9 September 2013 CABIs CEO, Dr Trevor Nicholls, has been elected to the final steering committee of the Tropical Agriculture Programme (TAP). Already a member of TAP’s interim steering committee, Dr Nicholls will hold this new role for the next three years.
TAP was launched at the first G20 meeting of agriculture chief scientists in 2012 with the aim of improving the coherence and impact of agricultural innovation in the worlds least developed countries. TAP brokers partnerships between existing initiatives in order to foster more sustainable capacity development. Since its creation in 2012, more than 40 of the most important international, regional and national organisations have agreed to join the programme. Recent work has focused on South-South collaborations, addressing issues central to CABI’s mission, such as improving food security.
The election results were announced at a TAP workshop on 4-6 September in Hainan, China, where Dr Nicholls and Feng Zhang, CABIs Country Director, China, were attending as programme representatives.
Talking about the benefits of TAP, Dr Nicholls said, “The Tropical Agriculture Platform is a much-needed initiative to achieve greater awareness of and synergy between the many programmes seeking to build the capacity for agricultural innovation in developing countries. CABI has participated actively in TAP since its inception in 2012 and I am honoured to have been elected to the Steering Committee. I hope our continued involvement will enable others to benefit from CABI’s experience of putting research into use with smallholder farmers, as well as ensuring that our own programmes such as Plantwise and Direct2Farm are aligned with other initiatives to deliver optimum impacts on farmer livelihoods and food security.”