Knowledge Millennium Summit 2011. The New Evergreen Revolution

NEW DELHI - We are in the Rich Knowledge Millennium, but the poor have poor knowledge of it. And there are about 1 billion of them.

"While new innovations and technologies are redefining agriculture development," the 9th Global Knowledge Millennium Summit says, "there is need [for] linking and leveraging innovations and [making] them work for society at large" (meraevents.com). The poor we have always been leaving out.

Until recently, when ICRISAT & Partners came up with what is now known as Inclusive Market-Oriented Development, the IMOD. No, it doesn't look like a revolutionary concept, until you ask what "Inclusive" means and ICRISAT Director General William Dar will tell you: "inclusive of the poor."

No, "inclusive of the poor" is not a new vocabulary, because even the World Bank had mentioned it years earlier in the book Making Transition Work for Everyone(2000, page 184, worldbank.org). What ICRISAT & Partners have done is give it a new meaning, that is, in my terms, inclusive of the poor as actors in the development drama, from producing quality local seeds to enjoying quality foreign markets. They have done in it Africa; see my "New coffee in Kenya. In Emali, women show who's the better half!" (26 February 2009, iCRiSAT Watch, blogspot.com). The women aren't always right, but they're always better.

IMOD is ICRISAT's strategy to 2020. Frank H says IMOD means that the poor actively participate from sourcing inputs to production to processing to marketing to village development, all throughout the process. The poor are no longer simply reactors; they become actors and, grouping themselves, with public and private partners, they become the businessmen and middlemen working for their own welfare. (For more details on the IMOD, see my "ICRISAT's iMODe. The village as minimum development goal," iCRiSAT Watch, 10 December 2010, blogspot.com).

Now look at the image shown here: The 3 important words are these: Agriculture * Innovations * Market. AIM@8%, targeting 8% growth in agriculture. They are holding the 9th Global Knowledge Millennium Summit (GKMS) on 08-09 November 2011 in New Delhi. This marks a qualitative change in the nature of the conference, as it is the first time they are talking of "agriculture" and "market" both of which include the poor.

The previous GKMS were as follows (assocham.org):

1st - Information Technology (1999 December)
2nd - Biotechnology The New World (2001 March)
3rd - The Business of Biotechnology (2003 March)
4th - Biotechnology and Nanotechnology (2006 March)
5th - B2B in Biotechnology and Nanotechnology (2007 September)
6th - Biotech Nanotech for Sustainable Agriculture (2009 February)
7th - Bio Pharma Emerging Health Threats: The Solution? (2009 November)
8th - "2010-2020: Decade of Innovations"; Food Security, Healthcare, Renewable Energy & Water (2010 November).

Always on innovations but they were not talking about the market; they were not talking about how much growth in agriculture they wanted; they were talking about consumers, but not talking about the poor. Now that they are, they might as well have written as their slogan:

Inclusive AIM@8%.

I like it that the listed objectives of the Summit emphasize partnership (meraevents.com):

* To deliberate and analyze hurdles in fostering public private partnership in innovations and investments
* To share innovations in technologies and services to meet agriculture development
* To seek common areas and priorities for collaboration to strengthen partnerships
* To reach consensus on planned actions to address sustainable developmental issues
* To devise strategies & plans to achieve 8% growth in agriculture.

The GKMS finally has realized that (meraevents.com):

Perhaps insufficient attention is given to the fact that the capacity for innovation in agriculture is influenced not only by farmers' skills and resources, but also by the wider network of links and relationships in which farmers are embedded, which help ideas to diffuse and find new uses.

Since they have invited ICRISAT to be part of the Global Knowledge Millennium Summit, they have accepted IMOD as the way to go in Agriculture, Innovation, and Market when it comes to the poor farmers in the drylands. They have in fact joined the next Green Revolution.

In his message to the Summit read by CLL Gowda, who is Research Program Director for Grain Legumes for ICRISAT, Director General William Dar says:

The next Green Revolution or the Evergreen Revolution (as Dr MS Swaminathan calls it) will have to be played out ... in less hospitable [habitats] such as the drylands. It will have to bring about food and nutritional security to billions of people worldwide but without further damaging the fragile [habitats]. And its long-term success will depend on a strong convergence strategy that brings together civil society and the public and private sectors through mutually beneficial partnerships that ultimately advances the agricultural sector.

The Green Revolution happened in croplands that were more fertile, much irrigated. The Evergreen Revolution will have to deal with the drylands, the badlands. And then those habitats will have to produce food without further damaging themselves such as by soil erosion or chemical poisoning. The long-term success of the new revolution, Dar says, will depend on partnerships that ultimately advance everyone, including the poor farmers.

And Third World countries, Dar says, need to invest more resources to grow food, grow incomes, and grow agriculture via extension services, infrastructure, irrigation systems, and information and communication technology. They need to grow drought-tolerant and heat-tolerant varieties to reduce the risk from Climate Change. They need to learn to use water wisely to reduce the risk that chemical fertilizers and pesticides will harm the environment.

Further, Dar says, the poor farmers in Third World countries need to access inputs as well as storage facilities, to empower themselves in order to get optimum value for their produce.

Governments need to gather and broadcast information about production, consumption and stocks to reduce price volatility. It is equally important for governments to invest more on research for development (R4D) as this has the highest impact on agricultural growth, as much as 60% in research and 50%+ in extension.

Entrepreneurs and private players need to come up with innovative products, processes and concepts to integrate into the value chain.

Given all that, William Dar says:

Together with governments, civil society organizations, the private sector and partners like ASSOCHAM, we are confident that we can make this second Green Revolution happen.¶ We owe it to the smallholder farmers and the poor people in the developing world!

Frank H says: Inclusive and Sustainable, that's the Evergreen Revolution.