Tensions between international donors and the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR), which is a leading institution bringing together thousands of scientists from the developing world, leave an uncertain future for funds for the group.
CGIAR is formed of 15 international centres. The tensions first broke out during the first Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD), which took place last week in Montpellier, France. The donors want a change in the way money is spent. Rather than going directly the centres, they want it to go to tackling specific problems with a results-driven approach, as reported earlier on Nature News.
However, the centres are worried this might affect them negatively if it is not planned out correctly.
Dr. Mahmoud Solh, director of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which is based in Aleppo, Syria, voiced his concerns. He is worried that this shift will mean the centres will not be able to maintain their infrastructure properly.
“In ICARDA, we have a research station which is about 1,000 hectares. We have several labs on biotechnology, bio-safety, plant pathology, entomology, and many others,” he said. “We also have big fields where we do all our breeding work with huge machinery for planting and land moderation.”
“All of these require new equipment and updated machineries. So if we talk about mega-programmes support only then the institutions may lag behind in technology.”
Even more important is support for the gene-banks in the centres. At ICARDA alone, the gene-banks hold about 133,000 genetic sources from all over the world including wheat, fava beans, forages, etc. The huge facilities that house them require constant funding to keep it running optimally.
“We have to move carefully. We feel that the new system has lots to offer but we have to be careful in ensuring that nothing falls between the cracks as we move from an old system to the new system,” Solh added.
However, the new suggested reforms at CGIAR promise to solve many glaring problems that have plagued the huge body for a while. It promises to cut out overlap in research and effort, as well as promoting more inter-centre collaboration and streamlining the research process.
The meeting in Montpellier only opened the lid but discussions on the reform will continue on for a while. The end result will be particularly interesting because, as Solh and Adel El-Beltagy, the outgoing chair of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), point on in a commentary published here on Nature Middle East, agricultural research will, in the future, play the biggest role in food security for the Middle East.