| Abstract |
Bangladeshis do not want to live by rice alone. As the aspirations, incomes, and nutritional awareness of its people have increased since independence, other cereals and the various value-added food products from them have played an increasing role in the country. With land scarcity and high human population density, Bangladesh has always had to rely on imports for many foods, but there have been lots of opportunities to diverSify and raise the production of basic crops domestically. Prominent among these emerging crops are wheat and maize, which grow particularly well in the moderately cool dry winter Rabi season. Over the years since CIMMYT established an office in Bangladesh in 1982, it has worked together with Government and other institutions. These joint programs have accumulated an impressive array of achievements and benefits that have helped to establish wheat and maize as the second and third most important cereals in Bangladesh, as well as addressing productivity and sustainability issues related to the broader farming systems in which farmers produce these crops. Here we describe many of those products and impacts. We attempt to show how they have helped and are still helping the national agricultural research and development systems in Bangladesh to provide technologies and information that farmers and other entrepreneurs use to sustain or raise crop productivity, and their incomes and livelihoods from farming. Some new emerging constraints are described that if addressed can further improve wheat and maize crop production in Bangladesh. Possible interventions are suggested for policy makers, research and extension. During the 1980s and 1990s, the substantial support that CIMMYT provided was almost entirely given to develop and promote wheat production in the country through germplasm provision, infrastructure development, agronomic research and training. During the 2000s, this support diversified with an increased emphasis on farm mechanization and conservation agriculture, maize improvement and training, agricultural databases, environmental concerns in intensifying cereal systems and fodder provision for livestock. The work of CIMMYT in Bangladesh has always been in very close partnership with a diverse array of local and international organizations including government agricultural research and extension institutes, universities, NGOs and private companies, and has been supported by several donors. There is no doubt that through this last quarter century of work by a small team of dedicated CIMMYT staff and their colleagues in the Bangladesh NARS, CIMMYT has made a massive contribution to local and national income, food security, human nutrition and wellbeing. This is so From 2002 to 2007, the ClMMYT Office in Bangladesh was able to substantially broadened its aspirations, its activities, its reach, and the types and depth of benefits it has had in Bangladesh. We did this mainly by the successful management and implementation of a well-resourced multi-component USAID project with a wide range of partners (including local community and NGO groups, government agencies, and international partners). That project conducted work on many issues from maize whole family training, farm mechanization and resource conservation technologies, databases and GIS, arsenic contamination in the food chain, and also gave support to papaya research. Recent or current partnerships and linkages with international organizations include IRRI, ILRI, ICRISAT, "IFDC and FAO; Murdoch University, ACIAR and CSIRO in Australia; Cornell University, Texas A and M University, Winrock International, Mud Springs Geographers, Helen Keller Foundation and USDA in the USA. Easily seen by any visitor to rural or urban areas of Bangladesh where nowadays many otherwise quite poor people regularly have wheat chapattis for their breakfast, a glass of milk from triticale fodder for their lunch and maize-fed chicken, eggs or fish for a nice dinner. In the main body of this paper we describe many of the achievements and benefits that by working together, CIMMYT and its key partners have attained with this work for Bangladesh. |
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