Poverty, food insecurity, natural resource degradation and climate change are global challenges; but they impact most severely on rural communities in dry areas. Addressing these challenges requires a combination of good science, integrated research-for-development approaches, and effective partnerships. As this report illustrates, all three elements are in place, resulting in new technologies and tangible benefits in more than 40 countries.

The year 2015 will be remembered for the waves of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region looking for a safer future in other parts of the world. While millions of people crossed into Europe, the international community looked for the roots causes of the migration, recognizing that food insecurity, unemployment, drought and environmental degradation all play a role in the uprising and coalescing of conflict.

Global food production has increased by 20% in the past decade – but food insecurity and poverty remain widespread , while the natural resource base continues to decline. International research centers, which have helped drive previous improvements, must continue to deliver new technologies to support sustainable growth in agriculture; and to work with other partners to accelerate the dissemination of these technologies.

The dry areas face severe challenges to sustainable development. The biggest challenges – food insecurity, water scarcity, land degradation, and climate change – are closely inter-related. The effects of climate change will be felt globally, but the dry areas will be particularly hard hit. Climate change will exacerbate water scarcity, rainfall variability, and the decline in the natural resource base, and thus could have a profound impact on food security.

2013 has been a fruitful year for ICARDA marked by research accomplishments and a sense of gratitude. Our longstanding partner countries provided important support in making decentralization of the Center’s research a reality. This transition positions our research programs to more expressly target agroecosystem-based solutions, needed for wider impacts.

The rangelands of West Asia and North Africa are the grazing grounds for the Bedouin with their flocks of sheep, goats and camels and are known as al Badia in the Middle East region. Average annual rainfall in the Badia ranges between 50 and 250 mm (Haddad 2006). Despite its scarcity, rainwater is generally poorly managed and much of it is lost through runoff and evaporation. To improve production in hese areas, there is a need for the sustainable management of natural resources – land and water (FAO 1983).

The literature identifies two common approaches for estimating technical efficiency. One approach is based on non-parametric, non-stochastic, linear programming. This suffers from the criticism that it does not take into account the possible influence of measurement error and other noise in the data (Coelli, 1995). The second approach uses econometrics to estimate a stochastic frontier function, and to estimate the inefficiency component of the error term. The disadvantage of this approach is that it imposes an explicit and possibly restrictive functional form on the technology.

The world is witnessing a period in its history when the increasing socio-political upheavals are taking the lives of thousands, and destroying the natural wealth of our planet. Poverty and food insecurity are two key forces driving this destruction. These ongoing problems compound those already being posed by an increasing shortage of water, scarcity of productive land, an expanding population, and the threat of global warming.

This report summarizes results from a large multi-partner project, Integrated watershed development
for food security and sustainable improvement of livelihood in Barani, Pakistan. The project (2007
to 2010) aimed to develop, demonstrate, and evaluate cost-effective technologies for monitoring
and use of water and land resources at watershed scale. It used an integrated approach combining
applied research, capacity building, and watershed improvement/rehabilitation through community

The year 2002 marked ICARDA's 25th anniversary, and coincided with several honors and awards for the center's excellence in research. Research on developing high-yielding kabuli chickpea varieties that thrive in cool, wet winter conditions earned the 2002 King Baudouin Award of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), jointly with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), which focuses on desi chickpea.

The objectives of this report are to evaluate and test, with community participation; the benchmark water management options which sustainably improve water productivity, net return per water unit, and optimize water use. The strategies evaluated have to be economically viable, socially acceptable, and environmentally sound in the three different agricultural eco-systems.

CropSyst is the crop growth model chosen as a decision tool for the Tadla Benchmark project. CropSyst is a daily time step simulation model. The model was developed to serve as an analytic tool to study the effect of cropping systems management on productivity and the environment. The model simulates the soil water budget, soil– plant nitrogen budget, crop canopy and root growth, dry matter production, yield, residue production, and decomposition. Management options include cultivar selection, crop rotation, irrigation, nitrogen fertilization, tillage operations, and residue management.