Through a series of electronic and face-to-face regional and global consultations, the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) in collaboration with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) aims to reshape the global agricultural research agenda for development and reorient it to the needs of the poor through both the generation of new and relevant knowledge and the empowerment of rural communities to make use of all that is known. The consultation results will feed into the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD), 2010. The process is being supported by Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI).
The e-consultation in the Asia-Pacific region (South, Southeast and East Asia and the Pacific) spanned from 1st to 24th September. Nearly 100 different participants for a total of about 350 messages and 110,000 words had actively participated.
Key Agricultural Development Issues
The stakeholders had endorsed a list of important issues (16 main drivers and 53 specific challenges) of agriculture-led development in the Asia-Pacific region (sent along with the list of ten questions). The key issues are grouped as below:
- (i) Fighting Stubbornly High Hunger and Poverty: Stubbornly high hunger, undernutrition and poverty and high dependence on agriculture, especially for employment and livelihood, bridging the huge yield gaps by doubling the rates of growth of yield and income while improving input use efficiencies particularly in the vast rice ecologies and rainfed areas which are often the hunger and poverty hotspots;
- (ii) Synergizing Productivity, Sustainability and Equity – Towards Evergreen Revolution: Extremely high and growing population pressure, nearly 75% of the world’s agricultural population cultivating only 37% of the world’s agricultural land under increasing land degradation, water scarcity and biodiversity erosion, thus underpinning the urgency of enhancing productivity in perpetuity by developing and adopting ecotechnologies towards creating an Evergreen Revolution;
- (iii) Can Small Always be Beautiful – The Crisis of Entitlement: Predominance of small and marginal farmers and increasing land fragmentation, emphasizing the need to generate technologies suited to smallholders, to enhance labour productivity, and to enhance access to land, water, energy, inputs, credit and insurance;
- (iv) Research – The Engine of Growth and Development: Centrality of technology, information, knowledge and innovations for development and to promote informed diversification to optimise opportunities in horticulture, livestock, fishery and agroforestry and to meet the challenges of rising income, inequity, urbanization and human health, and to revitalise the technology generation and diffusion process;
- (v) Linking Farmers with Markets: Linking farmers with markets, strengthening post-harvest management, agroprocessing, value addition, enhancing food availability for the poor through market, trade and distribution reforms, safetynets and integrated on-farm – off-farm – non-farm employment and income; strengthening bio-security toward safe and green agriculture and facilitating international trade; and
- (vi) Policy Support – A Must for Science-led Development: Policy options and actions for increased investment in agriculture and agricultural R&D, improving terms of trade for agriculture, participatory (involving public, private, NGO, CSO sectors and farmers) research, extension and education, input-output pricing, institutional and services supports, bioenergy, climate change management and minimization of distortions of crop-animal-soil-water cycles, regulatory measures and standards, gender sensitivity, and retention of youth in agriculture and agriculture-related activities.
See the main messages emerging from the responses of the stakeholders on the ten questions in the full summary.
The GFAiR Blog 
There are three broad deficiencies in the Asia pacific Regional E-consultation report. First, ADB’s support for GCARD is very misleading as she does not support agriculture as an economic activity within the inclusive growth strategy. Her main thrust is infrastructure and within this roads account for over one-third of their budget. At the same time the strategy 2012 does not mention agriculture at all.
Secondly, small is indeed beautiful and hence points (iii) and (iv) smacks of gross misunderstanding about the issues at the ground. Amendments are required in the interpretation of the e-cnsultstion submissions.
Thirdly, agricultural scientists have to benchmark their efforts with the local inititiatives as well as the farmer’s felt need. Their penchants for trampling oin the moral rights of the farmers and local population as well as trampling of traditional knowledge base require immediate correction. The research agenda thus must ask the question who is setting the agenda and how is it validated. Why are IAASTD concepts not engaged with in the discussion?
In addition, FAO through their RIGA database studies have clearly pointed out that decentralisation holds the key to sustainability and development of a secure future.
Yet another missing link is the absence of scientific and (economic) engagements in the agenda setting when we discuss networking between farmers and the market players.
Surely, inclusiveness agenda is in dire need for establishing a mocro foundation. We still have time to bring about some semblance of balance in discussion at the meet later in March 2010.
I hope the tentative agenda/programme as circulated will also be amended to adequately reflect these concerns.
Respectfully submitted,
Prof. J. George
I am disturbed by Prof George’s negative view of agricultural scientists. In his third point try replacing `agricultural scientist’ with `doctor’ and see where you get to: a lot of dead people.
I worked for several years as an agricultural scientist collecting traditional land races – by far the most effective and concrete way of preserving the traditional knowledge base. Unfortunately this massive knowledge base has almost entirely been placed in the FAO Seed Treaty without permission of farmers or countries where samples were collected. If a farmer wants a sample back that was freely given to me or hundreds of other collectors, (s)he has to sign away any former property rights: the opposite of moral.
The IAASTD process should be disregarded: it was a waste of development time and funding, with the agro-ecological agenda pushed by very few indeed, notable in the Americas.
The continued promotion of `small’ is a top-down, often foreign, intrusion into national decision-making on agriculture and the best way to feed citizens.