ICARDA annual report 2004

ICARDA Annual Report 2004
2
ICARDA was well represented
at the 2004 Annual General
Meeting (AGM04) of the CGIAR,
held in Mexico in October. The
Center organized a special luncheon
meeting for the CGIAR
Program for Central Asia and the
Caucasus, and co-hosted with
ICRISAT a meeting on
Desertification, Drought, Poverty
and Agriculture.
An international workshop on
“Grass Pea as a Food and Feed
Crop” was held at ICARDA in
November. It aimed to establish
partnerships for research and
development on grass pea, share
knowledge on grass pea as a food
Luncheon meeting on Desertification, Drought, Poverty and Agriculture at AGM04.
Left to right: Dr Ali Ahoonmanesh, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Head of AREO,
Iran; Dr William Erskine, ADG (Research), ICARDA; Prof. Dr Adel El-Beltagy, DG,
ICARDA; Dr Douglas Wholley from IFAD; and Dr Barry Shapiro from ICRISAT.
and feed crop, and develop a project
proposal to scale-out low-toxin
grass pea technologies to improve
food security and soil productivity
in Africa and Asia. Participants
came from Africa, Asia, Australia,
Europe, and the United States of
America.
ICARDA established a country
office in Islamabad, Pakistan, to further
strengthen the Center’s longstanding
partnership with the country
and fulfill its commitment to
improve productivity of crops and
livestock, and alleviate rural poverty
in the dry areas. The new office was
inaugurated by H.E. Mr Sikandar
Hayat Khan Bosan, Federal Minister
of Food, Agriculture and Livestock,
Pakistan, and Prof. Dr Adel
Members of the CBC and CDC and other participants who attended the Science
Council, CBC, and CDC meetings at ICARDA.
El-Beltagy, Director General of
ICARDA, on 8 November 2004.
Fostering Development of
Dry Areas
• Focusing on the poor in Sub-
Saharan Africa (SSA), ICARDA
continued its collaborative
research in Sudan, Ethiopia and
Eritrea on enhancing food security
through the generation of sustainable
production technologies
for cereals and cool-season food
legumes. In Eritrea, a new project
on “Improving Water
Productivity of Cereals and Food
Legumes in the Atbara River
Basin,” within the Challenge
Program on Water and Food,
was launched. A collaborative
project with Mauritania on natural
resource management started
in 2004. This is complementing
activities initiated with the
Canada-for-Africa funding,
which is also being used for specific
interventions in Eritrea,
Ethiopia, and Sudan.
• ICARDA is providing major
support to integrated research
on dryland resource management
in Pakistan within the
IFAD-funded Barani Village
Development Project.
• In 2004, the Minister of
Agriculture of Bangladesh recognized
the impact on lentil production
in Bangladesh of new
cultivars at a “BARI/ICARDA
Day, held in Dhaka.” Strong
links with NARS in germplasm
improvement of cereals (barley
and wheat) and food legumes
(lentils, kabuli chickpea, faba
bean and low-neurotoxin grass
pea) continue through
germplasm exchange and training
activities in Bangladesh,
India, Nepal and Pakistan, and
to a lesser degree in Bhutan,
China, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
and Vietnam.