Vision
Agriculture in the humid and sub-humid tropics is fundamental to rural livelihoods and offers the greatest potential to increase world food supplies. At the same time it risks significant loss of global biodiversity and negative impacts on natural resources. To address these interconnected socioeconomic opportunities and environmental threats, an innovative Research for Development (R4D) program known as the Humidtropics Program will work in diverse, selected agro-ecologies, market conditions, and farming systems to develop innovations integrating increased productivity, improved market performance, and sustainable management of the natural resource base. This will lead to intensification of livelihood systems based on integrated agricultural production in rain-fed farming areas while, at the same time, decreasing rural poverty, improving gender equity, restoring degrading farmlands and reducing pressure on natural ecosystems.
The vision of the CGIAR is to reduce poverty and hunger, improve human health and nutrition, and enhance ecosystem resilience through high-quality international agricultural research, partnership and leadership. The Humidtropics supports this vision, which in turn contributes to the following CGIAR System Level Outcomes (SLOs):
- Reducing rural poverty. Agricultural growth through improved productivity, market development and income generation has shown to be a particularly effective contributor to reducing poverty, especially in the initial stages of economic development.
- Increasing food security. Access to affordable food is a problem for millions of poor in urban and rural communities and requires increasing global supply of key staples and reducing potential price increases and price volatility.
- Improving nutrition and health. Poor populations spend most of their income on food and suffer from diets that are insufficient in proteins, vitamins and minerals affecting health and development, particularly among women and children.
- Sustainable management of natural resources. Agriculture has a substantial impact on natural resources that must be better managed to supply sustainable ecosystem services, particularly in light of climate change.
Theory of Change
Change in rainfed, smallholder farming systems in the tropics is gradual, adaptive, and stepwise; responding primarily to changes in market conditions, farmer-available resources, and increasingly, to changes of climate. Humidtropics seeks first to improve understanding of these processes in terms of alternative intensification pathways and critical points of intervention and then to design superior combinations of crops, livestock, fallows and trees; soil and water management practices; investment strategies for sustainable management of the natural resource base; and market innovations that direct intensification toward desired outcomes. These interventions will increase overall farm and system productivity and income while improving the integrity of the natural resource base, particularly soil and water quality. Humidtropics seeks to move beyond a mere focus on current principal staples but rather it strategically selects critical entry points that foster cumulative integration of new and more diverse system components. Humidtropics thus will attempt to generate a more equitable and integrative agricultural growth process, one that moves beyond commodity “booms”, diversifies risks, sustainably manages the natural resource base, and effectively reduces rural poverty.
While Humidtropics delivers an innovative research program focused on integrated farming systems in the humid and sub-humid tropics, equally important is the design of programmatic and institutional innovations that takes this research to scale. This research integrates market-level innovation with production system intervention. Furthermore, scaling up by itself, generates research questions that are critical in addressing how production system intensification impacts upon the CGIAR’s SLOs. Research on scaling up will be located across eleven strategically selected Action Areas, within which are embedded representative Action Sites where research on markets, productivity, and natural resource management (NRM) is conducted. While going to scale with production system intensification is a direct pathway to achieving the food security and sustainable natural resource outcomes, other methodological and institutional innovations are required to ensure impacts on rural poverty and improved nutrition of the most vulnerable. These may involve increasing access of poor households to technology and markets through farmer associations, ensuring participation of poor households in farmer groups organized around extension, microcredit or marketing, using women groups to introduce marketing of “women’s” food crops and value added processing, or ensuring poorer households participation in innovation platforms or value chain development. Strategies for scaling up programs to achieve these SLOs will build on past experiences and be directed by market opportunities and resource availability within the different Actions Sites. In this way, greater understanding on how to better design and adjust future rural development programs is generated.
The overall program will be monitored and evaluated in relation to achieving targets related to CGIAR System Level Outcomes in the program’s Action Areas. While the details on these targets is addressed later in this document, overall targets of the Humidtropics Program include increasing crop yields by 60% by optimizing input costs, crop and livestock combinations and land management practices; reducing poverty for 25 million people below the poverty line by increasing their incomes by at least 15%; and restoring productivity to 30 million ha of degrading cropland. The time frame for these achievements is estimated to be 15 years. What is presented in this document is a very new research agenda for the CGIAR, and the first three years of project implementation will focus on establishing the Action Areas, building the research teams, and testing basic protocols and data collection methods. Over these three years, a diverse array of existing, weakly related agricultural research thrusts, transition into a comprehensive, coordinated Research for Development (R4D) portfolio answerable to a wider array of partners and stakeholders.
The following 15-year targets apply to the farming population in the Action Areas:
a. Increase staple food yields by 60%
b. Increase average farm income by 50%
c. Lift 25% of poor households above the poverty line
d. Reduce the number of malnourished children by 30%
e. Nutrient depletion on 40% of farms reversed to sustainable nutrient flow
Objectives and Program Design
An integrative approach to research is necessary to sustainably increase productivity, reduce poverty and ensure ecosystem services in the challenging ecosystems of the humid and sub-humid tropics. Research on farming systems rather than technological components is essential to meeting both productivity and resource management goals and farmer investment choices are enhanced by integrally linking farming systems to markets. These dimensions determine the following overall goal for Humidtropics:
“To strengthen research and stimulate institutional innovation that increases economic and social returns among rural households adopting enhanced and sustained agricultural production and marketing strategies, while improving the biological and ecological integrity of their natural resource base.”
Meeting this goal is based on a program design organized around the following four specific objectives:
- To develop an integrated research program on sustainable intensification of rainfed smallholder farming systems in the humid and sub-humid tropics.
- To undertake research on the scaling up of this research to achieve impact on the four critical CGIAR System Level Objectives.
- To develop a network of Action Areas systematically comprising the variability of ecologies, agricultural potentials, levels of market development, population pressures and exposure to climate change that maximizes learning and raises potential for scaling-up and out.
- To establish a platform for global change research in response to agricultural challenges and associated impacts on tropical ecosystems and resources.
The program will be organized into three Strategic Research Themes (SRTs). SRT1 will involve a more centralized capacity to undertake characterization of Action Areas and their component Action Sites, to coordinate the development of surveys to monitor agricultural system change, and to provide analytical support in research synthesis at Action Area and program levels. SRT2 is an integrated research program organized around market development, system productivity, and natural resource management. SRT3 conducts research on scaling up and impacts on rural poverty and gender equity in a manner that raises institutional effectiveness of program partners. The research framework is a matrix of location-based research in the Action Areas drawing on critical capacities in thematic research groups arrayed across Centers and partner organizations. The articulation of research outputs between the three SRTs is essential to achieving the different research outcomes and in turn in translating these into impacts on system level objectives. The rest of the document essentially provides the detail on how these different elements will be developed and then linked to each other.
