Cassava, a crucial smallholder crop is often eclipsed in international research by the big staples like rice, wheat and maize – but it’s a CIAT priority crop.

Up to one billion people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa consume cassava on a daily basis – and that’s not to mention the hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia who produce cassava for the global starch industry.

Mr Gates calls attention to a number of wider issues, including levels of investment in international agricultural research and “critical” role of the CGIAR.

“Given the central role that food plays in human welfare and national stability, it is shocking—not to mention short-sighted and potentially dangerous—how little money is spent on agricultural research,” he writes.  “In total, only $3 billion per year is spent on researching the seven most  important crops. This includes $1.5 billion spent by countries, $1.2 billion by private companies, and $300 million by an agency called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Even though the CGIAR money is only 10 percent of the spending, it is critical because it focuses on the needs of poor countries. Very little of the country and private spending goes toward the priorities of small farmers in Africa or South Asia.”

Take a look at the letter in full for more on this, and the other priorities of the Foundation in 2012.

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The Climate Analogues online tool, developed by scientists at CIAT, the CGIAR’s research program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), and two UK universities, shows how the climate – and therefore the optimal areas for the production of certain crops – will change over the next 18 years.

It is hoped the tool will encourage exchanges of knowledge between communities in different parts of the world, to enable food producers to adapt.

It was officially unveiled during the United Nations COP17 climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, last month.

For more, have a look at this article on the news blog of the scientific journal Nature and this write-up on the blog of CIAT’s Decision and Policy Analysis (DAPA) program, together with the accompanying press release.

More on this later in 2012.

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Tackling India’s burning desire appeared on their Climate Conversations pages.

For the original article on the CIAT blog, click here.

For the accompanying picture set, click here.

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Over the Christmas period – a time of great indulgence in chocolate in many developed countries – the story appeared again, several times. This write-up in one of the UK’s leading national newspapers, The Telegraph, is definitely worth a read.

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Great to see that at the time of writing, 368 people had recommended the photo series on Facebook, and that it received over 40 tweets.

Click here for the introductory text, or click here to go straight to the pictures series.

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But a new project announced by CIAT and BGI to sequence no fewer than 5,000 cassava genotypes could unlock some of the crop’s as-yet undiscovered secrets, helping agricultural scientists find new cassava markets, and rise to the multifarious challenges of climate change. Click for more.

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It was just shown at Agriculture and Rural Development Day (ARDD) – a side event at the COP17 climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, to introduce the day’s Learning Events, where delegates will find out the nitty gritty about how agriculture can respond to climate change.

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This picture set in today’s Guardian, from the village of Othidhe in south west Kenya, gives a glimpse of farmers’ priorities.

The shots were taken during one of a series of workshops by CCAFS and the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. The opening session of each workshop asks farmers to write down what’s important to them on a piece of paper, and post it on a board. This is how some of the farmers from Othide responded.

For more on the methodology, have a look at these posts from Chase Sova of CCAFS, who was part of the workshop team.

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This is much, much more than just collecting rainwater in buckets.

Read more about it in this piece, published by the BBC today. You can also read the article in Spanish on BBC Mundo.

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Late October and early November in Punjab, India, is the time when hundreds of thousands of rice farmers, having harvested their crop, rush to clear the land and prepare for the wheat season.

This means lots of fires. Over a period of about a fortnight, more than one million hectares of straw and stubble is set ablaze, releasing – by my humble calculations – around 12 megatons of carbon dioxide. The smoke engulfs entire neighbourhoods, and blots out the sun. I was out-and-about in Sangrur for five days and didn’t once see the sky – just a smoky haze.

Everywhere we drove there were either fields on fire, those blackened and smoking, or those raked with straw, waiting to be ignited. Most farmers burn in the afternoon, when the straw and stubble is relativey dry – hence the ash fall around 4pm.

Chapati deficit?
Nonetheless, this is India’s breadbasket, where rice and wheat have been grown in annual rotation on an industrial scale for years. But cracks are beginning to appear in an agricultural system that feeds up to 500 million people.

Plummeting groundwater levels mean farmers are forbidden from planting rice until the 10th of June each year. This allows reserves used for irrigation to be recharged during the country’s rainy season.

But fixed rice planting creates a rigid farming calendar, leaving farmers only a few days to clear the rice and plant the wheat. Dropping a match onto a tinderbox of rice stalks is a cheap and effective way of dealing with your crop residue problem, with one hectare reduced to smouldering ash in about 10 minutes.

If you’re still with me, here’s the rub: in recent years, rising temperatures during the wheat season have started to hit production, with some farmers reporting yield losses of up to 15%. That’s potentially a lot of people short of chapati, and even more reason for farmers to sow the wheat on time, reinforcing the need to burn rice residues.

The search for smarter options
While residue burning is cost-effective, it clearly is not climate-smart. Neither is it soil-smart, biodiversity-smart, or health-smart.

Sitting in the snow of rice ash in Sangrur, I wondered what might happen in an ideal world. Maybe livestock could graze the stubble and straw, leaving behind soil-enhancing manure. Or the wheat could be planted while the rice stubble slowly dies back, the latter providing a useful compost. Or even more outlandish, perhaps more farmers could harvest rice by hand, since the need to burn seems to arise from the need to clear the long stalks left by combine harvesters; hand harvesters don’t burn.

But none of these options seemed viable. Livestock aren’t partial to rice stubble, I was told by Dr Sarwan Singh, a project leader at IFFCO, a local cooperative. Plus, there’s probably too much biomass to chomp through. Also, labour is relatively expensive compared to renting a combine. I counted at least 15 people standing at the roadside watching one of these machines do its work.

And whether it’s because the vast majority of farmers here are accustomed to a certain level of mechanisation, the story I heard time and again, was that you need some pretty sophisticated hardware to plant wheat if there’s still rice stubble in the ground.

One possible solution cited by several farmers, was the Happy Seeder, a locally-made seed and fertiliser driller. Attach it to a tractor and it plants wheat seed straight into the ground, ripping through the rice stubble. While this means no burning, a Happy Seeder is roughly 500,000 times more expensive than a match.

And price is not the only obstacle. In one village we encountered a Happy Seeder parked behind closed gates, with cobwebs in its seed funnels. Apparently the owner hadn’t used it for over a year because he hadn’t been able to find the right kind of tractor to pull it.

As I left Sangrur, with smoky clothes and stinging eyes, I was directed to two recent news stories. The first, from last month’s Chandigarh Tribune, detailed the imminent opening of a biomass power plant in Fazilka, about 150km away, fuelled in large part, by rice straw. This seemed like small-but-significant progress.

The second was a CNN/IBN piece about a huge blaze in a rice storage depot. Apparently poor storage facilities ended with “tens of thousands of tons” of rice grain going up in smoke as well.

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