In the past, plant breeding has helped avert entire famines by changing a handful of genes in key crop varieties. But today's breeders must meet similar challenges with consistent excellence, making the right decisions each season to refine natural genetic diversity into a multitude of hard-working food crops.
More impactful crop varieties can be designed using gender-responsive tools and data that reveal the needs of different users in the value chain, including women farmers, consumers and food processors.
The BrAPI project is creating a common standard to allow breeding applications to talk to each other, enabling greater sharing and innovation.
High-impact Rice Breeding in East and West Africa (Hi-Rice) tackles one of the sources of low rice productivity: a lack of high performing, locally adapted varieties.
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.
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.
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 farmers adopt improved varieties with the potential to improve livelihoods, resilience, food security and better nutrition.
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.
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, held in San Diego, USA.
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.