

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