Icar In Gene Research Pact

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) will be collaborating on genetic resource collection, evaluation, exchange and on the restoration of 15,000 accessions.

India will not have to sign a material transfer agreement for the transfer as the germplasm is merely being transferred back to the country, said Dr William D Dar, director general of ICRISAT.

The institute has a collection of over 113,000 accessions of its mandate crops, making it the world's largest repository of food crop germplasm. The collection is held in public trust on behalf of the Food and Agricultural Organization following the global convention on biodiversity.

As germplasm becomes increasingly entwined with the issues of intellectual property rights protection, ICRISATs holdings assure the security of the germplasm heritage of semi arid tropics (SAT) and ensure free access to this genetic wealth among nations, he added.

The two institutes will also be collaborating on research on drought management. ICRISAT has been working on the area of integrated watershed development for around 25 years now and is currently working on an Asian Development Bank funded project to evaluate this technology under farmers conditions in India, Thailand and Vietnam.

The institute will be investing more than half a billion dollars on the decertification project, said Dr BI Shapiro, director of the Natural Resource Management Programme. There is a growing threat of decertification in Asia and Africa and the major reason is population growth, he said.

Watershed development work can achieve a lot in this direction, he added. Drought management involves GIS, that is, identifying where watersheds should be located, terrain modeling wherein it is worked out where to lay out watersheds to better capture and manage water and remote sensing to identify where land degradation is starting to take place.