Contributions

FP3.4 Science quality

FP3 aims to improve the farming system performance by producing information, knowledge, guidelines and new combinations of technologies and practices that contribute to increased nutritional security and income generation through functional, diverse and emerging agricultural value chains²⁰⁵. Crop variety options from FP4 will be used in integrated farming systems to generate climate-resilient technological innovations for the agri-livelihood systems that GLDC targets.

Harnessing genotype x environment x management interactions (GxExM) for yield that have characterized CGIAR work to date, FP3, in collaboration with FP2 and FP4, will use participatory approaches to better target interventions on land, water, crop, tree and livestock diversity management via a focus on options x context = farming system performance²⁰⁶. The system performance includes aspects of total farm productivity, resources use efficiency, post-harvest loss reduction, social acceptability, equity and adaptability to contextual changes. By involving key stakeholders, deeper knowledge of the social and ecological context beyond farm scale will be taken into account. This includes knowledge on the constraints, opportunities, who, where, what and how, to prioritize intervention options acknowledging heterogeneity that helps increase overall performance of agri-food systems. System performance will be analyzed not only in terms of yield and quality gap reductions, but also include how better land, water, crop and livestock diversity management can contribute to profitability and resilience to climate change, pest and pathogen biotype changes and market risks²⁰⁷.

Critical assessments of risk management and acceptability will be included so that decision-making tools will be generated at various scales in the design of better production systems and natural resources management options²⁰⁸. This will involve links with the integrative CRPs that include WLE and FTA to upscale farm results to landscapes and PIM in terms of integrating on-farm and off-farm agriculture related data into economic models.

Within the agroecologies of GLDC, global spatial-temporal trends will be identified in land and water productivity and iteratively feed these back into the other GLDC flagships, especially FP1 for foresight analyses (Table FP3.1). A library of case studies of options x context data will be developed to support national and international policy decisions on the management of GLDC-AFS.

By linking with programs such as inter alia, the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) and other CRPs, the outputs will have global relevance. This will lead to the creation of a community of practice to develop agro-information system standards and best practices so that diverse pieces of sub-systems can complement each other. An important component of these analyses will be the Earth Observation Systems and spatial big-data analytics to help identify and prioritize extrapolation domains thus contributing to CGIAR’s effort on BigData. Near-real-time satellite remote sensing imaging coupled with climate and in-situ observations (met stations and cell phone feedback) will allow stakeholders to tailor the rural advisory and early warning to farm production dynamics. Linking these informatics will help improve input- use efficiency and lead to more informed decisions on sustainable land, water, crop and management practices²⁰⁹. Interactions across scales should be carefully evaluated as intervention at farm scale can have consequences (desirable or undesirable) at landscape scale and vice versa²¹⁰.

FP3 recognizes that productivity increases through improved technologies do not necessarily translate into livelihood improvements for the rural poor without considering socio-economic-ecological, policy and institutional contexts. For this to happen, FP3 will adopt a participatory approach involving the participation of multiple stakeholders in a way that feedbacks are incorporated in the process of development and adoption of sustainably intensified GLDC-based agricultural systems²¹¹. To ensure that productivity-enhancing technologies also deliver nutritional and environmental benefits, a combination of technical and social innovations have to be developed using trans-disciplinary and integrated research approaches and methods.

FP3 will produce the following IPGs:

Climate-resilient efficient integrated management practices for enhanced productivity of improved crop varieties, tree cultivars, livestock breeds, water, land and nutrients to adapt to variable and changing climates and farming systems in dryland settings.

Diversification and intensification of the production systems through suitable expansion of crop/livestock systems and crop variety/cultivar, livestock breed (with the Livestock CRP) and agronomic options.

Integrated biotic and abiotic (SLM) stresses management strategies for improved productivity and ecosystem services delivery.

Integrated assessment models for system-level analysis to enable better targeting of interventions along the value chain.

FP3.5 Lessons learned and unintended consequences

Traditional agricultural research has studied the relationship between land and livelihoods mainly from the perspective of the production of goods along agri-food value chains. The challenges of climate change, resources degradation and human-ecosystem interactions raise the broader issue of how mixed cereal-legume-tree-livestock systems can be managed for increased productivity through (not in spite of) the preservation and enhancement of the ecosystem services²¹². That requires stakeholders to be capacitated with new approaches to analyze, understand heterogeneity and risk of technology success or failure in mixed farming systems²¹³. The limited capacity for valuing the land and the services it provides undermined the ability to perform trade-off analysis of the impacts of interventions. To strengthen this ability requires a better knowledge, monitoring and evaluation of the ecosystem services provided by land and novel mechanisms to value and reward the production of these services for the benefit of the rural poor. That is why, the GLDC propose to build on the options x context = farm performance approach as a progression on the GxExM approach based on lessons learned from system research CRPs phase I. This will be combined with WLE’s efforts to develop tools that link farm level productivity resilience to the landscape level one.

Phase 1 work of Dryland Systems (DS) and WLE found that the portfolios of sustainable farming system options and their adoption drivers are scale- and context- specific implying a need for a more circumspect analysis of what works where and when and for whom²¹⁴. This research will inform the work on varieties/hybrids in FP4 and 5. Concurrently the livelihood context will be characterized at household-farm, village and landscape levels (within FP2 and with WLE). The context-specific portfolio of options includes technical, institutional/policy and market levers.

For communication and knowledge sharing, FP3 will explore the use of modern gender-responsive ICT including mobile and community media to scale out its outputs. This will include contextualized advisory notes on crop varieties, water, pests and disease management via mobile phones where real-time monitoring of land and water is now available. Innovation platforms linked across flagships will be an important medium of communication and knowledge sharing.

FP3.6 Clusters of Activities (CoA)