International Grassland and Rangeland Congresses 2020

In 2020 Kenya will host a joint congress of the International Grassland Congress and the International Rangeland Congress (see http://2020kenya-igc-irc.rangelandcongress.org/). We expect up to 1,500 delegates from around the world. The conference is being hosted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Irrigation with financial support from the Government of Kenya which has promised to fund 40% of the cost. ILRI is heavily involved in the organization of the event with several staff on different subcommittees. I sit on the Fundraising Committee, which is charged with raising sponsorship to help offset the cost of the conference and keep the conference fee to a minimum. This month we had a visit from Ray Smith from the University of Kentucky, who is the current President of the International Grassland Society and who was monitoring progress on the organization of the congress.

Protein Sustainability Working Group

The Rockefeller Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund have come together to establish a Protein Sustainability Working Group to explore the challenges and opportunities for the future of protein systems. As a member, I attended the first meeting of the group on 17–20 October at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), in Santa Barbara, California, USA. This meeting served as the first of four planned meetings of this working group and was aimed primarily at defining and co-developing a research agenda to provide science-based evidence and analysis that will inform the development of comprehensive global protein systems solutions.

It wasn’t all work in Santa Barbara! Relaxing with former ILRI Board chair, Lindiwe Sibanda and Xin Gen Lei of Cornell University.

Livestock is well represented in the group with our former Board chair, Lindiwe Sibanda, chair of the CGIAR Independent Science and Partnership Council and former ILRI Board member, Maggie Gill, Philip Thornton of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and former staff member Mario Herrero, as well as several other animal scientists, all members of the working group. I invited the group to hold one of its future meetings at ILRI. I took the opportunity to meet up, over dinner, with our former DDG, John McIntire, who lives in Santa Barbara.

Board meeting

As you know, the ILRI Board met on 20–24 October in Nairobi. Shirley Tarawali circulated a summary of the meeting to all staff on 30 October. Highlights from a programmatic perspective were the approval of the provisional 2019 budget, a well-received update on the Feed and Forages Development Program from Chris Jones, a discussion with the Chair of the Livestock CRP Independent Steering Committee and agreement on a format for presenting to the Board a dashboard of indicators on research program performance. I will be discussing this last item with the Program Leaders soon.

Till next month.

Iain