listening in at the GRiSP Science Forum 2011

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A lot of scientists in the different agricultural think-tanks within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) work on developing new and improved crop varieties to help reduce hunger and poverty all over the world. One of the research programs within the CGIAR is the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP). It makes efforts on rice improvement more structured across the different CGIAR centers that work on this particular crop. Ultimately, GRiSP aims to help rice farmers adapt to climate change and to make rice production more profitable for farmers and healthier to the environment.

Last week, participants in GRiSP gathered at the International Rice Research Institute headquarters for the Global Science Forum and the annual program review of the Asian part of the program. The major theme of the lectures and the discussions can be summed up, in my opinion, through Steve Jobs' message at the launch of the iPad 2:

“... Technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
-- Steve Jobs (March 2011)

Agricultural science is not enough to achieve the aims of GRiSP. Other disciplines are needed too.

While listening in on the discussions, I realized that making an impact on the rice farmers' lives is not just about improving the rice plant through breeding, nor is it just about increasing fertilizer and water inputs... it's more complicated than that. Aside from the environmental conditions that directly affect how rice (whether improved or traditional varieties) grows in the field, consumer preferences, application of post-harvest technologies, and multi-crop cultivation systems affect farmers' decisions and incomes. The ways farmers organize themselves and formulate protocols to handle the financial aspects of farming and post-processing also affect the way farmers do business.

Thus, the different disciplines of rice science should no longer be seen as disconnected. In GRiSP, solutions to farmers' production challenges are formulated via multidisciplinary approaches. For instance, breeders work with social scientists to take into account consumer acceptability while agricultural engineers work with economists to understand how post-harvest technologies are sustained as entrepreneurial enterprises. Innovations and scientific improvements, on the other hand, are communicated from scientist to farmer (and vice versa) via extension workers and through online and mobile phone platforms.

People from seemingly unrelated disciplines work together for a common purpose. That is the essence of GRiSP.

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