About us

French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development

A mandate

CIRAD's main mandate is to "contribute to rural development in tropical and subtropical countries through research, experimentation, training operations in France and overseas, and scientific and technical information, primarily in the fields of agriculture, forestry and agrifoods", in accordance with the statutes drafted when it was founded in 1984. Those statutes also instruct CIRAD to provide training through research and disseminate scientific and technical information to benefit development. The establishment is also expected to use its collective expertise to support public policy in terms of research for development in both North and South.

A strategy

In the light of the economic, social and environmental changes resulting from globalization, CIRAD is drafting a new strategy centring on six lines of research and on new work practices. However, the tasks set for it when it was founded in 1984 are more relevant than ever. Agriculture is still a major force for sustainable development and for alleviating poverty among the world's poorest communities.

Agricultural research still has a leading role to play in meeting the challenge facing humanity: providing food and energy for eight million human beings by 2030, while preserving the environment and, more generally, global public goods such as climate, plant and animal biodiversity and human and animal health. To meet that challenge, CIRAD is committed to public agricultural research centring on the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations and relayed by public development policies.

CIRAD: a targeted agricultural research organization committed to ensuring that its capacity to imagine the farming systems of the future benefits the world's poorest populations, sustainable development and global public goods.

Agricultural research needs to focus on three inextricably linked issues:

the human and social issue: access to food, consumption patterns, and food safety and security,
the environment and energy issue: designing new agricultural production systems aimed at preventing environmental risks while ensuring that countries in the South can exploit the natural resources they need for their development,
the governance and public policy issue: alleviating poverty and overcoming structural inequalities as the preferred means of preventing and resolving conflict (riots over hunger issues, territorial conflict, etc).

Based on these three issues, CIRAD has drawn up six strategic lines of research:

Inventing ecologically intensive farming systems to feed the world
Analysing the conditions for the development of biofuels and ensuring that they benefit people in developing countries
Innovating, to make food accessible, varied and safe
Foreseeing and managing infectious disease risks linked to wildlife and domestic animals
Supporting public policies aimed at reducing structural inequality and poverty
Understanding relationships between agriculture and the environment and between human communities and nature better, so as to manage rural areas sustainably.