The Syngenta Foundation works with a wide range of partners. This page provides some examples drawn from just one stream of our work, Research & Development. Locally and internationally, the list is naturally much longer when including our other streams: Seeds Systems, Risk Management, Farmer Support Services, and Policy & Outreach. Many of our Projects and Topics pages list further partners, as does our Archive of completed projects.
A major group of R&D partners comes from the international research network of the CGIAR.
These include the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), with which we partner on work in maize, and on mechanization. We also, for example, work on potatoes with CIP, with ICRISAT on sorghum and CIAT and HarvestPlus on biofortification. Our efforts to improve rice production include a pivotal role for AfricaRice.
CGIAR partnerships are complemented by those with "NARS", national agricultural research services. On cassava, we work with Brazil's EMBRAPA, on tef with Ethiopia's EIAR, as well as maize and other topics with Kenya's KALRO. Other examples around the world include the NARS in Vietnam and Indonesia. And our Foundation's very first project, more than 30 years ago, was the establishment of a key public research station in Mali.
We have also helped established BeCA, a regional bioscience hub in Kenya. Our host partner there, ILRI, belongs to the CGIAR.
Our R&D partnerships often also include universities.
Groundbreaking tef work, for example, has been performed in Bern, Switzerland. At the University of Illinois, USA, we collaborate with the Soybean Innovation Lab. In the area of demand-led breeding, our partners include WACCI in Ghana and the University of Queensland in Australia. With Switzerland's ZHAW, we're working on CONSUS, a decision model for sourcing from smallholders. Michigan State University - both in the USA and Mali - contributes extensive research to our Policy work. We also team up with the Netherland's world-famous agricultural university in Wageningen. And if you're wondering where Latin America features in this list, we recently concluded a project on Jatropha with Zamarano University in Honduras.
International donors play a key role in enabling R&D to succeed.
The International Wheat Yield Partnership, which we helped found, enjoys major support from the UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Our soybean partnership, for example, draws funding from USAID. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a generous donor to many projects worldwide, including some of our partnerships. We also work with the World Bank's long-standing BioCarbon Fund.
No list of R&D partners, however, would be complete without the private sector.
Some of the firms we work with here are small and local, like Kenyan diagnostic experts Crop Nutrition; others are large and internationally successful, such as our Dutch seeds partner HZPC. And as the Syngenta Foundation, we are also very grateful to the company that both makes our work possible in the first place, and participates in selected R&D projects.