1.1. Origin, Mandate and Role of CIAT in Tropical Agriculture
1.2. CIAT's Strategic Plan
1.3. CIAT Today
The Colombian Government and the Rockefeller Foundation signed an agreement to create CIAT on 12 May 1967. The Centre was officially decreed a Colombian institution in November 1967. By the time CIAT's facilities at Headquarters were dedicated on 12 October 1973, the Centre had become one of four 'founding' centres of the CGIAR. In 1977, at the CGIAR's request, the Board recognized global responsibilities, going beyond the regional responsibilities that the foundations originally emphasized.
CIAT's original mandate stated its objectives as being:
"To generate and deliver, in collaboration with national and regional institutions, improved technology which will contribute to increased production, productivity and quality of specific food commodities in the tropics, principally countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, thereby enabling producers and consumers, especially those with limited resources, to increase their purchasing power and improve their nutrition."
There were no changes in CIAT's mandate from 1984 until the third External Review in 1989. Soon after that Review, in April 1991, CIAT published its current strategic plan, 'CIAT in the 1990s and Beyond'. A supplement to the plan discussed the global and regional trends underpinning it. While later circumstances have required revisions of the original medium term plan based on this strategy, CIAT's board and management have consistently made these revisions within this 1991 strategic framework.
The 1991 strategic plan included a restatement of CIAT's operational mandate which is quoted below:
"CIAT will contribute to technology development that will lead to long term improvement in the productivity of agricultural resources; to the development of innovative, more cost effective, agricultural research approaches and methods; to the strengthening of research institutions in participating countries; and to the development of inter-institutional linkages. To that end CIAT's activities centre around the following three areas;.... Germplasm development research,....resource management research in tropical America... and institutional development."
The restated operational mandate then elaborated the geographical scope of each commodity mandate and of the resource management research initiative.
The centrepiece of the 1991 strategy is the recognition that CIAT's traditional commodity research alone is unlikely to achieve sustainable agricultural development. The plan introduced natural resource management research to CIAT and, from 1991 to 2001, proposed to expand in this new programme area to balance the Centre's commitment to germplasm improvement.
The 1991 CGIAR paper on system expansion, and its 1992 revision of CGIAR Priorities and Strategies, moved the CGIAR as a whole towards a greater balance between germplasm development and natural resource management research. The CIAT strategy paper was a pioneer effort by a centre to implement this change in orientation. Other initiatives in the 1991 paper reinforced the ongoing shift into advanced laboratory science, and stressed the need for new forms of collaboration. These forms, across the wider range of institutions and skills, are needed to address the complex task of improving productivity while maintaining the resource base.
The 1991 plan summarized CIAT's strategy as follows:
"Germplasm development research will be directed at characterizing and broadening the genetic base of selected commodities, and at understanding the gene-governed mechanisms determining plant adaptation and productivity in major production areas, including the ecosystems of tropical America selected for intensive agroecological research. The aim is to develop the potential of germplasm resources for increasing output and efficiency of input use."Resource management research will focus on important tropical American agroecosystems which are threatened by increasing land use intensity or natural resource degradation, as well as those which may have the potential for relieving such pressure. The aim of research will be to understand the basic processes within the agroecosystems in order to make agriculture more sustainable.
"This integrated approach will be pursued within a framework of inter-institutional cooperation aimed at enhancing complementarity and increasing cost-effectiveness in research at the national, regional and international levels."
The strategy foresees a strong interaction between research on CIAT's priority commodities (cassava, rice, beans and tropical forages), and CIAT's priority ecosystems (the middle hillsides, savannahs and forest margins of tropical America). CIAT's accumulated knowledge from its traditional crop improvement programmes was clearly an important criterion in selecting the ecosystems for its new natural resources initiative. It has potential as an example of the synergies sought by the CGIAR through the ecoregional approach to research.
The strategy for the natural resource management initiative will be to integrate options in land use and farming systems that help relieve market and social pressures on fragile environments. Implementation will see activities at two levels of aggregation: at the sectoral level, emphasis will be on understanding the policy needs to mobilise alternative land use strategies; at the production level, emphasis will be on generating and integrating technologies into production systems which are agroecologically sound, input use efficient, and economically viable.
The plan also foresaw that an institutional model which is increasingly collaborative implies more decentralized execution and greater reliance on the integration of information and the efficiency of communications.
A Medium-Term Plan 1992-96 was developed from this strategy document and submitted to TAC in May 1991. It was revised to cover the 1993-98 period and resubmitted to TAC in May 1992. Based on the 1991 strategy, CIAT reorganised its programme structure in June 1992.
The failure to attract new funding required a number of planning adjustments. In November 1993, the Board approved an Action Plan to accommodate what had by then become a deteriorating funding situation. CIAT has been implementing the Action Plan since that time. The Centre submitted a 1994/95 Programme and Budget to TAC in August 1994, and a Programme and Budget for 1995 to TAC and the CGIAR in October 1994.
Table 1.1 below sets out the Centre's 1991 expectations of a 20% increase in senior staff over the decade 1991-2001. Within this, the number of scientists in germplasm development was expected to fall by 28%, from 65 to 47, and the number in resource management to increase from 1 to 34. Actual 1994 totals are included in a final column for comparison.
Table 1.1: Planned Core Resource Allocation (Senior Staff Years) for 1996 and 2001, with actuals for 1991 and 1994
|
|
1991 |
1996 |
2001 |
1994 |
|
Germplasm Development |
65 |
51 |
47 |
47 |
|
Resource Management |
1 |
30 |
34 |
17 |
|
Institutional Development |
6 |
8 |
8 |
5 |
|
Management etc. |
10 |
9 |
9 |
7 |
|
Total |
82 |
98 |
98 |
76 |
Source: 'CIAT in the 1990s and Beyond - A Strategic Plan', p. 68, Table 5.1 and 1994 data added.
As the table shows, CIAT's expectations of increased funds to add senior staff years were not realised. Indeed, CGIAR funding, and CIAT's with it, began to decline in real terms in 1991. By 1994 CIAT had downsized its germplasm development group to the level proposed for 2001, but had only managed to build up the resource management group to half the strength intended for 1996. Both Institutional Development and Management and Administration had also been downsized by 1994 to permit even this rebalancing.
CIAT retains four commodity programmes in beans, rice, cassava and tropical forages. It also has two new programmes in natural resource management research: Tropical Lowlands, subsuming two other priority ecosystems (the savannahs and forest margins); and Hillsides. It has also expanded its analytical capability in Land Use, built up from the earlier Agroecological Studies Unit. Thus, despite funding setbacks, CIAT is a very different centre today from what it was in 1989.
