Many of the speakers and participants in Science Forum 2009 invoked the spectre of hunger in the context of population growth and climate change. The prognosis is of increasing pressure on scarce agricultural land and water as we try to produce enough food. It is said that we must exert ourselves to the utmost to make farming more productive over its existing surface area, since we cannot afford to expand the available agricultural land. And the need is urgent. At the same time, the con...   read more >>

During the second afternoon of the Science Forum, we plunge into a session that ought to have been scheduled on the first morning – a scene-setting plenary that delves into the key themes that are supposed to be framing the conference: forging partnerships and mobilising linkages. It’s great pity that the four useful presentations have come so late in the agenda, particularly since they take place after the parallel workshops are already over. Nevertheless, the four speakers provide us...   read more >>

This conference is supposed to be about ‘collaboration’ and ‘partnerships’, but what do those concepts mean? In the discussions so far, ‘partnership’ often seems to be used as little more than a proxy term for something else. It seems to encompass many different kinds of institutional arrangements, including the participation of private companies in agricultural input markets, information-sharing among governments and international organisations, or the collaboration of national and interna...   read more >>

It has been a lively afternoon at the Science Forum. The conference broke up into six parallel workshops, which discussed issues from gene sequencing to resilience, ICTs to eco-efficiencies and biofuels to biofortification. It would be impossible to summarise all that was discussed in just a few words. For one thing, I could only be physically present in two of the workshops, switching rooms either side of the tea break. Fortunately, a final report-back at the end of the day provided an eff...   read more >>

The Science Forum 2009 is now well and truly under way. After opening remarks by the chair of the CGIAR Science Council, Rudy Rabbinge, among others, the conference is kicked off by several agenda-setting keynote speeches. First up is Professor Martin Kropff, Rector of the host institution, Wageningen University. Kropff takes full advantage of his platform to advertise his university, speaking with practised fluency about its capabilities, mission and current reorganisation into a unive...   read more >>

The world has changed a great deal since the CGIAR – the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research - was established in 1971. As the CGIAR system struggles to get to grips with the challenges of climate change, population growth and increasing pressure on resources, it also needs to adapt to a new institutional landscape in which ‘developing countries’ like India, China and Brazil, not to mention the private sector, now have significant capacity to carry out agricultural res...   read more >>