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The global equilibrium is currently disrupted by complex and interconnected crises, jeopardizing the food and nutritional security of populations.

In 2021, 828 million people were suffering from hunger, an increase of 150 million since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, according to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 report, produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Faced with this urgent need, forty (40) research and training institutes from 23 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America met in Montpellier, France, on June 27 and 28, 2022, at the initiative of the Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD), to reflect on how to make the necessary agricultural and food transitions, in order to guarantee food and nutritional security for populations, while preserving the planet.

The high point of CIRAD's partnership meetings, which focused on the changing role of research and the ways in which it works in partnership in a context of multiple crises, was the signing of a declaration ratifying the commitment of the institutes taking part.

Called the Montpellier Declaration, it emphasizes cross-border scientific cooperation to meet all the current challenges facing agriculture. 

Faced with the scale of the challenges associated with global health, food and nutritional security, the preservation of natural resources (water, biodiversity, soil) and the necessary transformation of agricultural and food systems, as well as the adaptation and mitigation of climate change, our organizations are committed to working more closely together and strengthening their relations in order to best plan this collective investment effort in research, innovation and training, in the service of the transitions to be invented all over the planet",

reads the Montpellier Declaration.

Click here to read and download the Montpellier Declaration.

"This solemn commitment by research institutes worldwide augurs a better future. For these days, problems affecting one country rapidly escalate to continental and even global proportions. The COVID-19 pandemic and the recent war in Ukraine are ample illustrations of this. Cooperation is therefore necessary to jointly overcome the hydra of interconnected challenges in agriculture", comments CORAF's Executive Director, Dr Abou TENKOUANO, who is also a signatory of the Declaration. 

Five main common working objectives govern the Montpellier Declaration:

1. Accelerating agro-ecological, energy and food transitions for greater resilience ;
2. Improving access to digital tools for agricultural research and training;
3. Develop contextualized knowledge of the societies and environments in which research is carried out;
4. Maintain physical interactions between people to encourage collective experimentation and the co-construction of common solutions or projects; 
5. Invest massively in human capital and agricultural training.

CIRAD's partnership meetings are the first of their kind. As mentioned in the Declaration, further iterations are expected to be held at regular intervals.

According to the signatories, this will make it possible to monitor the implementation of the recommendations and strengthen shared understanding of the dynamics underway.