Agri-Science Park's Valuable Contribution to Rural Economy
Providing Poor Farmers Access to
Affordable Tech & Markets

Dr. William D. Dar, Director General of ICRlSAT (International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics), talks about the institute's flagship initiative, the Agri-Science Park in an interview to Indo-Australian Business. In this, Dr. Dar highlights the role of the Agri-Science Park in providing the poor farmers the much-needed technology at affordable cost to help them step up productivity as well as market their produce. Excerpts.

Dr. Dar, please tell us about the Agri-Science Park, your flagship initiative, to improve the lot of the poor farmers through the power of technology.

The Agri-Science Park (ASP) is ICRISAT's initiative to partner with the private sector to develop technologies that will help link the poor and marginal farmers of the drylands to the markets. For the poor farmers to improve their incomes and livelihoods, it is important to increase agricultural productivity. However, this is not enough by itself. For them to do value addition to their agricultural produce they need access to technology and further to the markets. The ASP has been designed to develop technologies that will provide value-addition and market access to the farmers.

The integrated initiatives under the ASP are: the Agri-Business Incubator (ABI), the Ag-Biotech Innovation Center (AIC), the Hybrids Parents Research Consortium (HPRC), the Bioproir ducts Research Consortium (BRC) and the SAT Eco-Venture.

How appropriate, accessible and affordable are these technologies, considering the small and unviable size of an average Indian farm holding?
These technologies being developed are designed to be appropriate, accessible and affordable to the average farmer. Let me give you a couple of examples. The ABI has incubated the ethanol from sweet sorghum technology. If a dryland farmer grows sweet sorghum variety or hybrid instead of ordinary sorghum then he can sell the stalks (after harvesting the grain) to the distillery. Now we are working with our partners Rusni Distilleries and Aakruthi Agricultural Associates of India to help the farmers further by establishing decentralized crushing centers at the level of village clusters.

The other example is of our low-cost aflatoxin testing kits, which have brought down the cost of testing a sample from Rs 1,000 to Rs 50. This has made the technology affordable for the farmers, who can check for aflatoxin contamination in their groundnut, corn and chillies.

How important is agribusiness and allied industries in India, where nearly 70 percent of the population depends on agriculture for livelihood? What is your institution's role in promoting rural agro-based industries?
Agri-business and allied industries are of great importance for India, since such a large percentage of the population draws its livelihood from the agricultural sector. Only through agri-business and allied industries can the agriculture sector add value to its produce. In fact there should be a greater investment of technology and funds into agri-business.

Please brief us on the work being carried out at the Ag-biotech Innovation Center, and how agri companies are benefiting from it?
The Ag-biotech Innovation Center (AIC) is a platform that provides the infrastructure for R&D such as dry / wet lab spaces, access to common laboratories, precision farms, collaborative research with ICRISAT's scientific strength and state of art support infrastructure for the established agribusiness companies to kick-start their R&D activities. Coming into AIC, a company saves the gestation period of establishing an R&D Center and collaborating with ICRISAT on specific research projects of the company's need complements the R&D needs.

Reputed companies such as ITC, Pioneer-Dupont are members of AIC and the Government of Andhra Pradesh has supported to build additional wet lab space looking into the demand from this sector.

The Agri-Business Incubator (ABI) at ICRISAT has been in existence for the last five years. What have been its notable achievements?
Through its initiatives, ABI-ICRISAT has benefited around 30,000 farmers and supported 15 entrepreneurs in the four years since it was established. It also incubated 10 ventures and generated direct employment of around 320 people and mobilized $8 million worth of business for the incubates.

ABI-ICRISAT has got the National award for the Best Incubator 2005 in its third year of operation, which is a landmark achievement in the business incubation industry.

ABI clients have also been acknowledged with awards for their contributions to the farming and the agri-business community. The Prime Minister of India felicitated ABI Client, Dr. Palaniswamy of Rusni Distilleries, with Best Social Entrepreneur of the Country Award. Another ABI client Aakruthi Agricultural Associates of India received FAPCI Award for Rural development by the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.

ABI has also pioneered globally the successful incubation and commercialization of sweet sorghum based ethanol projects. It was also successful in commercializing ICRISAT's varieties namely ICGV91114 (groundnut) and JG 11 (chickpea) varieties in Andhra Pradesh by Aakruthi Agricultural Associates.

Please tell us about how you wish to further develop Agri-Science Park@ICRISAT and its initiatives?
There is a new initiative in the pipeline for the establishment of a Bio-Food Knowledge Center (BFKC). BFKC will technically backstop the food processing industry and the food parks that are coming up in the country. Through this platform ICRISAT will also look at R&D to add value to our mandate crops.

Similarly we are also forming strategic alliances with other institutions at national and global levels and are planning to establish ASP in our African centers.

Please elaborate on ICRISAT's Global Theme - Harnessing Biotechnology for the Poor and how has it helped nations since its launch in 2001?
ICRISAT's research focuses on increasing the agricultural productivity and incomes for the poor farmers in the drylands of the semi-arid tropics of 48 countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Since our inception in 1972 we have been working on crop improvement through conventional methods. While we continue the conventional methods, we also want to embrace modern agri-biotechnology to increase the speed of crop breeding, enhance precision and also overcome limitations inherent to conventional methods through the transgenic technology.

An example of our use of agri-biotechnology is our successful development of pearl millet hybrid HHB 67 Improved through the molecular-marker assisted selection route in 2005. We could breed this hybrid quicker than through conventional breeding, and introduce resistance for downy mildew disease, which was devastating the earlier pearl millet hybrid grown in Haryana and Rajasthan.