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.

Since 1996, a growing coalition of stakeholders from the private sector, government and donor communities has promoted a new package of agronomic practices for smallholders in Zambia. The conservation farming (CF) system they advocate involves: dry-season land preparation using minimum tillage methods (either ox-drawn rip lines or hand-hoe basins laid out in a precise grid of 15,850 basins per hectare); no burning but rather retention of crop residue from the prior harvest; planting and input application in fixed planting stations; and nitrogen-fixing crop rotations.

This first background paper from the CGIAR Water for Food Program seeks to identify research needs to increase crop water productivity, such that food security can be ensured and farmers’ livelihoods enhanced without increasing water diverted for agriculture.The paper proposes a number of priority topics for research on crop water management in the challenge Program on Water and Food, which will be amended during the development of the Program.

Singapore has been dependent on Malaysia for nearly forty percent of its water supply, and water has been a source of dispute between the two countries. This paper examines the water issues between Singapore and Malaysia.The paper describes the water agreements signed in 1961 and 1962. It discusses some of the important aspects of the dispute between Singapore and Malaysia, including the debate on pricing, the right to revise prices, and the guarantee of supplies after 2061.

Forests play an important role in the water cycle, stimulating rainfall, protecting soils from erosion and regulating the flow of water. It is therefore important to preserve forests for water management. Previous efforts to protect forests in Ecuador have relied on controlling land use and excluding local people. These methods often have limited success, because of problems such as corruption and a lack of enforcement. A new approach is to pay people to protect the forests.

Although gender issues are today a priority on the agendas of irrigation policy makers, interventionists, farm leaders and researchers, there is still a considerable gap between positive intentions and concrete action. An important but hitherto ignored reason for this is the lack of adequate generic concepts and tools that are policy-relevant and can accommodate the vast variation in irrigation contexts worldwide. The Gender Performance Indicator for Irrigation (GPII) aims to fill this gap.