RUBIS Project Kick-Off Meeting
The Kick-off meeting of the RUbber agroforestry Breeding Initiative for Smallholders (RUBIS) Project was held virtually on January 11, 2021. This meeting brought together 57 participants from the organizations of our consortium (CIRAD, IRRI and UGM) and from guest institutions (CIFOR, ICRAF, PSU, UPLB, MRB). The meeting was organized in two sessions.
This event began with an opening session hosted by Dr. Arini Wahyu Utami from UGM. The opening session consisted of opening speeches and introductory remarks from institutions directly involved in the RUBIS Project. Dr. Pascal Montoro delivered the opening speech from CIRAD, who provided an overview of the RUBIS Project and the challenges it faces today and in the future. Furthermore, the event continued with introductory remarks delivered by Marie Christine Cormier-Salem as the Director of the Agropolis Foundation, Prof. Panut Mulyono as the Rector of UGM, Edy Suprianto as the Director of IRRI, and Alain Rival as CIRAD Regional Director for Southeast Asian Island Countries.
The second session dealt with the presentation of workpackage activities by workpackage leaders, and the discussions were moderated by Dr. Thomas Wijaya from IRRI. Prof. Siti Subandiyah from UGM introduced the coordination and governance of the project (WP0), and then Ms Dwi Shinta Agustina from IRRI, Dr. Frédéric Gay from CIRAD, Dr. Fetrina Oktavia from IRRI, and Dr. Pascal Montoro introduced the background and scheduled activities on socioeconomy (WP1) and agronomy (WP2) of rubber-based agroforestry systems, as well as the genetics (WP3) and integration of data (WP4), respectively.
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The RUBIS Project is the fruit of a long-term French-Indonesian collaboration. Today, the natural rubber socioeconomic and environmental issues question our research practices and directions, which have a slight impact on rubber cultivation. In that respect, our previous scientific consortium was expanded with socio-economy, agronomy, and agroforestry disciplines with scientists from.
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The RUBIS project is a project that supports the rubber development program in the long term. This activity is an initiative activity in a participatory scheme for a resilient rubber cultivation system for smallholders in the context of global change. Programs include repeating scientific questions and agricultural-based solutions to respond to rapidly changing socio-economic and environmental constraints. Also, the capitalisation of multidisciplinary and participatory studies is carried out to be useful for the application of on-farm evaluation trials. Ultimately, the feedback from in-farm evaluation trials should lead to adjustments for better system robustness.
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The objective: WP 1 is aimed to identify the representative of stakeholders and their typology in Indonesia as well as socioeconomics constraints and stakeholders’ demand. This statement should lead to a co-construction of solutions for resilient rubber-based cropping systems in Indonesia in a context of socioeconomics and environmental pressures.
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The objective: Classes the rubber clones according to the agronomic and physiologic capacities in order to facilitate the selection of material for further on-farm large-scale
trials. The traits will be selected for matching with the cropping systems identified by stakeholders (WP1) and with a possible tolerance to predicted environmental constraints (WP2). -
The objective: Integrate project data and information from WP1, WP2, and WP3, design both planting packages, experimental network and tools for further establishment and monitoring of on-farm trials, the proposal for funding on-farm trials, and identify new research questions for a new research proposal.