All news and blogs
New project aims to modernize rice breeding in Africa
EiB news | Sam Storr | 7/7/2020
Rice is a food for the future in Africa, with consumer demand for rice growing faster than any other staple crop. With most farms yielding less than two tons per hectare, Africa's taste for rice could lead to greater reliance on food imports, with US $7 billion already...
Plant breeders could let women farmers guide them
| Sam Storr | 3/6/2020
Plant breeders produce new varieties for their customers: farmers. To predict what kinds of new varieties are likely to offer significant benefits to farmers, breeders may turn to their customers to evaluate which characteristics might make a new variety more acceptable. A comprehensive review of many such evaluations suggests that if breeders were to pay more attention to what women need, it could increase the usefulness of...
Assessing the current state of breeding operations in West Africa
EiB news | Sam Storr | 6/4/2020
In February, the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding (EiB) Platform assessed breeding operations and phenotyping capacity at five CGIAR and national crop research stations in West Africa.Given that the population of West Africa is expected to double in the next...
Dawn of a pan-African method for designing varieties with impact
EiB news | Sam Storr | 20/2/2020
Market and crop development specialists in Africa are making important steps towards embedding customer- and product-driven breeding practices in the region in 2020.One the chief obstacles to agricultural development in Africa is the low rate at which...
Breeding for better gender equity
| Sam Storr | 11/2/2020
This blog was also posted by the Gender & Breeding Initiative A pilot study to validate tools that will help breeders to pay more attention to gender is about to be launched with two breeding programs in Nigeria and Kenya. The pilot study represents an important milestone in a new collaboration between the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform (EiB) and the CGIAR Gender and Breeding Initiative (GBI), which is led by the CGIAR...
Plant breeders assess tools and services to accelerate breeding with genotypic data
EiB news | Sam Storr | 7/2/2020
On January 15, the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform (EiB) held a one-day workshop with users of its genotyping and data analytics services at the 2020 International Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) conference,...
Toward a unified breeding data management system
EiB news | Sam Storr | 28/1/2020
Members of the Enterprise Breeding System (EBS) advisory committee are lending expertise to make progress on the development of a full-spectrum breeding data management software.CGIAR plant breeders currently rely on a suite of different software projects to make use...
EiB Annual Meeting 2019 Highlights
EiB news | Sam Storr | 16/12/2019
A common vision for CGIAR breeding backed by funders, with a view to One CGIARAt its 2019 annual meeting, the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform outlined an ambitious vision for breeding program modernization designed to deliver on the two key metrics demanded by the donors behind Crops to End...
CGIAR and NARS cassava and yam breeders visit Brazil
EiB news | Sam Storr | 2/12/2019
During the week of 12 August 2019, cassava and yam breeders from CGIAR and national agricultural research centers in Colombia, Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania participated in an EiB-sponsored visit to Brazil.After carrying out assessments at 13 CGIAR centers, the trip...
Enterprise Breeding System hackathon
EiB news | Sam Storr | 22/11/2019
First steps taken to unify CGIAR-NARS breeding softwarePhoto credit: CIMMYT / Eleusis Llanderal ArangoFrom 21 October to 1 November, software developers and administrators from several breeding software projects met at the headquarters of the International Maize & Wheat Improvement Center (...