CGIAR Signs Site License Agreement with Esri That Will Assist Group to Increase Food Security and Agricultural Productivity

Redlands, California—July 2, 2010—Esri announces that the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research ( CGIAR) has signed a site license providing its 15 research centers throughout the world with access to ArcGIS software. CGIAR works in collaboration with hundreds of government, civil society, and private organizations to reduce poverty and hunger, improve human health and nutrition, and create greater ecosystem resilience. Esri's geographic information system (GIS) technology will be implemented in the centers to foster programs for sustainable agricultural growth benefiting the poor.

"This site license agreement will ensure that scientists in every center have access to the GIS technology they need to continue their important work including the creation of data collections on population, poverty, climate, soils, crops, livestock, transportation, and biodiversity," says Enrica Porcari, chief information officer of CGIAR. "The centers will provide spatial applications that help users more readily see and understand interrelationships between such subjects as urban and rural markets, crop production, deforestation, and soil erosion."

"The new agreement with Esri represents a major advance in the ability of CGIAR and its partners to build and share location-specific agricultural and natural resource knowledge products to help overcome poverty and hunger," says Stanley Wood, coordinator of the Consortium for Spatial Information ( CSI) of CGIAR and International Food Relief Program ( IFPRI) senior research fellow.

"Esri is pleased to work closely with CGIAR as it strives to provide food security for every nation," says John Steffenson, manager of the Esri federal civilian and global affairs team in Washington, D.C. "We strongly support the critical research of these centers as they improve agricultural production, sustainability, and resilience globally."

Esri's ArcGIS will provide the platform for collaborative efforts in GIS-based agricultural research at global, regional, and local levels in every center. This will allow CGIAR to continue creating online applications such as the Amazon Initiative which allows dynamic queries about biomass and deforestation in the Amazon. More than 10 CGIAR datasets and applications are also available as services from ArcGIS.com, a hosted Web site available for anyone to create, find, and use maps, applications, and tools.

For more information on Esri's agriculture solutions, visit www.esri.com/agriculture.


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Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com/news.



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