| Abstract |
CIMMYT is a new concept of voluntary international cooperation aimed at contributing to rapid and substantial increases in world food production. Its province is wheat and maize, and its goal, in collaboration with interested governments and institutions, to increase the yields per unit area and improve the quality of these two crops wherever they can be grown efficiently. In promoting this goal, CIMMYT serves as the central axis of a vast united effort involving many nations, institutions, and individuals. It represents a new movement in international cooperation. Its programs proceed on the basis of need, desirability, and feasibility. Its work is carried out through a wellcoordinated effort among scientists, educators, government leaders, industrialists, and the farmers themselves. Problems are solved through an integrated, multidisciplinary approach. The Center's success is measured on the basis of what happens to yields at the farm level, and, more generally, in terms of the wellbeing of people at all levels of society. The idea of dedicating high-level, multidisciplinary research to improving a single crop on a worldwide scale crystallized during the 1960's; it took shape first in the International Rice Research Institute, established in the Philippines in 1962 by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, but the genesis of the concept dates back to the cooperative agricultural program initiated in 1943 between the Government of Mexico and the Rockefeller Foundation. This cooperative effort has become a classic success story of the transformation, by 1956, of a food-deficit country to selfsufficiency in wheat and maize. From this base CIMMYT evolved and was formally established in its present form in April, 1966. The present annual core budget is in the neighborhood of $2.5 million; in addition nearly $2 million is being devoted to special projects around the world. CIMMYT's achievements in catalyzing agricultural progress received widespread recognition in 1967, when the harvests of India and West Pakistan, based on the high-yielding dwarf wheats developed in Mexico, astounded the world. Again in 1970, when Dr. Norman E. Botlaug, head of the Center's wheat program, was named Nobel Peace Laureate, CIMMYT's victories on the farm front were linked with the cause of world peace. The same year, CIMMYT and IRRI shared the UNESCO Science Prize. The Center this year inaugurates its new permanent headquarters at El Batan, near Mexico City, in the full realization that, in spite of the very real progress made, the world's hunger problem is grave and will not be solved without an all-out effort on the part of both the developed and the developing nations. CIMMYT's mission is to cement their partnership in the most ancient-and fundamental pursuit of the family of man: providing food for all its members. |
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