IRRI overcomes barriers and bottlenecks towards a rice breeding revolution

Public breeding is undergoing a slow transformation as it adopts better, faster, more modern technologies and practices – all with the goal of ensuring farmers get the crop varieties they need.  

With an improvement plan that focuses on centralized and modernized breeding, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is setting the pace for CGIAR. IRRI has been making big advances, including designing a unified rice breeding strategy, defining market segments, developing breeding pipeline frameworks, and driving forward dry direct seeded rice (DDSR) as one of IRRI’s key crop techniques. 

However, IRRI’s plan hasn’t been invulnerable to bumps and bottlenecks. A big challenge was executing its improvement plan during COVID-19’s lockdown periods. They also battled a lack of a common rice breeding philosophy across the CGIAR, insufficient capacity to effectively assess and monitor market forces, and bottlenecks in ensuring new techniques such as rapid generation advance (RGA) become routine. But IRRI began conquering these challenges through project funding from the Crops to End Hunger (CtEH) initiative.   

Facilitated by CGIAR Excellence in Breeding (EiB), the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), invested in CtEH grants to help IRRI supercharge their journey. Here are some of the advances IRRI has been making: 

 

OneRice breeding strategy

In the past, each CGIAR breeding program operated in its own way. However, according to IRRI’s Senior Scientist Shalabh Dixit, OneRice “is the blueprint of how rice breeding should be done.” Launched by IRRI’s Rice Breeding Platform, the OneRice breeding strategy creates a habitual breeding framework that provides CGIAR breeding centers with common terminology, resource management, size management, and allocation systems to better breed rice at IRRI and across the CGIAR and national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) partners. CtEH helped bring together various components of OneRice to reach these goals.  

 

                                                                                                  

As a result, rice varieties can be developed and disseminated faster and more effectively across the system. Within the OneRice breeding strategy, IRRI is revolutionizing breeding operations by developing market segment and breeding pipeline frameworks for new and desirable farmer-preferred varieties. 

 

Market segments, breeding pipelines, and a Global Product Repository 

Gathered from around the globe, IRRI’s global market segment analysis resulted in identifying nine priority market segments for prospective breeding pipelines. CtEH supported the recruitment of product managers, who now have the opportunity to design and implement a management strategy around in-demand products. New varieties will be mapped to strategic local market segments based on the farmer and consumer demands within that area.  

Also, according to Dixit, the product manager will help in, “managing, to some extent, the life-cycle of a variety.” IRRI’s product manager will be able to profile desirable and new rice varieties that meet market demand that can be shared with the Global Product Repository. IRRI developed the repository to share market intelligence and product profiles with CGIAR and NARES breeding partners.

 

The DDSR fields were developed through the CtEH mechanization project. Source: IRRI 

 

Dry direct seeded rice as a new pathway to sustainable agriculture