Attachments
In pursuit of wider development impact, CIAT prepared a new strategy in 2013, which we briefly summarize here. Reaffirming ecoefficiency as a guiding principle of our research, the strategy commits us to reaching these targets by or before 2020:
- Enhanced food and nutrition security for more than 15 million poor consumers
- Improved market opportunities for at least 3 million rural poor
- Technologies for environmentally sustainable crop production in the hands of a million farmers
- Climate-smart policies established in 10 countries
Each country and rural community must build its own eco-efficient future. To that end, CIAT Strategy 2014–2020 (http://ow.ly/ugcuV) offers not a detailed blueprint but a call to action on many fronts across the diverse panorama of tropical agriculture.
The new technologies, methods, and knowledge that we aim to deliver by or before 2020 will help farmers respond to growing pressures from powerful forces impacting on economies and agro-ecologies across the developing world.
Foremost among these forces is population growth. Overall, it will slow markedly toward 2050, but populations in many developing countries will expand significantly, especially in cities, making food insecurity an increasingly urban phenomenon.
More intense competition between food and non-food uses of land and water could take a heavy toll on these and other natural resources.
Climate change will further magnify agriculture’s environmental challenge by diminishing the suitability of many tropical areas for the production of key staple crops.