Ithaca, New York
September 19, 2007
By Krishna Ramanujan
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Ronnie
Coffman, left, international professor of
plant breeding and genetics and director of
International Programs in Cornell's College
of Agriculture and Life Science, with two
colleagues from the University of Ghana's
Department of Agronomy.
Photo credit: Stefan Einarson |
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In its latest venture in Africa,
Cornell University will
support a new doctoral program at the University of Ghana to
train African plant breeders to tackle issues relating to maize,
cassava, sorghum, millet, tomato, cowpea and other crops vital
to Africans' diet.
Funded by a $4.9 million grant from the Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a partnership between the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, the
program aims to address the serious shortage of professional
African plant breeders skilled in breeding indigenous plants.
Cornell will receive an additional $1.7 million from AGRA to
provide academic and technical support.
This is the second announcement in recent days of a
Cornell-supported program in Africa. Earlier this month Cornell
signed a memorandum of understanding with Bahir Dar University
in Ethiopia to offer its Master of Professional Studies (MPS)
degree in international agriculture and rural development, to be
taught as a pilot by Cornell faculty who will travel to
Ethiopia. It will be Cornell's first degree program in Africa.
In Ghana, starting in January 2008, the West Africa Centre for
Crop Improvement (WACCI) program, located at the University of
Ghana in Legon and supported by Cornell, will train 40 Ph.D.
students from West African countries in plant breeding and
genetics, with eight students admitted each year for the next
five years.
"When Africans come to study in the United States, they are
drawn to the problems that their supervising faculty have, which
may be unrelated to the challenges at home. So they graduate
with an education that is out of context, and they may have
relatively little incentive to return home," said Ronnie
Coffman, international professor of plant breeding and genetics
and director of International Programs in Cornell's College of
Agriculture and Life Sciences. "African donors are tired of
supporting this kind of training because they feel they are not
getting sufficient return on their investments. This is an
effort to train plant breeders in the African context."
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From left:
Stefan Einarson, director of the
Transnational Learning Program in Cornell's
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences;
Vernon Gracen, Cornell plant breeding
professor and associate director of WACCI;
Eugene Terry, a consultant to AGRA; Coffman;
and Mark Laing, director of the African
Centre for Crop Improvement. |
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Cornell plant breeding professor
Vernon Gracen, who is also associate director of WACCI, will
spend six months in Ghana annually to help upgrade the
curriculum, supervise student thesis research and help in
management of the center. Plant breeding and genetics professor
Margaret Smith, who serves as principal investigator of the
project for Cornell, will provide leadership in planning and
evaluating thesis research, through electronic communication
with the University of Ghana.
Stefan Einarson, director of the Transnational Learning Program
in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, will travel
frequently to Ghana to provide technical assistance to WACCI.
Resources from Cornell's Mann Library will be available to
students electronically.
Also, all of Cornell's plant breeding courses, which are
available on video, will be either streamed over the Internet or
provided on DVD for use in Ghana. Ghanaian faculty and students
and Cornell faculty also will be in contact via video
conferencing to review student proposals and theses.
Students will devote the first two years of study to gaining a
standardized foundation in genetics related to plant breeding,
biotechnology, plant microbial interactions and disease control,
plant stress physiology and more. As students move on to years
three to five, they will conduct thesis research projects based
in the students' home countries, aimed at solving problems faced
by local farmers.
"This collaboration with WACCI provides engagement for our
faculty and gives us experience in the challenging problems of
Africa, some of which could become global problems," said Smith.
For example, she said, "Many plant diseases and pests are
worldwide problems as exemplified currently by the new race of
wheat stem rust fungus that recently originated in East Africa
and is spreading around the world."
RELATED RELEASE:
African
partnership announces the launch of a critical PhD program for
crop breeding in Africa |
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