This project worked to refine selected integrated crop-livestock technologies, assess systems approaches to crop-livestock integration, and create institutional capacity with local partners at national, provincial and district levels for establishing local platforms for commercialisation and co-learning. This small project complemented CSE/2009/004 (Farming and Marketing System, FMS) by enriching elements of the FMS activities in selected research hubs in Savannakhet and Champassak Provinces, Lao PDR, with core members of the FMS research team a

Creating more productive, resilient, profitable and sustainable maize-legume farming systems that overcome food insecurity and help reverse soil decline.

Improving the productivity, income and food security of smallholder farming households in the Eastern Gangetic Plains. 

This project aimed to identify mechanisation options and post-harvest technologies to enhance household livelihoods and food security in lowland rice-growing areas. Cambodia and Laos share problems of widespread rural poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition. Rainfed lowland rice, grown once a year in the wet season, is the backbone of agricultural production, but is largely subsistence-oriented with low productivity, delivering low-quality rice to local consumers. Growing quality rice and non-rice crops would increase household income and reduce rural poverty.

The lowland and upland farming systems of rainfed southern Lao PDR have been identified as having elevated risk of hunger and rising rural poverty. The Government of Lao PDR recognises the south as an agricultural economy in transition, with a need to ensure that the poor participate in and benefit from the transition process. Increasing the supply of food and generating income from these systems is constrained by low fertility soils, weed competition, production and market risk (including drought and flood) and increasing cost of labour.

This project aimed to address the threat to wheat production caused by wheat blast in Bangladesh and South Asia by deploying resistant wheat varieties.  With over 160 million people, Bangladesh is one of the world’s most densely populated countries. Wheat is the country’s second most important staple food after rice. 

This project aimed to establish and validate a practical and economically viable system that would enable smallholders in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan to harvest mungbean mechanically. High labour costs and labour shortages at harvest time constrain mungbean production in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan. Harvesting costs account for more than half of the crop’s total production costs, preventing expansion at a time when the nutritious legume is in high demand. Rising prices increasingly put mungbean beyond the reach of the poor. 

Identifying specific haplotypes and testing genetic markers in breeding programs to ensure their suitability for reducing chalk.  Chalk is a defect in mature grains of rice which causes the grain to become brittle and susceptible to breakage during the milling process. The incidence of chalk is likely to increase as average global temperatures rise. 

Wheat blast is a devastating disease severely influencing wheat production in the Southern Cone region of South America and has the potential to cause yield reduction of up to 100% under conducive environments.

Enhancing the production and profitability of legumes in the existing cropping systems in Pakistan reverse the decline in legume production. 

Improving agricultural productivity and profitability in Timor-Leste by addressing technical and social impediments to annual crop intensification, and by establishing forage tree legumes and sandalwood as a sustainable income source and land management practice. 

Reducing wheat vulnerability to stripe (yellow) rust in South Asia and East Africa.

Building a network to attract new members and investors in mungbean research in southeast Asia and Australia.

Improving smallholder incomes in southern Bangladesh through productivity and profitability of dry-season cropping on non-saline land and, with improved saline-tolerant pulses and wheat, on saline land.

This project aimed to make water use more efficient and to increase wheat yield in the rain-fed and minimally irrigated zones of India and Australia. The researchers were searching for new methods, germplasm and molecular markers for efficient water use that could be used to improve wheat in both countries. The project focused on two important research areas:

This project aimed to develop improved wheat varieties for India and Australia using molecular technologies. Modern wheat breeding is changing rapidly. Scientists can use molecular markers linked to important traits, DNA fingerprinting technologies, integrated breeding strategies, and data management to make wheat breeding more efficient and effective.

This project aimed to modernise the Ethiopian sorghum breeding program at the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR).

Oil palm is economically the most important crop in both Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. This project is improving the livelihoods of smallholders and communities dependent on oil palm, through greater productivity and production sustainability. 

This project aimed to introduce new, high-yielding, drought-tolerant and disease-resistant varieties of wheat and maize to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has one of the highest per capita wheat consumptions in the world but does not produce enough to meet domestic demands. Afghan wheat research lacks a home-grown wheat breeding programme, and research in other disciplines also needs support to develop and disseminate useful implementable technologies.

Seeds of Life (SoL) is a program within the Timor-Leste Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) funded jointly by the Australian and Timorese Governments. SoL evolved from the recognition that a lack of good food crop varieties in Timor-Leste was constraining crop production and impinging on national food security. SoL aims to improve food security through increased productivity of major food crops.

​Legume production in Bangladesh has fallen significantly short of consumer demand becoming a major concern to national food security. Increasing the cropping intensity by replacing fallow with a legume between rice-rice cropping systems in western Bangladesh offered the prospect of increased legume production and improved farm household livelihoods. The project aimed to provide the research to reinvigorate pulse production in western Bangladesh through lentil and pea during rabi season (i.e. November to February) and mungbean during kharif 1 season (i.e. March to June).

In Bangladesh the rise in demand for maize - as human food and from the poultry and fish industries - has led to a trend away from traditional rice-rice and rice-wheat cropping systems and toward rice-maize systems. But actual farm yields of rice and maize fall below their potential. This project identifed, tested and promoted key interventions in four districts that could lead to sustainable cropping intensification - resulting in double- and/or triple-cropping rice-maize systems. Specific objectives to improve these systems were:

This project aimed to increase the yield and resilience of farmers' dry season sorghum crop. In south-west India many farmers grow sorghum during the post-rainy (dry) season, either for subsistence on the grain, but also to sell grain for human consumption or stover residue for cattle feed in markets. Stover has become an important part of the sorghum value chain, and crop improvement now targets dual purpose types. Water limits grain and stover yield. Plants with the stay-green (SG) trait can use soil water later in the dry season.

Ug99 is a strain of stem rust first identified in Uganda in 1998 and confirmed in 1999. It attacks many commercial cultivars of wheat by overcoming important resistance genes, and there is evidence of its continued rapid evolution. Thus 50 million hectares - potentially 25% of the world's wheat - is at risk, with more than 90% of cultivars deemed susceptible along the predicted spore migration route.

This project aimed to extend dryland wheat breeding success to north-western China by working with leading breeding programs for dryland wheats in north-western China. In both north-western China and Australia, conservation farming practices are being promoted as an important component of more-sustainable farming systems. CSIRO Plant Industry has been achieving considerable breeding success for dryland wheat in Australia by targeting specific traits that make more effective use of available water.