Bill Gates Calls International Response to Helping Poor Farmers  Outdated and Inefficient, Outlines Changes Needed to Feed 1 Billion Hungry

Announces nearly $200 million in new agriculture grants, bringing foundation total to over $2 billion

ROME — Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told the international agricultural community it had fallen short of delivering the help small farmers in developing countries need, when they need it. In a speech delivered at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Gates asked the UN bodies responsible for fighting hunger and poverty to unite around a common global target for sustainable productivity growth to guide and measure their efforts.
Continue reading Bill Gates Calls International Response to Helping Poor Farmers

Feeding the forgotten poor chronicles agriculturist’s perspectives in tackling poverty and hunger

William D. Dar

Director General, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, India.

Article for the Times Disaster Management; January 2012 issue.

Several crises confront agriculture today, and their confluence, if unabated, will lead to a ‘perfect storm’ triggering a global disaster of unprecedented proportions. Warming temperatures, droughts, floods, increasing land degradation, rising food prices, zooming energy demand and population explosion are creating extreme challenges to feed the world.
A rising perfect storm
Climate change is real and the world is experiencing related impacts in terms of warmer temperatures for longer periods, prolonged drought and widespread floods. The effects of climate change are going to be borne by all, most especially the poorest of the poor. In the drylands, the impact of climate change on rainfall pattern is not going to be temporary but is likely to be the rule rather than the exception.

In terms of drought, the year 2011 has seen the worst in six decades inflicting untold suffering to 12 million people in the Horn Of Africa covering Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda. Hundreds of thousands of people have left their homes, with famine conditions lasting until December. In 2009, Niger was wracked by a severe drought that slashed grain production, bringing hunger to over 7 million people (more than half of the country’s population). In India, the World Bank predicts the possibility of declining yields of major dryland crops in Andhra Pradesh together with the dropping of rice production in Orissa’s flood-prone coastal regions by 12 percent due to climate change.

On the other hand, Thailand’s worst flooding in 50 years has reduced the country’s rice harvest by over 10 percent, while the inundation cut the yields in Cambodia by 12 percent, in Laos by 7.5 percent, and in the Philippines by 6 percent. The reduced harvest of these countries and controlled rice exports by China and India have resulted in supply shortages which made food prices soar in the world market. This is compounded by the skyrocketing energy demand by emerging economies, reducing land area for food production in place for biofuels.

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Nature Biotechnology (2011)  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2022

Draft genome sequence of pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan), an orphan legume crop of resource-poor farmers

Rajeev K Varshney et al.

Pigeonpea is an important legume food crop grown primarily by smallholder farmers in many semi-arid tropical regions of the world. We used the Illumina next-generation sequencing platform to generate 237.2 Gb of sequence, which along with Sanger-based bacterial artificial chromosome end sequences and a genetic map, we assembled into scaffolds representing 72.7% (605.78 Mb) of the 833.07 Mb pigeonpea genome. Genome analysis predicted 48,680 genes for pigeonpea and also showed the potential role that certain gene families, for example, drought tolerance–related genes, have played throughout the domestication of pigeonpea and the evolution of its ancestors. Although we found a few segmental duplication events, we did not observe the recent genome-wide duplication events observed in soybean. This reference genome sequence will facilitate the identification of the genetic basis of agronomically important traits, and accelerate the development of improved pigeonpea varieties that could improve food security in many developing countries.

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