The International Winter Wheat Improvement Program (IWWIP) held its 2015 International Winter Wheat Traveling Seminar in Azerbaijan and Georgia on 24 May. More than 40 participants from 18 countries attended the seminar, which covered more than 1,000 kilometers in four days.

The CGIAR Research Program on MAIZE, CIMMYT and IITA are pleased to announce that as of 1 June 2015, the MAIZE CRP has been led by the former Director of CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program, who will now spearhead the CGIAR’s international maize research agenda. The CIMMYT Board, upon endorsement by the MAIZE Stakeholder Advisory Committee (StAC), has agreed to the CIMMYT Director General appointing Dr. B.M. Prasanna as MAIZE CRP Director.

The international training workshop “Approaches for integrated analysis of agricultural systems in South Asia: Field, to farm, to landscape scale,” jointly organized by CIMMYT and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)-Central Soil Salinity Research Institute (CSSRI), was held at Karnal, Haryana, India, during 18-23 May. The workshop targeted farming systems and agricultural development researchers in South Asia and provided an overview of the approaches and tools used to assess agricultural systems.

The Wheat Productivity Enhancement Program (WPEP), led by CIMMYT and funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), held technical training sessions on wheat seed production from March to May 2015 for farmer enterprise groups (FEGs) in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Province. The training was held in collaboration with the Outreach Programme of the Agriculture Research System in KP Province, which formed the FEGs, each comprising 30-35 persons including farmers, seed dealers and seed company representatives.

CIMMYT’s Heat Stress Tolerant Maize for Asia (HTMA) project held a hybrid maize field day during 21-22 April at the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute’s (BARI) Regional Agricultural Research Stations (RARS) in Khoirtola, Jessore and Gazipur. The event was attended by over 60 participants, including local maize farmers, Bangladeshi seed company representatives, agricultural input dealers, Bangladesh government seed system officers and BARI maize researchers.

CIMMYT has been awarded an Excellence Through Stewardship (ETS) certificate of achievement for successfully completing the ETS audit requirements for its operations in Mexico and Kenya. ETS is a global, not-for-profit industry-coordinated organization dedicated to “promote the responsible management of agricultural technology, through encouraging product stewardship and quality management systems practices and by educating the public.” The ETS audit was an independent third-party review of CIMMYT’s quality management system and standard operating procedures (SOP) for transgenic research. “The successful ETS certification is an important milestone in implementing and modeling – teaching and demonstrating – responsible stewardship of transgenic research,” according to Kevin Pixley, Director of CIMMYT’s Genetic Resources Program. CIMMYT is the first CGIAR center to achieve ETS certification.