By Frank Rijsberman, Consortium CEO and Wayne Powell, Consortium Chief Science Officer, CGIAR Last month world leaders committed to a new Sustainable Development Agenda with 17 goals and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030. 69 of those targets relate to health, to food and to a sustainable planet. Providing a healthy diet for nine billion people from truly sustainable agri-food systems is going to be humanity’s greatest challenge in coming decades.
Not only are there an estimated 800 million people going hungry, but also close to 2 billion people are malnourished, lacking essential micro-nutrients, and some 2 billion people are overweight or obese. Unhealthy diets have overtaken smoking as the most important cause of death. Eighty percent of food found in a modern grocery store is highly processed with too much added sugar, and just not healthy. Only 9 percent of the maize (corn) grown in the United States is for human consumption—much of it used to produce corn syrup, while the remainder feeds animals or produces biofuel. Roughly a third of the food produced in the world is lost or wasted. And the agri-food systems that provide this unhealthy food are also seriously threatening the health of our planet. Currently they produce over 25 percent of greenhouse gases today and are set to produce a rapidly increasing share under a business-as-usual scenario. Agriculture is the largest cause of water scarcity, the primary cause of land degradation and deforestation, and is a key contributor to the pollution that kills lakes and seas.
Clearly, agriculture and sustainable agri-food systems are of critical importance to the future of humanity, but they need to change from being the problem to becoming the solution. Such a transformation will require a massive overhaul of our agri-food systems—from the seeds and fertilizers we use, to the way we manage ecosystems, food processing, food safety and food marketing. We need to support and communicate the need for behavioral change in the consumption of balanced, sustainable healthy diets.
The transformation of food systems will require rapid innovation, driven by targeted research. Investment in agri-food system research, including agri-food research for development, will have to be scaled up, but it will have to embrace a paradigm shift. More of the same type of research, focused on increasing productivity of staple cereals, is not going to be the answer. More investment is needed in nutrient dense crops such as legumes and sustainable agri-food systems need to be underpinned by the life sciences and an IT revolution. Publicly funded plant breeding needs to catch up with the modern molecular breeding methods deployed in the private sector, based on high-throughput, inexpensive genotyping, combined with big data approaches on shared cloud-based IT infrastructure, and linked to a network of high-resolution phenotyping sites in all major agro-ecologies. Sustainability needs to be addressed just as seriously through ecosystem services and landscape based approaches to maintain and recover the resilience of climate-smart agro-ecosystems for future generations.
CGIAR has a major role, indeed a responsibility, to transform agri-food systems and help achieve healthy diets for all. It needs rapidly scaled up investments—but it will need to demonstrate that it has an attractive plan that is worthy of investment. It must have clear plans with outcomes that help achieve the sustainable development agenda. Programs must be established through transparent consultation with all key stakeholders. Above all it must be aligned with the priorities of CGIAR partner countries; aligned with demand, and aligned with the priorities of the key partners who need to deliver impact on the ground.
A first good step in that direction was set through the development of CGIAR’s new 2016-2030 Strategy that is well aligned with the new Sustainable Development Agenda, and has clear and quantitative CGIAR targets.
Next, we are in the process of designing our new, next generation and investment ready research portfolio. It demonstrates we can deliver on this strategy—both at scale and with increased efficiency and effectiveness—to deliver value for our investors who face the constant pressure of choosing where to put their money for maximum impact.
We believe that this requires redesigning the current CGIAR research portfolio around a smaller number of programs. This would include a single program on genetics and diversity that links CGIAR’s collections of genetic resources to modernized breeding programs serving all crops as well as livestock and fish improvement. Also, a small number of agri-food systems programs would deliver innovation at scale in specific geographies through integrated plans for each of these sites, developed in close collaboration with development partners. Finally, it would have programs on climate change, nutrition and health, landscapes, and policies and institutions that engage with these agri-food system programs in the same geographies. We have laid out our vision for this new research agenda for the CGIAR in response to the CRP 2nd Call Pre-Proposals.
A radical overhaul of agri-food systems will require a paradigm shift and cannot be achieved by working exclusively along old, commodity-focused programs. To be successful it will require a small number of nimble programs, speeding up the cycle of innovation, and partnering more strategically with development and private sector partners to attract funding to invest in “state of the art,” shared research infrastructure, both in the lab and in the field. CGIAR needs to capitalize more on its core assets the genebanks, the networks of phenotyping field sites and the rich global partner networks—but it is time to do it collectively, as a system.
We must look outwards to embrace new science opportunities, new ways of doing business and fresh ways of partnering—re-gaining the confidence of investors in collaborative programs that add value. This is what is on the table and we urge centers and investors to embrace this proposal in the upcoming CGIAR Fund Council meeting early November in Washington DC.