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2021 was another challenging year because of subsequent COVID-19 waves. The global health emergency put the collective response capacity of the development sector to the test. It painfully raised awareness of the essential contribution that publicly funded research and capacity development efforts make to global peace and stability. CIMMYT’s mission, maize and wheat science for improved livelihoods, and our commitment to excellence in our operations and rapid response capacity are ever more important to help farmers, food workers and vulnerable communities avert a looming food crisis and mitigate the effects of the ongoing global health and food supply chain crises. Our 2021 Annual Report is organized in three sections or impact areas that are essential to food systems transformation, which means shifting the focus of global and local food production from efficiency to resilience, and from competition for resources to balance and inclusion. To give you an overview of the contents of this report, on the discovery side we embarked on an ambitious initiative to apply environmental genome wide association methods to predict how today’s maize, rice, sorghum, cassava, groundnut and bean varieties will perform, and to identify needed genetic diversity for them to succeed three or four decades from now. This is a very exciting area of research that will help us hedge our food systems against the harshest conditions anticipated from climate change, and an example of shifting the focus of our science from solving yesterday’s problems tomorrow to solving tomorrow’s problems today. Breeding continues to be at the core of CIMMYT’s excellence in science and response capacity.

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