About Company
Our effort to study food systems and advance solutions at the intersection of agriculture, environment and nutrition comes from shared experience spanning over five decades. Even if the Alliance was born in 2019 under the umbrella of a wider organization such as CGIAR, its two sides have a long tradition of global research.
The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical, or CIAT) was founded in 1967 in Palmira, Colombia. Since then, in collaboration with hundreds of partners, it helped developing countries make farming more competitive, profitable, and resilient through smarter, more sustainable natural resource management.
In 1967, many poor and hungry people in the tropics were smallholder farmers. Increasing the productivity of their crops was the critical entry point for CIAT’s research. Since that time, our researchers have been concerned with nearly every aspect of tropical agriculture: the crop varieties that farmers grow, the production systems they manage, the agricultural landscapes they inhabit, the markets in which they participate and the policies that influence their options and decisions.