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CENTRO INTERNATIONAL DE AGRICULTURA TROPICAL (CIAT)
CIAT research supports farmers’ efforts to cope with drought in two ways: First, it supports drought management through developing low-cost, site specific insurance. Second it enables drought avoidance through development of tolerant germplasm.
Drought insurance in developing countries
Drought insurance works by ‘packaging’ the best available science in a single number – the insurance premium – that represents the specific likelihood of loss caused by drought. Farmers in developing countries lack access to drought insurance and most early schemes have failed because of administrative and technical inadequacies. Most, if not all of these pitfalls can be avoided through index-based rainfall insurance methods to provide cost-effective yet accurate drought insurance. The basic requirements of an effective insurance scheme are:
· The scheme must be secure yet cheap to administer
· The premiums must correspond accurately to loss
Historical data on which such methods rely is unavailable for many if not most places in the developing world. However, at CIAT we can provide site-specific rainfall-indices for regions where little or no data are available, by using statistical models that interpolate daily rainfall between sparsely distributed weather stations that are then coupled to crop simulation models. Results have been applied in Nicaragua and Thailand.
For example, in Nicaragua, CIAT developed a low-cost drought insurance method to help local insurers support dry bean production. Extensive crop yield data does not exist for the area, and even where it is available, is suspected of bias. Climate varies significantly over short distances, so even where climate data existed, it proved unfit to provide comprehensive coverage at the detail required. With the back-up of experienced agronomists, CIAT deployed the tropical-weather generator MARKSIM to produce 100-year climate data-sets for local (18 km) grid cells that were coupled to DSSAT crop simulation model to generate ‘pseudo historical’ data-sets of bean yield for different soil types and crop varieties.
This data were used to design insurance schemes for specific locations and conditions. Acceptability and transparency were validated through workshops in the area with micro-finance institutes and farmer groups. Discussions are on-going to develop these methods further with local insurers and to expand methods to include a broader range of specific crop types.
Developing drought tolerant germplasm
CIAT’s long experience of developing new beans, rice and forage germplasm is being applied to improve the drought tolerance of beans, cassava and forage crops and to improve the water productivity of rice.
Target genes have been identified for beans using marker-assisted selection and similar research is ongoing for cassava and rice. Through the HarvestPlus and Generation Challenge Program, bean germplasm is being developed to cope with multiple abiotic stresses (drought, nutrient deficiency and soil acidity). Forages and legumes provide valuable feed and cover in farming systems within Latin America and improved drought tolerant forage systems are being developed through Canavalia brasiliensis and Brachiaria hybrids.
A major component of research for HarvestPlus is the prior targeting of research to large areas within Africa on the basis of analysis of observed coincidence between drought severity and the impact on chronic malnutrition, as moderated through farming systems that attempt to respond to drought stress.
For further details on CIAT drought-related work contact:
Simon Cook s.cook@cgiar.org
Peter Jones p.jones@cgiar.org
Myles Fisher m.fisher@cgiar.org
INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH INSTITUTE (IRRI)
Many drought research projects and outputs are summarized in a recent Issue of Rice Today http://www.irri.org/publications/today/today.asp : September 2005, Vol. 4 N 2 (Drought: fighting the dry curse).
For further details on IRRI drought-related work contact
Dr Sushil Pandey: sushil.pandey@cgiar.org
Dr. T.P. Tuong: t.tuong@cgiar.org
Dr. Bas Bouman: b.bouman@cgiar.org
INTERNATIONAL CROPS RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR THE SEMI-ARID TROPICS (ICRISAT)
ICRISAT has adopted watersheds as the entry point for tackling drought, blending it with Integrated Genetic and Natural Resource Management (IGNRM) approach for improving the livelihoods. The three-pronged strategy followed by ICRISAT for drought mitigation includes
· Plant breeding for drought tolerance,
· Efficient management of natural resources, arresting land degradation, in-situ conservation of moisture harvesting excess water in the rainy season and utilizing it for supplemental irrigation and
· Empowering the stakeholders through enabling knowledge sharing and policies for development in rainfed areas.
With over 113 500 accessions from 130 countries conserved in its Genebank, ICRISAT acts as world repository for the genetic resources of its mandate crops (sorghum, pearlmillet, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut). ICRISAT has identified donors of drought tolerance in the germplasm of pearl millet (PRLT 2/89-33 and 863B), sorghum (the stay-green line B35) and chickpea (ICC4958, a line with a large root system). ICRISAT has released drought-tolerant lines for its mandatory crops and uses conventional as well as market assisted biotechnology tools to develop drought tolerant cultivars.
ICRISAT has developed an innovative farmer-participatory consortium model for integrated watershed development. The key principles of this holistic model are convergence, consortium for technical backstopping, tangible benefits to all the stakeholders, cooperative participation and capacity building. The pilot model was evaluated at Kothapally, a drought-prone village in South Central India, with problems of severe land degradation, water scarcity, and low crop productivity. Kothapally has shown very promising results and this model is scaled-up in 240 micro-watersheds in India, Thailand, Northern Vietnam and South China benefiting 250,000 people.
ICRISAT uses new science tools like crop-growth simulation models, water balance techniques and GIS for assessing the length of crop growing period and for drought characterization. However, water alone cannot do the job and soil health must be improved as well. Amendments with deficient micronutrients showed 30 to 70% increases in crop yields (maize, soybean, sorghum, green gram, black gram, pigeon pea, wheat, chickpea, mustard, finger millet, pearl millet, castor, etc). Balanced fertilizer application (N, P, K and deficient micronutrients) double crop productivity.
Knowledge Sharing and Capacity Building are integral to mitigating impacts of drought. THE VIRTUAL ACADEMY FOR THE SEMI-ARID TROPICS (www.vasat.org) is a consortium of CGIAR centers and NARES partners that has developed a pilot system for strengthening the anti-drought capacity of rural families in vulnerable locations. Blends of contemporary open learning methods and internet or community radio-based communication strategies are used. Mapping the vulnerability of drought-prone areas and populations is essential. Initial work in South Central India shows that capacity strengthening among rural women almost immediately leads to significant improvements in the adoption of resource-conserving technologies. As part of this effort, in partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), ICRISAT is developing a new GIS-based tool that will help peoples’ organizations in the locality to assess vulnerability at their level.
For further details on ICRISAT drought-related work contact:
S.P. Wani, Principal Scientist (Watersheds), ICRISAT, s.wani@cgiar.org
V. Balaji, Head, Knowledge Management and Sharing, ICRISAT, v.balaji@cgiar.org.
C.L.L. Gowda, Global Theme Leader, Crop Improvement & Management, ICRISAT, c.gowda@cgiar.org
D. A. Hoisington, Global Theme Leader, Biotechnology, ICRISAT, d.hoisington@cgiar.org
WORLD AGROFORESTRY CENTRE (ICRAF)
ICRAF focuses on the role trees can play in increasing the sustainability of smallholder farming, including dryland trees as well as those in other ecosystems. ICRAF’s emphasis on improving soil fertility through trees has developed a strong capacity and leading-edge tools for the surveillance and monitoring of dryland soil quality and land degradation (http://www.worldagroforestry.org/sensingsoil/; http://www.worldagroforestrycentre.org/wadrylands/index.html). The tools, which are being tested and applied in East and West Africa, include satellite remote sensing, geographic information systems and soil infrared spectroscopy techniques. These tools are especially important in a scientific approach to the fight against desertification because difficulties in measuring land degradation have plagued the UNCCD (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification) process from the start.
Many indigenous dryland trees have never become commercialized, and this could provide valuable new income streams to the dryland poor, and reward them for caring for trees rather than allowing them to be cut down. ICRAF is researching the domestication and genetic improvement of selected high-value dryland fruit tree species in southern and West Africa (http://www.worldagroforestrycentre.org).
For Further information on ICRAF Drought-related work contact Keith Shepherd, Principal Soil Scientist
k.shepherd@cgiar.org
INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH IN THE DRY AREAS (ICARDA)
ICARDA conducts research on drought characterization by means of GIS and weather predictors, drought mitigation through land and water management and drought proofing through crop improvement and genetic resources characterization. A summary of the first research direction is given below.
Using GIS-embedded weather generators for characterizing climatic stresses
Agroclimatic characterization of the Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA) region – the mandate area of ICARDA –is of paramount importance to map the occurrence of abiotic stresses, particularly extremes of temperature, heat and drought. In the view of the high variability of climatic conditions, particularly of precipitation, in this region a risk assessment of climatic stresses involves a quantification of stress probabilities. A major problem is that the low density of meteorological stations in the CWANA region, the high cost of meteorological data and many gaps in data records do not allow these stresses in most locations in the region to be quantified.
To address this problem a joint study was undertaken between the Plant Stress and Water Conservation Laboratory of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of USDA in Lubbock, Texas, and ICARDA’s GIS Unit. The objective was to develop a GIS-application (the ‘ICARDA Agro-Climate Tool’), allowing a user to select any agricultural location inside the ICARDA mandate region through a simple Windows user interface and obtain a set of relevant views on the climatic stresses at that location for the selected crop, growing season and soil type. The outputs of the Tool are estimates of means and probabilities of exceeding user-defined thresholds for temperature and precipitation on daily basis, or for time periods that can be defined by users. The results can be viewed as graphs or exported as data files for use in other software applications.
The Tool’s core is a ‘weather generator’, which is actually a software module that generates artificial series of climatic data through a process of stochastic simulation. In order to operate, the weather generator had to be parameterized for different parts of CWANA by using real climatic data series. For the development of the Tool several public domain databases were used. Precipitation, minimum and maximum temperature data for 649 stations were obtained for the period 1977-1991 from two climatic data archives in the public domain, the Global Daily Summary Data (GLDS) and the Global Daily Climatology Network (GDCN). Also a crop database containing information for irrigation has been added, as well as the GTOPO30 Digital Elevation Model, and simplified maps of country boundaries, population centers, agricultural areas and station locations. All these databases are ‘embedded’ inside the application.
The weather generator used is GEM6, developed by the USDA-ARS. The feasibility of using the synthetic climatic data produced by the weather generator software, instead of real climatic data, stands or falls with its ability to reproduce realistic estimates of the real climatic parameters. A validation was undertaken by comparing the statistics of the generated data with those of the real data, which showed satisfactory agreement. The Tool currently has some limitations, notably the short time series used to parameterize the weather generator, but a newer version is in the make that will use a longer and more up-to-date time series.
The potential applications of the Tool are in the area of crop breeding, targeting existing or new varieties of ICARDA commodity crops, with particular tolerances or sensitivities to various climatic stresses, to environments where these varieties have not been tested. It also has application potential for the characterization in terms of stress tolerance of genetic resources found at particular accession sites. The Tool is also vital for the characterization of climatic variability and of the major climatic stresses. As such it can benefit water management specialists who can use it to assess potential impact of rainfall and temperature variability on crop water and irrigation requirements. It also has applicability in climate change research.
For further details on ICARDA’s drought-related work contact:
Drought characterization and mapping: Eddy De Pauw (e.de-pauw@cgiar.org)
Drought mitigation through land and water management: Theib Oweis (t.oweis@cgiar.org)
Coping with drought through crop improvement and genetic resources characterization: Sanjaya Rajaram (s.rajaram@cgiar.org)
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