JIRCAS President, Dr. IWANAGA Masa, attended the Independent Steering Committee (ISC) meeting of the Rice CGIAR Research Program (CRP) held in Bangkok, Thailand on September 16 -17, 2019. The Rice CRP is a program of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and consists of 5 Flagship Projects each with clusters of activities. The committee, which includes JIRCAS, three research institutions under CGIAR, and two research institutes in France, evaluates the achievements and plans for future work in order to maximize the outputs from each project. In addition to the ISC members, the participants also included the members of the program planning and management teams, and leaders of the Rice Flagship Projects.

The first day of the meeting focused on reports of the activities of Rice CRP in 2018 and 2019 with the committee members providing evaluations and also clarifying specific points and problems of upcoming activities in 2020. On the second day, an action plan for 2020 was proposed, and the committee members gave specific advice to the project leaders. In cooperation with other committee members, Pres. Iwanaga gave advice and recommendations to the Flagship Project on the development of improved and climate-resilient rice varieties.