Humidtropics, a CGIAR Research Program, is a global initiative that helps poor farm families, particularly led by women, in tropical Africa, Asia and Americas to boost their income from integrated agricultural systems’ intensification while preserving their land for future generations.
Development outcomes
Over the next 15 years, Humidtropics will advance the CGIAR System Level Outcomes within the Action Areas by increasing staple food yields by 60%, increasing average farm income by 50%, lifting 25% of poor households above the poverty line, reducing the number of malnourished children by 30% and restoring 40% of these farms to sustainable resource management. In this way, Humidtropics will serve as a model to other agencies seeking to link agricultural systems research to developmental impact.
Why focus on Humid and Sub-Humid Tropics?
The humid tropics with 2.9 billion people on about 3 billion hectares of land are critical to global food supplies and central to the maintenance of global biodiversity. Agricultural systems intensification in these areas offers the best potential for poverty reduction, especially for women and other vulnerable groups, and meeting world food demand. The bulk of the rural poor reside in the humid and sub-humid tropics, areas also associated with poor household nutrition and soil fertility depletion. Humidtropics focuses directly on rainfed smallholder farming systems and their opportunities to boost their income from sustainable intensification of their integgated production system.
Research Themes
SRT1 Systems Analysis and Synthesis
SRT2 Integrated Systems Improvement
SRT2.1 Value Chains, Institutions and Markets
SRT2.2 Increasing System Productivity
SRT2.3 Natural Resource Improvement
SRT 3 Scaling and Institutional Innovation
Program Structure
The program structure is based on three strategic research themes and linked through monitoring and evaluation processes.
Action Areas
- They are representative and capture diversity. Action Areas are selected that are representative for the humid tropics diversity, contain widespread poverty, and poor natural resource integrity.
- Urgent need exists for large-scale impacts. These Action Areas have relatively high population densities where intensification, production systems diversification and integration, and rural transformation are urgently needed and have best potential for massive impact.
- They advance earlier investments and existing and potential partnerships. Earlier research investments in the Action Areas will benefit from planned interventions based on collaboration to generate better synergies between existing expertise of the Centers and their partners and develop new partnerships and expertise to achieve better impact.
Action Sites
An Action Site is simply the location where the actual work takes place, ie where the “action is”. These sites are located in an Action Area and carefully selected following common entry criteria to allow the R4D results to scale out and up.