Over the years, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) has been generating technologies suited to the semi-arid regions, particularly those in Asia.
Also, ICRISAT has been implementing training and information exchange programs to strengthen national research programs. To date, 2,042 scientists from 28 Asian countries have been trained by the institute.
In the case of the Philippines, ICRISAT, the Department of Agriculture and the Los Baños-based Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD) have been jointly undertaking a project on low-cost technology for storing groundnut (peanut) seeds as an alternative to cold storage. This technology has been well-adopted by farmers.
A groundnut variety, UPL Pn 10 (JL 24) now occupies about 10 percent of the area of the Cagayan Valley region.
ICRISAT and PCARRD have an agreement to undertake agricultural R&D programs and projects to boost agricultural development in the country. An earlier agreement between the two institutions had been renewed in a covenant signed by ICRISAT Director General William Dar and PCARRD Executive Director Patricio S. Faylon.
ICRISAT and the Mariano Marcos State University (MMSU) in Batac, Ilocos Norte are also undertaking a joint project on pigeon pea (locally known as kardis). MMSU, headed by Dr. Saturnino Ocampo Jr., president, is a multi-campus university in Ilocos Norte whose seat of administration is the main campus in Batac town.
Groundnut and pigeon pea are two of the five commodities that ICRISAT is mandated to work on. The others are sorghum, millet and chickpea.
ICRISAT is one of 16 international agricultural research centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). It focuses on the farming systems of the semi-arid tropics.
"With its new vision of ‘Science with a Human Face,’ ICRISAT is tailoring its research to address and resolve real human needs: reduce poverty, hunger and environmental degradation across the dry tropics of the world," said Dar, former agriculture acting secretary and PCARRD executive director.
The dry tropics represent one of the harshest agro-ecosystems of the world, where food production is an unpredictable enterprise and the sowing of seeds is an act of faith.
The region is home to hundreds of millions of desperately poor people, most of whom live in Asia, where the population is expected to increase by about 1.4 billion during the 1990-2020 period.
"ICRISAT‘s research," Dr. Dar stressed, "is targeted at the smallholders who scratch out a living from these dry areas. Such farmers have been bypassed by the Green Revolution, because the high yield responsiveness of the crop varieties that triggered the Green Revolution could not be expressed in the dry tropics. In many ways, this challenge is, therefore, even greater than that of the Green Revolution."
However, building on the past 28 years of partnership-based effort, ICRISAT has been quietly making a definite difference to the lives of rural poor in the dry tropics and a continuous stream of proven technologies is flowing from the institute to the farm.
In Asia, the center’s impact has been spreading through the ICRISAT-coordinated Cereals and Legumes Asia Network (CLAN), which facilitates collaborative research and technology exchange across the 13 CLAN member countries.
Considering that these are the impacts of only a few of the results of ICRISAT’s partnership-based research, the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB), which has been actively supporting the institute’s research programs, stated in a recent report :
"Research at ICRISAT has made significant advances in breeding high-yielding, early-maturing varieties of its mandated crops and has identified solutions to many production management problems. It has developed many improved technologies that have been adapted to fit the needs of poor farmers in Asian countries. This is shown by the significant increases (10-100 percent) in yields of major cereals and grain legumes."
ICRISAT’s achievements were recognized when it became the first CGIAR center to win the King Baudouin Award  the system’s highest accolade  twice in a row for its work on millet and pigeon pea.
According to Dr. Dar, the best is yet to come since nearly half of all the releases of improved varieties developed by ICRISAT and its partners have taken place in the past six years.
If this momentum continues, ICRISAT’s magic wand will indeed put a smile on the faces of the poorest of the poor in the rural dry tropics of Asia, transforming their lives and leading them to a brighter future.