The Bill & Melinda Gates Agricultural Innovations (Gates Ag One) fund has awarded a $34 million grant to an international consortium of scientists to enhance crop yield and food security in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Leading agricultural researchers from CSIRO are collaborating on the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) project with the Universities of Illinois, California, Berkeley, Lancaster, Cambridge, and Essex in the UK and the United States Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Research Service
The project’s goal is to solve global hunger by enhancing the difficult process of photosynthesis to enhance food yield.
With protein demand expected to quadruple in regions like Africa by 2050, CSIRO scientist Jose Barrero said the focus is now on strengthening essential food crops like cowpea in some of the world’s most disadvantaged and hostile terrain.
“Cowpea is an important vegetable food source for smallholder farmers in Africa where it is a major source of protein,” Dr Barrero stated.
According to CSIRO scientist TJ Higgins, the goal is to produce new, improved cowpea varieties that provide higher yield and contribute to global food security in view of West Africa’s predicted population rise and the adverse effects of climate change.
“Existing work by CSIRO and partners on improving outcomes for crops in Africa has already led to the development and commercial release of the world’s first genetically modified cowpea in Nigeria,” Dr Higgins said.
Dr Higgins stated that the new cowpea cultivar is resistant to the Maruca pod-borer, a major insect pest.
“We have already seen major improvements in crop productivity in field trials conducted by the RIPE project. This new research as part of the RIPE project will have an additional impact on reducing hunger and rural poverty,” he added.
According to RIPE Project Director Steven Long, the CSIRO and RIPE team’s work is world-leading and will have far-reaching ramifications for small-scale agriculture in developing countries.
“This is where science can make a real difference to human outcomes, unlocking improvements in productivity without requiring more inputs from farmers with limited resources”, Dr Long said.
The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the U.S. Food and Agriculture Research Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the RIPE project in 2012.
The ongoing effort is being funded by Gates Ag One, a non-profit branch of the Gates Foundation established to utilise the latest crop science to serve the needs of smallholder farmers.
 fund has awarded a $34 million grant to an international consortium of scientists to enhance crop yield and food security in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.){kind=link}