ICRISAT

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is a non-profit, non-political organization that performs agricultural research for development in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with a wide array of partners across the globe. The semi-arid or dryland region covers around 6.5 million square kilometers of land in 55 countries, and has over 2 billion people out of which around 644 million of these are very poor. ICRISAT and its collaborators help empower these poor people to overcome poverty, hunger and a degraded environment through improved agriculture.

Headquarters

Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, with two regional hubs and four country offices in sub-Saharan Africa.

Functions:

ICRISAT conducts research on protecting the environment. Tropical dryland areas generally seen as resource-deficient and perennially affected by shocks like drought, trapping dryland communities in poverty and hunger and dependent on external aid. ICRISAT implements research programs in ways that benefit small farmers in these regions enabling them and their families to go beyond subsistence farming to produce surpluses that can be stored and sold to markets, paving the way for prosperity in the drylands.

Targets for ICRISAT:

• Help halve rural poverty by increasing farm incomes through more productive, stable, diverse and profitable crops and crop products,
• Help halve hunger by contributing innovations that increase yields by 30% on a wide  scale and through policy advice that stabilizes food prices and availability,
• Help halve childhood malnutrition by enhancing the nutrient content of staple food  crops and helping the poor diversify their crops, delivering more nutritious and safer  food, and
• Increase resilience of dryland farming through innovations that stabilize, safeguard and enhance natural resource capital, biological and  systems diversity, and land health.