Last week, I had the opportunity to help facilitate a two-day workshop focused on agricultural policy and advocacy in Ibadan, Nigeria, on the campus of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), one of the 13 agricultural research centers that are part of the CGIAR system (formerly known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). IITA was one of the original centers of the CGIAR when it was established in 1971, along with CIMMYT (the wheat and maize research center in Mexico City), IRRI (the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines), and CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia).
I was recruited for this workshop by my friend and colleague Abiola Afolayan, previously with Bread for the World (where I met her several years ago here in the Washington DC area). She is now the co-founder of the Center for Women’s Policy and Agricultural Innovation (CWPAI), headquartered in Abuja, Nigeria. I was joined in facilitating this workshop by Abiola, her fellow co-founder of CWPAI Olafunke Makinwa, Adebayo Adeleke, retired U.S. Army Major and head of the Nigerian Food Security Project, and Alex Johnson, a Capitol Hill veteran, former U.S. diplomat and the co-founder of the Global Futures Collaborative at Howard University.
The workshop was funded by IITA, and most of the people attending work for that institution, some coming from across Africa as well as from the research facilities on the Ibadan campus. The majority were relatively young, likely post-docs or junior scientific staff, and they appeared very interested in the information we were providing. In addition to specific feedback I solicited during the course of the workshop, which was highly favorable, the fact that there was only a slight drop-off in attendance between Day 1 and Day 2 also supports that hypothesis.
The topics we covered during the course of this workshop included the following:
• Foundations of Food Policy,
• How changes in the foreign policy views of the United States and other Western countries have altered how financial assistance to developing country agricultural sectors might be distributed and how much,
• Global, Regional, and National Policy Frameworks, including how the U.S. farm bill process came about, as well as discussions about various regional and national food policies,
• Why engage in advocacy with policymakers, and how to go about it, and
• Private Sector Partnerships
The workshop also included two breakout sessions, one on each day, for participants to brainstorm among themselves about how to best approach policymaking and policymakers, and a short session of role playing during the advocacy component of the workshop.
At the end of Day 2, we had the chance to visit some of the research facilities on the IITA campus, and learn more about the work underway there. The first stop was at the Genetic Resource Center, IITA’s gene bank, which is the largest such facility on the African continent. It is headed by Dr. Michael Abberton, A British plant breeder who has worked at IITA since 2012. The majority of the Resource Center’s collection consists of hundreds of varieties of the six principal crops that they are mandated to work on:
• Maize (corn)
• Soybeans
• Cowpeas
• Bananas and plantain
• Yams
• Cassava
The first three crops on this list are reproduced through the production and planting of seed, and the last three crops are propagated vegetatively, which means that they are developed from existing vegetative structures like stems, roots, or leaves. If you recall the movie The Martian, the lead character played by Matt Damon was able to survive alone for months on Mars in part because he was able to cut up the potatoes that had been brought to help the crew celebrate Thanksgiving, and plant the pieces in order to grow potatoes to supplement the packaged rations he still had. Potatoes are vegetatively propagated, just like the three crops mentioned above.
In order to maintain the collection properly, technicians have to go in and draw out random seeds (where applicable) and then test-plant them to make sure they are still viable. This is a standard practice for all gene banks around the world, because you don’t want to devote resources to preserving nonviable seeds that can’t be used to grow actual plants.
We also had the chance to meet Dr. Mercy Diebiru-Ojo, who specializes in research on the cassava plant, a crop that was indigenous to South America (Brazil) but was introduced to Africa in the 16th Century by Portuguese traders. Cassava is cultivated in most African countries (about 40 in all) as a staple crop, and provides a source of carbohydrate calories but not much else in terms of nutrition. In 2025, Dr. Dieburu-Ojo was awarded the Africa Food Prize for her work on cassava, having developed methods to more rapidly reproduce the cassava plant (as well as yams), increasing yields by up to 500 percent, and also for incorporating Vitamin A into certain varieties of the crop to make it more nutritionally useful.
The IITA headquarters campus itself is located on a gated, 1,000-acre forested preserve in the middle of Ibadan, a metropolitan area with a population of around 4.3 million. Unfortunately, we chose to make it only a three-day trip to Nigeria, leaving no time to see the countryside and Nigerian farmers at work. Interestingly, we did see numerous long-horn cattle and goats grazing along the side of the highway between Lagos and Ibadan, along with probably thousands of small huts and shacks selling probably every product imaginable. There was even what looked like an open-air cattle market on the outskirts of Lagos, with perhaps thousands of animals up for sale.
