For a sustainable & resilient global agriculture - Bill Gates

This is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Statement to the CGIAR Business Meeting 7-8 December 2009 at Washington DC at the IMF Headquarters. The CGIAR oversees 15 international research centers in agriculture all over the world.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation views the CGIAR as a crucial partner in the fight against hunger and poverty, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The CGIAR´s proven track record in enhancing smallholder productivity growth has inspired the Foundation´s strategy for investing in smallholder agriculture as an engine of overall economic growth and welfare improvement. Our grant support to the CGIAR (committed and active proposals to date) for the 2009-13 period is around $400 million which is 80 million dollars per year. This number could rise as we receive additional proposals during this five-year period. We support strategic and long-term R&D activities (in which the CGIAR has a unique comparative advantage) that result in outputs that have the potential to create transformational change in the lives of poor producers and consumers.

I would like to take this opportunity to announce the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation´s intention to formally join the CGIAR in the near future. There are several details around programmatic focus, funding arrangements, and membership issues that need to be worked out, but we believe these issues can be resolved in a mutually agreeable manner. Let me also state that we endorse the principles laid out in the CGIAR joint declaration and look forward to discussing the modalities for their implementation.

The Foundation looks forward to working with the CGIAR community in further refining and elaborating the Strategic Results Framework, the mega-program structure and the associated funding and operational details. We would like to call for greater granularity in MP structure in terms of clearly specified outputs, activities needed to achieve them and clear estimates of resource requirements. We encourage the consideration of unique mega-programs that are crop-specific, for the major staples, such as a rice mega-program, and a wheat mega-program. We also call for the articulation and focus on critical gender issues across all mega-programs.

We believe the reform process should lead centers back to their comparative advantage and empower them to deliver high-quality research and technological innovations. We believe that region- and country-specific technology adaptation and dissemination activities ought to be led by National Partners and that the centers ought to work in close partnership with them.

The CGIAR centers have unique and highly valuable genetic resources, research infrastructure and scientific capacity -- we hope the reform process will lead to assured support for sustaining and enhancing these resources. The end result of the reform ought to be a CGIAR system that can once again attract the "best and the brightest" scientists to devote their careers to the cause of improving developing country agriculture.

We are concerned that a prolonged transition period may lead to a funding gap at the Centers and make it difficult for them to retain high-quality staff. The BMGF commitments to the CGIAR for the 2010 time period are well established and we would like to urge other donors to ensure that there is minimum uncertainty during this transition period.

Finally, the BMGF believes that a sustainable and resilient global agriculture R&D system, focused on smallholder productivity growth, is absolutely crucial for achieving the goal of hunger and poverty reduction in the developing world. We look forward to working with a renewed and reinvigorated CGIAR system to create transformational change in the lives of poor producers and consumers across the developing world.