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Oct 272015
 

 

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

GCP sowed the seeds of a genetic resources revolution.

“In the last 10 years we have had a revolution in terms of developing the genetic resources of crops.”

So says Pooran Gaur, Principal Scientist for chickpea genetics and breeding at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), and Product Delivery Coordinator for chickpeas for the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP).

He attributes this revolution in large part to GCP, saying it “played the role of catalyst. It got things started. It set the foundation. Now we are in a position to do further molecular breeding in chickpeas.”

Led by Pooran, researchers from India, Ethiopia and Kenya worked together not only to develop improved, drought-tolerant chickpeas that would thrive in semiarid conditions, but also to ensure these varieties would be growing in farmers’ fields across Africa within a decade.

The 10-year Generation Challenge Programme, with the goal of improving food security in developing countries, aimed to leave plant genetic assets as an important part of its legacy.

Diagnostic, or informative, molecular markers – which act like ‘tags’ for beneficial genes scientists are looking for – are an increasingly important genetic tool for breeders in developing resilient, improved varieties, and have been a key aspect of GCP’s research.

Photo: ICARDA

Chickpeas, ready to harvest.

What is a diagnostic molecular marker?

Developments in plant genetics over the past 10–15 years have provided breeders with powerful tools to detect beneficial traits of plants much more quickly than ever before.

Scientists can identify individual genes and explore which ones are responsible for, or contribute to, valuable characteristics such as tolerance to drought or poor soils, or resistance to pests or diseases.

Once a favourable gene for a target agronomic trait is discovered and located in the plant’s genome, the next step is to find a molecular marker that will effectively tag it. A molecular marker is simply a variation in the plant’s DNA sequence that can be detected by scientists using any of a range of methods. When one of these genetic variants is found close on the genome to a gene of interest (or even within the gene itself), it can be used to indicate the gene’s presence.

To use an analogy, think of a story as the plant’s genome: its words are the plant’s genes, and a molecular marker works like a text highlighter. Molecular markers are not precise enough to highlight specific words (genes), but they can highlight sentences (genomic regions) that contain these words, making it easier and quicker to identify whether or not they are present.

Once a marker is found to be associated with a gene, or multiple genes, and determined to be significant to a target trait, it is designated an informative marker, diagnostic marker or predictive marker. Some simple traits such as flower colour are controlled by one gene, but more complex traits such as drought tolerance are controlled by multiple genes. Diagnostic markers enable plant breeders to practise molecular breeding.

Breeders use markers to predict plant traits

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Hard work: a Ugandan bean farmer’s jembe, or hoe.

In the process known as marker-assisted selection, plant breeders use diagnostic molecular markers early in the breeding process to determine whether plants they are developing will have the desired qualities. By testing only a small amount of seed or seedling tissue, breeders are able to choose the best parent plants for crossing, and easily see which of the progeny have inherited useful genes. This considerably shortens the time it takes to develop new crop varieties.

“We use diagnostic markers to check for favourable genes in plants under selection. If the genes are present, we grow the seed or plant and observe how the genes are expressed as plant characteristics in the field [phenotyping]; if the genes are not present, we throw the seed or plant away,” explains Steve Beebe, a leading bean breeder with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and GCP’s Product Delivery Coordinator for beans.

“This saves us resources and time, as instead of a growing few thousand plants to maturity, most of which would not possess the gene, by using markers to make our selection we need to grow and phenotype only a few hundred plants which we know have the desired genes.”

GCP supported 25 projects to discover and develop markers for genes that control traits that enable key crops, including bean and chickpea, to tolerate drought and poor soils and resist pests and diseases.

Genomic resources, including genetic maps and genotyping datasets, were developed during GCP’s first phase (2004–2008) and were then used in molecular-breeding projects during the second five years of the Programme (2009–2014).

“GCP’s philosophy was that we have, in breeding programmes, genomic resources that can be utilised. Now we are well placed, and we should be able to continue even after GCP with our molecular-breeding programme,” says Pooran.

Photo: IRRI

A small selection of the rice diversity in the International Rice Research Institute gene bank – raw material for the creation of genomic resources.

Markers developed for drought tolerance

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Cracked earth.

With climate change making droughts more frequent and severe, breeding for drought tolerance was a key priority for GCP from its inception.

Different plants may use similar strategies to tolerate drought, for example, having longer roots or reducing water loss from leaves. But drought tolerance is a complex trait to breed, as in each crop a large number of genes are involved.

Wheat, for example, has many traits – each controlled by different genes – that allow the crop to tolerate extreme temperature and/or lack of moisture. Identifying drought tolerance in wheat is therefore a search for many genes. In the particular case of wheat, this search is compounded by its genetic make-up, which is one of the most complex in the plant kingdom.

The difficulty of identifying genes that play a significant role in drought tolerance makes it all the more impressive when researchers successfully collaborate to overcome these challenges. GCP-supported scientists were able to develop and use diagnostic markers in chickpea, rice, sorghum and wheat to breed for drought tolerance. The first new drought-tolerant varieties bred using marker-assisted selection have already been released to farmers in Africa and Asia and are making significant contributions to food and income security.

Photo: ICRISAT

Tanzanian sorghum farmer.

Markers developed for pests and diseases

Photo: IITA

A bumper harvest of cassava roots at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria.

Cassava mosaic disease (CMD) is the biggest threat to cassava production in Africa – where more cassava is grown and eaten than any other crop. A principal source of CMD resistance is CMD2, a dominant gene that confers high levels of resistance.

Nigerian GCP-supported researchers worked on identifying and validating diagnostic markers that are associated with CMD2. These markers are being used in marker-assisted selection work to transfer CMD resistance to locally-adapted, farmer-preferred varieties.

In the common bean, GCP-supported researchers identified genes for resistance to pests such as bean stem maggot in Ethiopia, as well as diseases such as the common mosaic necrosis potyvirus and common bacterial blight, which reduce bean quality and yields and in some cases means total crop losses.

Markers developed for acidic and saline soils

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Sifting rice in Nepal.

Aluminium toxicity and phosphorus deficiency, caused by imbalanced nutrient availability in acid soils, are major factors in inhibiting crop productivity throughout the world. Aluminium toxicity also exacerbates the effects of drought by inhibiting root growth.

Diagnostic markers for genes that confer tolerance to high levels of aluminium and improve phosphorus uptake were identified in sorghum, maize and rice. The markers linked to these two sets of similar major genes have been used efficiently in breeding programmes in Africa and Asia.

Salt stress is also a major constraint across many rice-producing areas, partly because modern rice varieties are highly sensitive to salinity. Farmers in salt-affected areas have therefore continued growing their traditional crop varieties, which are more resilient but give low yields with poor grain quality. To address this issue, GCP supported work to develop and use markers to develop popular Bangladeshi varieties with higher tolerance to salt. GCP also funded several PhD students working in this area, one of whom was Armin Bhuiya.

Markers mean information, which means power

Diagnostic molecular markers are, in their most essential form, data. That means they are easily stored and maintained as data in publicly accessible databases and publications. Breeders can now access the molecular markers developed for various crops through the Integrated Breeding Platform – a web-based one-stop shop for integrated breeding information (including genetic resources), tools and support, which was established by GCP and is now continuing independently following GCP’s close – in order to design and carry out breeding projects.

“We could not have done that much in developing genomic resources without GCP support,” says Pooran. “Now the breeding products are coming; the markers are strengthening our work; and you will see in the next five to six years more products coming from molecular breeding.

“For me, GCP has improved the efficiency of the breeding programme – that is the biggest advantage.”

More links

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Beans on sale in Uganda.

Oct 162015
 
Photo: A Paul-Bossuet/ICRISAT

Pigeonpea farmers in India.

The tagline of the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) is ‘Partnerships in modern crop breeding for food security’. One of GCP’s many rewarding partnerships was with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).

The Institute was a source of valuable partnerships with highly regarded agricultural scientists and researchers, as well as of germplasm and genetic resources from its gene bank. With assistance from GCP, these resources have enabled scientists and crop breeders throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America to achieve crop improvements for chickpea, groundnut, pearl millet, pigeonpea and sorghum, all of which are staple crops that millions of people depend upon for survival.

“The philosophy of GCP at the start was to tap into and use the genomic recourses we had in our gene banks to develop ICRISAT’s and our partners’ breeding programmes,” says Pooran Gaur, GCP’s Product Delivery Coordinator for chickpeas, and Principal Scientist for chickpea genetics and breeding at ICRISAT.

ICRISAT’s gene bank is a global repository of crop genetic diversity. It contains 123,023 germplasm accessions – in the form of seed samples – assembled from 144 countries, making it one of the largest gene banks in the world.

The collection serves as insurance against genetic loss and as a source of resistance to diseases and pests, tolerance to climatic and other environmental stresses, and improved quality and yield traits for crop breeding.

Pooran says the ultimate goal of the GCP–ICRISAT partnership was to use the resources in the gene bank to develop drought-tolerant varieties that would thrive in semi-arid conditions and to make these varieties available to farmers’ fields within a decade.

Photo: S Kilungu/CCAFS

Harvesting sorghum in Kenya.

Setting a foundation for higher yielding, drought-tolerant chickpeas

Pooran was involved with GCP from its beginning in 2004 and was instrumental in coordinating chickpea projects.

Photo: ICRISAT

Chickpea harvest, India.

“GCP got things started; it set a foundation for using genomic resources to breed chickpeas,” says Pooran. During Phase I of GCP (2004–2009), ICRISAT was involved in developing reference sets for chickpeas and developing mapping populations for drought-tolerance traits. It also collaborated with 19 other international research organisations to successfully sequence the chickpea genome in 2013 – a major breakthrough that paved the way for the development of even more superior chickpea varieties to transform production in semi-arid environments.

The International Chickpea Genome Sequencing Consortium, led by ICRISAT and partly funded by GCP, identified more than 28,000 genes and several million genetic markers. Pooran says these are expected to illuminate important genetic traits that may enhance new varieties.

The trait of most interest to many chickpea breeders is drought tolerance. In recent years, droughts in the south of India, the largest producer of chickpeas, have reduced yields to less than one tonne per hectare. Droughts have also diminished chickpea yields in Ethiopia and Kenya, Africa’s largest chickpea producers and exporters to India. While total global production of chickpeas is around 8.6 million tonnes per year, drought causes losses of around 3.7 million tonnes worldwide.

Photo: ICRISAT

Putting it to the test: Rajeev Varshney (left, see below) and Pooran Gaur (right) inspecting a chickpea field trial.

Pooran says the foundation work supported by GCP was particularly important for identifying drought-tolerance traits. “We had identified plants with early maturing traits. This allowed us to develop chickpea varieties that have more chance of escaping drought when cereal farmers produce a fast-growing crop in between the harvest and planting of their main crops,” he says.

New varieties that grow and develop more quickly are expected to play a key role in expanding the area suitable for chickpeas into new niches where the available crop-growing seasons are shorter.

“In southern India now we are already seeing these varieties growing well, and their yield is very high,” says Pooran. “In fact, productivity has increased in the south by about seven to eight times in the last 10–12 years.”

Developing capacity by involving partners in Kenya and Ethiopia

Photo: GCP

Monitoring the water use of chickpea plants in experiments at Egerton University, Njoro, Kenya.

As part of GCP’s Tropical Legumes I project (TLI), incorporated within its Legume Research Initiative (RI), ICRISAT partnered with Egerton University in Kenya and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) to share breeding skills and resources to produce higher yielding, drought-tolerant chickpea varieties.

“When we first started working on this project in mid-2007, our breeding programme was very weak,” says Paul Kimurto of the Faculty of Agriculture at Egerton University, who was Lead Scientist for chickpea research in the TLI project. “We have since accumulated a lot of germplasm, a chickpea reference set and a mapping population, all of which have greatly boosted our breeding programme.”

Paul says that with this increased capacity, his team in Kenya had released six new varieties of chickpea in the five years prior to GCP’s close at the end of 2014, and were expecting more to be ready within in the next three years.

In fields across Ethiopia, meanwhile, the introduction of new varieties has already brought a dramatic increase in productivity, with yields doubling in recent years, according to Asnake Fikre, Crop Research Directorate Director for EIAR.

Varieties like the large-seeded and high-valued kabuli have presented new opportunities for farmers to earn extra income through the export industry, and indeed chickpea exports from eastern Africa have substantially increased since 2001. This has transformed Ethiopia’s chickpeas from simple subsistence crop to one of great commercial significance.

Photo: S Sridharan/ICRISAT

This chickpea seller in Ethiopia says that kabuli varieties are becoming more popular.

Decoding pigeonpea genome

Two years prior to the decoding of the chickpea genome, GCP’s Director Jean-Marcel Ribaut announced that a six-year, GCP-funded collaboration led by ICRISAT had already sequenced almost three-quarters of the pigeonpea genome.

“This will have significant impact on resource-poor communities in the semi-arid regions, because they will have the opportunity to improve their livelihoods and increase food availability,” Jean-Marcel stated in January 2012.

Pigeonpea, the grains of which make a highly nutritious and protein-rich food, is a hardy and drought-tolerant crop. It is grown in the semi-arid tropics and subtropics of Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. This crop’s prolific seed production and tolerance to drought help reduce farmers’ vulnerability to potential food shortages during dry periods.

Photo: B Sreeram/ICRISAT

A pigeonpea farmer in his field in India.

The collaborative project brought together 12 participating institutes operating under the umbrella of the International Initiative for Pigeonpea Genomics. The initiative was led by Rajeev K Varshney, GCP’s Genomics Theme Leader and Director of the Center of Excellence in Genomics at ICRISAT. Other participants included BGI in Shenzhen, China; four universities; and five other advanced research entities, both private and public. The Plant Genome Research Program of the National Science Foundation, USA, also funded part of this research.

“We were able to assemble over 70 percent of the genome. This was sufficient to enable us to change breeding approaches for pigeonpea,” says Rajeev. “That is, we can now combine conventional and molecular breeding methods – something we couldn’t do as well before – and access enough genes to create many new pigeonpea varieties that will effectively help improve the food security and livelihoods of resource-poor communities.”

Pigeonpea breeders are now able to use markers for genetic mapping and trait identification, marker-assisted selection, marker-assisted recurrent selection and genomic selection. These techniques, Rajeev says, “considerably cut breeding time by doing away with several cropping cycles. This means new varieties reach dryland areas of Africa and Asia more quickly, thus improving and increasing the sustainability of food production systems in these regions.”

Several genes, unique to pigeonpea, were also identified for drought tolerance by the project. Future research may find ways of transferring these genes to other legumes in the same family – such as soybean, cowpea and common bean – helping these crops also become more drought tolerant. This would be a significant asset in view of the increasingly drier climates in these crops’ production areas.

“We cannot help but agree with William Dar, Director General of ICRISAT, who observed that the ‘mapping of the pigeonpea genome is a breakthrough that could not have come at a better time’,” says Jean-Marcel.

Photo: ICRISAT

East African farmers inspect pigeonpea at flowering time.

Securing income-generating groundnut crops in Africa

Groundnut, otherwise known as peanut, is one of ICRISAT’s mandate crops. Groundnuts provide a key source of nutrition for Africa’s farming families and have the potential to sustain a strong African export industry in future.

“The groundnut is one of the most important income-generating crops for my country and other countries in East Africa,” says Patrick Okori, who is a groundnut breeder and Principal Scientist with ICRISAT in Malawi and who was GCP’s Product Delivery Coordinator for groundnuts.

“It’s like a small bank for many smallholder farmers, one that can be easily converted into cash, fetching the highest prices,” he says

It is the same in West Africa, according to groundnut breeder Issa Faye from the Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles (ISRA), who has been involved in GCP since 2008. “It’s very important for Senegal,” he says. “It’s the most important cash crop here – a big source of revenue for farmers around the country. Senegal is one of the largest exporters of groundnut in West Africa.”

In April 2014, the genomes of the groundnut’s two wild ancestral parents were successfully sequenced by the International Peanut Genome Initiative – a multinational group of crop geneticists, including those from ICRISAT, who had been working in collaboration for several years.

The sequencing work has given breeders access to 96 percent of all groundnut genes and provided the molecular map needed to breed drought-tolerant and disease-resistant higher yielding varieties, faster.

Photo: S Sridharan/ICRISAT

Drying groundnut harvest, Mozambique.

“The wild relatives of a number of crops contain genetic stocks that hold the most promise to overcome drought and disease,” says Vincent Vadez, ICRISAT Principal Scientist and groundnut research leader for GCP’s Legumes Research Initiative. And for groundnut, these stocks have already had a major impact in generating the genetic tools that are key to making more rapid and efficient progress in crop science

Chair of GCP’s Consortium Committee, David Hoisington – formerly ICRISAT’s Director of Research and now Senior Research Scientist and Program Director at the University of Georgia – says the sequencing could be a huge step forward for boosting agriculture in developing countries.

“Researchers and plant breeders now have much better tools available to breed more productive and more resilient groundnut varieties, with improved yields and better nutrition,” he says.

These resilient varieties should be available to farmers across Africa within a few years.

Supporting key crops in West Africa

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Harvested pearl millet and sorghum in Ghana.

With a focus on the semi-arid tropics, ICRISAT has been working closely with partners for 30 years to improve rainfed farming systems in West Africa. One sorghum researcher who has been working on the ground with local partners in Mali since 1998 is Eva Weltzien-Rattunde. She is an ICRISAT Principal Scientist in sorghum breeding and genetic resources, based in Mali, and was Principal Investigator for GCP’s Sorghum Research Initiative.

Eva and her team collaborated with local researchers at Mali’s Institut d’Economie Rurale (IER) and France’s Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD; Agricultural Research for Development) on a project to test a novel molecular-breeding approach: backcross nested association mapping (BCNAM). Eva says this method has the potential to halve the time it takes to develop local sorghum varieties with improved yield and adaptability to poor soil fertility conditions.

In another project, under GCP’s Comparative Genomics Research Initiative, Eva and her team are using molecular markers developed through the RI to select for aluminium-tolerant and phosphorus-efficient varieties and validating their performance in field trials across 29 environments in three countries in West Africa.

“Low phosphorus availability is a key problem for farmers on the coast of West Africa, and breeding phosphorus-efficient crops to cope with these conditions has been a main objective of ICRISAT in West Africa for some time,” says Eva.

“We’ve had good results in terms of field trials. We have at least 20 lines we are field testing at the moment, which we selected from 1,100 lines that we tested under high and low phosphorous conditions.” Eva says that some of these lines could be released as new varieties as early as 2015.

Ibrahima Sissoko, a data curator working with Eva’s team at ICRISAT in Mali, also adds that the collaborations and involvement with GCP have increased his and other developing country partners’ capacity in data management and statistical analysis, as well as helping to expand their network. “I can get help from other members of my sorghum community,” he says.

In summing up, Eva says: “Overall, we feel the GCP partnerships are enhancing our capacity here in Mali, and that we are closer to delivering more robust sorghum varieties that will help farmers and feed the ever-growing population in West Africa.”

Photo: A Paul-Bossuet/ICRISAT

Enjoying a tasty dish of sorghum.

Tom Hash, millet breeder and Principal Scientist at ICRISAT and GCP Principal Investigator for millet, shares Eva’s sentiments on GCP and the impact it is having in West Africa.

Between 2005 and 2007, GCP invested in genetic research for millet, which is the sixth most important cereal crop globally and a staple food (along with sorghum) in Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Mali, Niger, northern Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan.

With financial support from GCP, and drawing on lessons learnt from parallel GCP genetic research, including in sorghum and chickpea, ICRISAT was able to mine its considerable pearl millet genetic resources for desirable traits.

Hari D Upadhyaya, Principal Scientist and Head of Genebank at ICRISAT in India, led this task to develop and genotype a ‘composite collection’ of pearl millet. The team created a selection that strategically reduced the 21,594 accessions in the gene bank down to just 1,021. This collection includes lines developed at ICRISAT and material from other sources, with a range of valuable traits including tolerance to drought, heat and soil salinity and resistance to blast, downy mildew, ergot, rust and smut, and even resistance to multiple diseases.

The team then used molecular markers to fingerprint the DNA of plants grown from the collection.

“GCP supported collaboration with CIRAD, and our pearl millet breeding teams learnt how to do marker-based genetic diversity analysis,” says Tom. “This work, combined with the genomic resources work, did make some significant contributions to pearl millet research.”

Over 100 new varieties of pearl millet have recently been developed and released in Africa by the African Centre for Crop Improvement in South Africa, another developing country partner of ICRISAT and GCP. Tom says the initial genetic research was pivotal to this happening.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

A Ghanaian farmer examines his pearl millet harvest.

From poverty to prosperity through partnerships

Patrick Okori says that GCP has enabled his organisation to make a much stronger contribution to the quality of science.

“Prior to GCP, ICRISAT was already one of the big investors in legume research, because that was its mandate. The arrival of GCP, however, expanded the number of partners that ICRISAT had, both locally and globally, through the resources, strategic meetings and partnership arrangements that GCP provided as a broad platform for engaging in genomic research and the life sciences.”

This expansion of ICRISAT, facilitated by GCP, also enabled researchers from across the world and in diverse fields to interact in ways they had never had the opportunity to before, says Vincent Vadez.

“GCP has allowed me to make contact with people working on other legumes, for example,” he says. “It has allowed us to test hypotheses in other related crops, and we’ve generated quite a bit of good science from that.”

Pooran Gaur has had a similar experience with his chickpea research at ICRISAT.

“GCP provided the first opportunity for us to work with the bean and cowpea groups, learning from each other. That cross-learning from other crops really helped us. You learn many things working together, and I think we have developed a good relationship, a good community for legumes now.”

This community environment has made the best use of an unusual variety of skills, knowledge and resources, agrees Rajeev Varshney.

“It brought together people from all kinds of scientific disciplines – from genomics, bioinformatics, biology, molecular biology and so on,” he says. “Such a pooling of complementary expertise and resources made great achievements possible.”

More links

Photo: A Paul-Bossuet/ICRISAT

Man and beast team up to transport chickpeas in Ethiopia.

 

Jun 222015
 
Photo: Joseph Hill/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Groundnut plants growing in Senegal.

Across Africa, governments and scientists alike are heralding groundnuts’ potential to lead resource-poor farmers out of poverty.

Around 5,000 years ago in the north of Argentina, two species of wild groundnuts got together to produce a natural hybrid. The result of this pairing is the groundnut grown today across the globe, particularly in Africa and Asia. Now, scientists are discovering the treasures hidden in the genes of these ancient ancestors.

Nearly half of the world’s groundnut growing area lies within the African continent, yet Africa’s production of the legume has, until recently, accounted for only 25 percent of global yield. Drought, pests, diseases and contamination are all culprits in reducing yields and quality. But through the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP), scientists have been developing improved varieties using genes from the plant’s ancient ancestors. These new varieties are destined to make great strides towards alleviating poverty in some of the world’s most resource-poor countries.

Photo: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

A Ugandan farmer at work weeding her groundnut field.

A grounding in the history of Africa’s groundnuts

From simple bar snack in the west to staple food in developing countries, groundnuts – also commonly known as peanuts – have a place in the lives of many peoples across the world. First domesticated in the lush valleys of Paraguay, groundnuts have been successfully bred and cultivated for millennia. Today they form a billion-dollar industry in China, India and the USA, while also sustaining the livelihoods of millions of farming families across Africa and Asia.

Groundnut facts and figures •	About one-third of groundnuts produced globally are eaten and two-thirds are crushed for oil  •	The residue from oil processing is used as an animal feed and fertiliser •	Oils and solvents derived from groundnuts are used in medicines, textiles, cosmetics, nitro-glycerine, plastics, dyes, paints, varnishes, lubricating oils, leather dressings, furniture polish, insecticides and soap •	Groundnut shells are used to make plastic, wallboard, abrasives, fuel, cellulose and glue; they can also be converted to biodiesel

“The groundnut is one of the most important income-generating crops for my country and other countries in East Africa,” says Malawian groundnut breeder Patrick Okori, Principal Scientist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), who was also GCP’s Product Delivery Coordinator for groundnuts.

“It’s like a small bank for many smallholder farmers, one that can be easily converted into cash, fetching the highest prices,” he says.

The situation is similar in West Africa, according to groundnut breeder Issa Faye from the Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles (ISRA; Senegalese Agricultural Research Institute), who has been involved in GCP since 2008. “It’s very important for Senegal,” he says. “It’s the most important cash crop here – a big source of revenue for farmers around the country. Senegal is one of the largest exporters of peanut in West Africa.”

Groundnuts have good potential for sustaining a strong African export industry in future, while providing a great source of nutrition for Africa’s regional farming families.

“We believe that by using what we have learnt through GCP, we will be able to boost the production and exportation of groundnuts from Senegal to European countries, and even to Asian countries,” says Issa. “So it’s very, very important for us.”

Photo: Joseph Hill/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Harvested groundnuts in Senegal.

How Africa lost its groundnut export market

Photo: V Vadez

Groundnuts in distress under drought conditions.

In Africa, groundnuts have mostly been grown by impoverished smallholder farmers, in infertile soils and dryland areas where rainfall is both low and erratic. Drought and disease cause about USD 500 million worth of losses to groundnut production in Africa every year.

“Because groundnut is self-pollinating, most of the time poor farmers can recycle the seed and keep growing it over and over,” Patrick says. “But for such a crop you need to refresh the seed frequently, and after a certain period you should cull it. So the absence of, or limited access to, improved seed for farmers is one of the big challenges we have. Because of this, productivity is generally less than 50 percent of what would be expected.”

Photo: S Sridharan/ICRISAT

Rosette virus damage to groundnut above and below ground.

Diseases such as the devastating groundnut rosette virus – which is only found in Africa and has been known to completely wipe out crops in some areas – as well as pests and preharvest seed contamination have all limited crop yields and quality and have subsequently shut out Africa’s groundnuts from export markets.

The biggest blow for Africa came in the 1980s from a carcinogenic fungal toxin known as aflatoxin, explains Patrick.

Photo: IITA

Aflatoxin-contaminated groundnut kernels from Mozambique.

Aflatoxin is produced by mould species of the genus Aspergillus, which can naturally occur in the soil in which groundnuts are grown. When the fungus infects the legume it produces a toxin which, if consumed in high enough quantities, can be fatal or cause cancer. Groundnut crops the world over are menaced by aflatoxin, but Africa lost its export market because of high contamination levels.

“That’s why a substantial focus of the GCP research programme has been to develop varieties of groundnuts with resistance to the fungus,” says Patrick.

After a decade of GCP support, a suite of new groundnut varieties representing a broad diversity of characteristics is expected to be rolled out in the next two or three years. This suite will provide a solid genetic base of resistance from which today’s best commercial varieties can be improved, so the levels of aflatoxin contamination in the field can ultimately be reduced.

Ancestral genes could hold the key to drought tolerance and disease resistance

In April 2014, the genomes of the groundnut’s two wild ancestral parents were successfully sequenced by the International Peanut Genome Initiative – a multinational group of crop geneticists, who had been working in collaboration for several years.

The sequencing work has given breeders access to 96 percent of all groundnut genes and provided the molecular map needed to breed drought-tolerant and disease-resistant higher-yielding varieties, faster.

“The wild relatives of a number of crops contain genetic stocks that hold the most promise to overcome drought and disease,” says Vincent Vadez, ICRISAT Principal Scientist and groundnut research leader for GCP’s Legumes Research Initiative. And for groundnut, these stocks have already had a major impact in generating the genetic tools that are key to making more rapid and efficient progress in crop breeding.

“Genetically, the groundnut has always been a really tough nut to crack,” says GCP collaborator David Bertioli, from the University of Brasilia in Brazil. “It has a complex genetic structure, narrow genetic diversity and a reputation for being slow and difficult to breed. Until its genome was sequenced, the groundnut was bred relatively blindly compared to other crops, so it has remained among the less studied crops,” he says.

With the successful genome sequencing, however, researchers can now understand groundnut breeding in ways they could only dream of before.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Groundnut cracked.

“Working with a wild species allows you to bring in new versions of genes that are valuable for the crop, like disease resistance, and also other unexpected things, like improved yield under drought,” David says. “Even things like seed size can be altered this way, which you don’t really expect.”

The sequencing of the groundnut genome was funded by The Peanut Foundation, Mars Inc. and three Chinese academies (the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences), but David credits GCP work for paving the way. “GCP research built up the populations and genetic maps that laid the groundwork for the material that then went on to be sequenced.”

Chair of GCP’s Consortium Committee, David Hoisington – formerly ICRISAT’s Director of Research and now Senior Research Scientist and Program Director at the University of Georgia – says the sequencing could be a huge step forward for boosting agriculture in developing countries.

“Researchers and plant breeders now have much better tools available to breed more productive and more resilient groundnut varieties, with improved yields and better nutrition,” he says.

These resilient varieties should be available to farmers across Africa within a few years.

Genetics alone will not lift productivity – farmers’ local knowledge is vital

Improvements in the yield, quality and share of the global market of groundnuts produced by developing countries are already being seen as a result of GCP support, says Vincent Vadez. “But for this trend to continue, the crop’s ability to tolerate drought and resist diseases must be improved without increasing the use of costly chemicals that most resource-poor farmers simply cannot afford,” he says.

While genetic improvements are fundamental to developing the disease resistance and drought tolerance so desperately needed by African farmers, there are other important factors that can influence the overall outcome of a breeding programme, he explains. Understanding the plant itself, the soil and the climate of a region are all vital in creating the kinds of varieties farmers need and can grow in their fields.

Photo: Y Wachira/Bioversity International

Kenyan groundnut farmer Patrick Odima with some of his crop.

“I have grown increasingly convinced that overlooking these aspects in our genetic improvements would be to our peril,” Vincent warns. “There are big gains to be made from looking at very simple sorts of agronomic management changes, like sowing density – the number of seeds you plant per square metre. Groundnuts are often cultivated at seeding rates that are unlikely to achieve the best possible yields, especially when they’re grown in infertile soils.”

For Omari Mponda, now Director of Tanzania’s Agricultural Research Institute at Naliendele (ARI–Naliendele), previously Zonal Research Coordinator and plant breeder, and country groundnut research leader for GCP’s Tropical Legumes I project (TLI; see box below), combining good genetics with sound agronomic management is a matter of success or failure for any crop-breeding programme, especially in poverty-stricken countries.

“Molecular markers by themselves will not address the productivity on the ground,” he says, agreeing with Vincent. “A new variety of groundnut may have very good resistance, but its pods may be too hard, making shelling very difficult. This does not help the poor people, because they can’t open the shells with their bare hands.”

And helping the poor of Africa is the real issue, Omari says. “We must remind ourselves of that.”

This means listening to the farmers: “It means finding out what they think and experience, and using that local knowledge. Only then should the genetics come in. We need to focus on the connections between local knowledge and scientific knowledge. This is vital.”

The Tropical Legumes I project (TLI) was initiated by GCP in 2007 and subsequently incorporated into the Programme’s Legumes Research Initiative (RI). The goal of the RI was to improve the productivity of four legumes – beans, chickpeas, cowpeas and groundnuts – that are important in food security and poverty reduction in developing countries, by providing solutions to overcome drought, poor soils, pests and diseases. TLI was led by GCP and focussed on Africa. Work on groundnut within TLI was coordinated by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). The partners in the four target countries were Malawi’s Chitedze Research Station, Senegal’s Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles (ISRA), and Tanzania’sAgricultural Research Institute (ARI). Other partners were France’s Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD), the Brazilian Corporation of Agricultural Research (EMBRAPA) and Universidade de Brasil in Brazil, and University of Georgia in the USA. Tropical Legumes II (TLII) was a sister project to TLI, led by ICRISAT on behalf of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). It focussed on large-scale breeding, seed multiplication and distribution primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, thus applying the ‘upstream’ research results from TLI and translating them into breeding materials for the ultimate benefit of resource-poor farmers. Many partners in TLI also worked on projects in TLII.

Photo: A Diama/ ICRISAT

Participants at a farmer field day in Mali interact with ICRISAT staff and examine different groundnut varieties and books on aflatoxin control and management options.

Local knowledge and high-end genetics working together in Tanzania

Like Malawi, Tanzania has also experienced the full spectrum of constraints to groundnut production – from drought, aflatoxin contamination, poor soil and limited access to new seed, to a lack of government extension officers visiting farmers to ensure they have the knowledge and skills needed to improve their farming practices and productivity.

Although more than one million hectares of Tanzania is groundnut cropping land, the resources supplied by the government have until now been minimal, says Omari, compared to those received for traditional cash crops such as cashews and coffee.

Photo: C Schubert/CCAFS

A farmer and her children near Dodoma, Tanzania, an area where climate change is causing increasing heat and drought. Groundnut is an important crop for local famers, forming the basis of their livelihood together with maize and livestock.

“But the groundnut is now viewed differently by the government in my country as a result of GCP’s catalytic efforts,” Omari says. “More resources are being put into groundnut research.”

In the realm of infrastructure, for instance, the use of GCP funds to build a new irrigation system at Naliendele has since prompted Tanzania’s government to invest further in irrigation for breeder seed production.

“They saw it was impossible for us to irrigate our crops with only one borehole, for instance, so they injected new funds into our irrigation system. We now have two boreholes and a whole new system, which has helped expand the seed production flow. Without GCP, this probably wouldn’t have happened.”

Irrigation, for Omari, ultimately means being able to get varieties to the farmers much faster: “maybe three times as fast,” he says. “This means we’ll be able to speed up the multiplication of seeds – in the past we were relying on rainfed seed, which took longer to bulk and get to farmers.”

With such practical outcomes from GCP’s research and funding efforts and the new genetic resources becoming available, breeders like Omari see a bright future for groundnut research in Tanzania.

Photo: C Schubert/CCAFS

Groundnut farmer near Dodoma, Tanzania.

The gains being made at Naliendele are not only sustainable, Omari explains, but have given the researchers independence and autonomy. “Before we were only learning – now we have become experts in what we do.”

Prior to GCP, Omari and his colleagues were used to conventional breeding and lacked access to cutting-edge science.

“We used to depend on germplasm supplied to us by ICRISAT, but now we see the value in learning to use molecular markers in groundnut breeding to grow our own crosses, and we are rapidly advancing to a functional breeding programme in Tanzania.”

Omari says he and his team now look forward to the next phase of their research, when they expect to make impact by practically applying their knowledge to groundnut production in Tanzania.

Similar breeding success in Senegal

Photo: C Schubert/CCAFS

Harvesting groundnuts in Senegal.

Issa Faye became involved in GCP in 2008 when the programme partly funded his PhD in fresh seed dormancy in groundnuts. “I was an example of a young scientist who was trained and helped by GCP in groundnut research,” he says.

“I remember when I was just starting my thesis, my supervisor would say, ‘You are very lucky because you will not be limited to using conventional breeding. You are starting at a time when GCP funding is allowing us to use marker-assisted selection [MAS] in our breeding programme’.”

The importance of MAS in groundnut breeding, Issa says, cannot be overstated.

“It is very difficult to distinguish varieties of cultivated groundnut because most of them are morphologically very similar. But if you use molecular markers you can easily distinguish them and know the diversity of the matter you are using, which makes your programme more efficient. It makes it easier to develop varieties, compared to the conventional breeding programme we were using before we started working with GCP.”

By using markers that are known to be linked to useful genes for traits such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, or resistance to aflatoxin-producing fungi, breeders can test plant materials to see whether or not they are present. This helps them to select the best parent plants to use in their crosses, and accurately identify which of the progeny have inherited the gene or genes in question without having to grow them all to maturity, saving time and money.

Photo: S Sridharan/ICRISAT

These women in Salima District, Malawi, boil groundnuts at home and carry their tubs to the Siyasiya roadside market.

Senegal, like other developing countries, does not have enough of its own resources for funding research activities, explains Issa. “We can say we are quite lucky here because we have a well-developed and well-equipped lab, which is a good platform for doing molecular MAS. But we need to keep improving it if we want to be on the top. We need more human resources and more equipment for boosting all the breeding programmes in Senegal and across other regions of West Africa.”

Recently, Issa says, the Senegalese government has demonstrated awareness of the importance of supporting these activities. “We think that we will be receiving more funds from the government because they have seen that it’s a kind of investment. If you want to develop agriculture, you need to support research. Funding from the government will be more important in the coming years,” he says.

“Now that we have resources developed through GCP, we hope that some drought-tolerant varieties will come and will be very useful for farmers in Senegal and even for other countries in West Africa that are facing drought.”

It’s all about poverty

“The achievements of GCP in groundnut research are just the beginning,” says Vincent. The legacy of the new breeding material GCP has provided, he says, is that it is destined to form the basis of new and ongoing research programmes, putting research well ahead of where it would otherwise have been.

“There wasn’t time within the scope of GCP to develop finished varieties because that takes such a long time, but these products will come,” he says.

For Vincent, diverse partnerships facilitated by GCP have been essential for this to happen. “The groundnut work led by ICRISAT and collaborators in the target countries – Malawi, Senegal, and Tanzania – has been continuously moving forward.”

Photo: S Sridharan/ICRISAT

Groundnut harvesting at Chitedze Agriculture Research Station, Malawi.

Issa agrees: “It was fantastic to be involved in this programme. We know each other now and this will ease our collaborations. We hope to keep working with all the community, and that will obviously have a positive impact on our work.”

For Omari, a lack of such community and collaboration can only mean failure when it comes to addressing poverty.

“If we all worked in isolation, a lot of money would be spent developing new varieties but nothing would change on the ground,” he says. “Our work in Tanzania is all about the problem of poverty, and as scientists we want to make sure the new varieties are highly productive for the farmers around our area. This means we need to work closely with members of the agricultural industry, as a team.”

Omari says he and his colleagues see themselves as facilitators between the farmers of Tanzania and the ‘upstream end’ of science represented by ICRISAT and GCP. “We are responsible for bringing these two ends together and making the collaboration work,” he says.

Only from there can we come up with improved technologies that will really succeed at helping to reduce poverty in Africa.”

As climate change threatens to aggravate poverty more and more in the future, the highly nutritious, drought-tolerant groundnut may well be essential to sustain a rapidly expanding global population.

By developing new, robust varieties with improved adaptation to drought, GCP researchers are well on the way to increasing the productivity and profitability of the groundnut in some of the poorest regions of Africa, shifting the identity of the humble nut to potential crop champion for future generations.

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Photo: S Sridharan/ICRISAT

Oswin Madzonga, Scientific Officer at ICRISAT-Lilongwe, visits on-farm trials near Chitala Research Station in Salima, Malawi, where promising disesase-resistant varieties are being tested real life conditions.

Jun 122015
 
Photo: IITA

Growing cowpea pods.

Each year, millions of people in Senegal go hungry for several months, many surviving on no more than one meal a day. Locals call this time soudure – the hungry period. It typically lasts from June through to September, when previous winter and spring cereal supplies are exhausted and people wait anxiously for a bountiful autumn cereal harvest.

During this period, a bowl of fresh green cowpea pods once a day is the best that many people can hope for. Cowpeas are the first summer crop to mature, with some varieties ready to harvest in as little as 60 days.

While cowpeas provide valued food security in Africa, yields remain low. In Senegal, average cowpea yields are 450 kilograms per hectare, a mere 10–30 percent of their potential. This poor productivity is primarily because of losses due to insects and diseases, but is sometimes further compounded by chronic drought.

In 2007, the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) brought together a team of plant breeders and geneticists from Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and the USA to collaborate on cowpea. Their goal was to breed varieties that would be higher yielding, drought tolerant and resistant to pests and diseases, and so help secure and improve local cowpea production in sub-Saharan African countries.

Photo: IITA

A trader selling cowpea at Bodija market, Ibadan, Nigeria.

Cowpea production – almost all of it comes from Africa

A type of legume originating in West Africa, cowpeas are also known as niébé in francophone Africa and as black-eyed peas in the USA.  They are well adapted to drier, warmer regions and grow well in poor soils. In Africa, they are mostly grown in the hot, drought-prone savannas and very arid sub-Saharan regions, often together with pearl millet and sorghum.

Nutritionally, cowpeas are a major source of dietary protein in many developing countries. Young leaves, unripe pods and peas are used as vegetables, and the mature grain is processed for various snacks and main meal dishes. As a cash crop, both for grain and animal fodder, cowpea is highly valued in sub-Saharan Africa.

Worldwide, an estimated 14.5 million hectares of land is planted with cowpea each year. Global production of dried cowpeas in 2010 was 5.5 million tonnes, 94 percent of which was grown in Africa.

“In Senegal, cowpeas cover more than 200,000 hectares,” says Ndiaga Cissé, cowpea breeder at L’institut sénégalais de recherches agricoles (ISRA; Senegalese Agricultural Research Institute). “This makes it the second most grown legume in Senegal, after groundnuts.”

In 2011, Senegal experienced its third drought within a decade. Low and erratic rainfall led to poor harvests in 2011 and 2012: yields of cereal crops (wheat, barley and maize) fell by 36 percent compared to 2010. Consequently, the hungry period in 2012 started three months earlier than usual, making gap-fillers like cowpea even more important. In fact, cereal production in sub-Saharan African countries has not seen substantial growth over the last two decades – total area, yield and production grew by only 4.3 percent, 1.5 percent and 5.8 percent, respectively.

Climate change is expected to further compound this situation across sub-Saharan Africa. Droughts are forecast to occur more frequently, weakening plants and making them more vulnerable to pests and diseases.

“Improved varieties of cowpeas are urgently needed to narrow the gap between actual and potential yields,” says Ndiaga. “They will not only provide security to farmers in the face of climate change, but will also help with food security and overall livelihoods.”

Photo: IITA

Farmers in Northern Nigeria transport their cowpea harvest.

Mapping the cowpea genome

For over 30 years, Phil Roberts, a professor in the Department of Nematology at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), has been breeding new varieties of cowpea. “UCR has a long history of research in cowpea breeding that goes back to the mid-seventies,” explains Phil. “One of the reasons we were commissioned by GCP in 2007 was to use our experience, particularly in using molecular breeding, to help African cowpea-breeding programmes produce higher yielding cowpeas.”

For seven years, Phil and his team at UCR coordinated the cowpea component of the Tropical Legumes I (TLI) project led by GCP (see box below).  The objective of this work was to advance cowpea breeding by applying modern, molecular breeding techniques, tools and knowledge to develop lines and varieties with drought tolerance and resistance to pests and diseases in the sub-Saharan African countries Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Nigeria and Senegal.

The molecular breeding technology that UCR uses for cowpeas is based on finding genes that help cowpea plants tolerate insects and diseases, identifying markers that can indicate the presence of known genes, and using these to incorporate valuable genes into higher yielding varieties.

“Using molecular breeding techniques is a lot easier and quicker, and certainly less hit-or-miss, than conventional breeding techniques,” says Phil. “We can shorten the time needed to breed better adapted cowpea varieties preferred by farmers and markets.”

Phil explains that the first priority of the project was to map the cowpea genome.

“The map helps us locate the genes that play a role in expressing key traits such as drought tolerance, disease resistance or pest resistance,” says Phil. “Once we know where these genes are, we can use molecular marker tools to identify and help select for the traits. This is a lot quicker than growing the plant and observing if the trait is present or not.”

To use an analogy, think of the plant’s genome as a story: its words are the plant’s genes, and a molecular marker works as a text highlighter. Molecular markers are not precise enough to highlight specific words (genes), but they can highlight sentences (genomic regions) that contain these words (genes), making it easier and quicker to identify which plants have them. Traditionally, breeders have needed to grow plants to maturity under appropriately challenging conditions to see which ones are likely to have useful traits, but by using markers to flag valuable genes they are able to largely skip this step, and test large amounts of material to choose the best parents for their crosses, then check which of the progeny have inherited the gene or genes.

Photo: IITA

Diversity of cowpea seed.

Breeding new varieties faster, using modern techniques

Photo: ICRISAT

A farmer pleased with her cowpea plants.

The main focus of the cowpea component in TLI was to optimise marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) and marker-assisted backcrossing (MABC) breeding techniques for sub-Saharan African environments and relevant traits.

MARS identifies regions of the genome that control important traits. In the case of cowpeas, these include drought tolerance and insect resistance. It uses molecular markers to explore more combinations in the plant populations, thus increasing breeding efficiency.

MABC is the simplest form of marker-assisted breeding, in which the goal is to incorporate a major gene from an agronomically inferior source (the donor parent) into an elite cultivar or breeding line (the recurrent parent). Major genes by themselves have a significant effect; it’s therefore easier to find a major gene associated with a desired trait, than having to find and clone several minor genes. The aim is to produce a line made up almost entirely of the recurrent parent genotype, with only the selected major gene from the donor parent.

Using the genome map and molecular markers, the UCR team identified 30 cowpea lines with drought tolerance and pest resistance from 5,000 varieties in its collection, providing the raw material for marker-assisted breeding. “Once we knew which lines had the drought-tolerance and pest-resistance genes we were looking for, we crossed them with high-yielding lines to develop 20 advanced cowpea lines, which our African partners field tested,” says Phil.

The lines underwent final field tests in 2014, and the best-yielding drought-tolerant lines will be used locally in Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Senegal to develop new higher yielding varieties that will be available to growers by 2016.

“While we are still some time off from releasing these varieties, we already feel we are two or three years ahead of where we would be if we were doing things using only conventional breeding methods,” says Ndiaga.

Photo: IITA

A parasitic Striga plant, in a cowpea experimental plot.

The genome map and molecular markers have helped cowpea breeders like Ousmane Boukar, cowpea breeder and Kano Station Representative with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), headquartered in Nigeria, to locate the genes in cowpeas that play a role in expressing desirable traits.

Ousmane, who was GCP’s cowpea Product Delivery Coordinator, says, “We have used this technology to develop advanced breeding lines that are producing higher yields in drier conditions and displaying resistance to several pests and diseases like thrips and Striga. We expect these lines to be available to plant breeders by the end of 2015.

“TLI has had a huge impact in Africa in terms of developing capacity to carry out marker-assisted breeding,” he says. “This form of breeding helps us to breed new varieties in three to five years instead of seven to ten years.”

The Tropical Legumes I project (TLI) was initiated by GCP in 2007 and subsequently incorporated into the Programme’s Legumes Research Initiative (RI). The goal of the RI was to improve the productivity of four legumes – beans, chickpeas, cowpeas and groundnuts – that are important in food security and poverty reduction in developing countries, by providing solutions to overcome drought, poor soils, pests and diseases. TLI was led by GCP and focussed on Africa. Work on cowpea within TLI was coordinated by the University of California, Riverside in the USA. Target-country partners were Institut de l’Environnement et de Recherches Agricoles (INERA) in Burkina Faso, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique and Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles (ISRA; Senegalese Agricultural Research Institute) in Senegal. Other partners were the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and USA’s Feed the Future Innovation Labs for Collaborative Research on Grain Legumes and for Climate-Resilient Cowpea. Tropical Legumes II (TLII) was a sister project to TLI, led by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) on behalf of IITA and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). It focussed on large-scale breeding, seed multiplication and distribution primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, thus applying the ‘upstream’ research results from TLI and translating them into breeding materials for the ultimate benefit of resource-poor farmers. Many partners in TLI also worked on projects in TLII.

Burkina Faso – evaluating new lines to improve the country’s economy

Cowpea is an important crop for the people of Burkina Faso. Over 10 million farmers produce on average 800,000 tonnes of cowpeas each year, making the country the third largest producer in the world, behind neighbours Nigeria and Niger.

Much of Burkina Faso’s cowpea crop is consumed domestically, but the government sees potential in increasing productivity for export to Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana in the south. This new venture would improve the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is the third lowest in the world.

“The government is very interested in our research to improve cowpea yields and secure them against drought and disease,” says Issa Drabo, lead cowpea breeder with the Institut de l’Environnement et de Recherches Agricoles (INERA) in Burkina Faso.

“We’ve been working closely with UCR to evaluate advanced breeding lines that we can use in our own breeding programme. So far we have several promising lines, some of which breeders are using to create varieties for release to farmers – some as early as this year.”

Photo: IITA

Farmers in Burkina Faso discuss cowpea varieties during participatory varietal selection activities.

Outsourcing the molecular work

Issa says his team has mainly been using conventional breeding techniques and outsourcing the molecular breeding work to the UK and USA. “We send leaf samples to the UK to be genotyped by a private company [LGC Genomics], who then forward the data to UCR, who analyse it and tell us which plants contain the desired genes and would be suitable for crossing.”

The whole process takes four to six weeks, from taking the samples to making a decision on which plants to cross.

“This system works well for countries that don’t have the capacity or know-how to do the molecular work,” says Darshna Vyas, a plant genetics specialist with LGC Genomics. “Genotyping has advanced to a point where even larger labs around the world choose to outsource their genotyping work, as it is cheaper and quicker than if they were to equip their lab and do it themselves. We do hundreds of thousands of genotyping samples a day – day in, day out. It’s our business.”

Darshna says LGC Genomics have also developed plant kits, as a result of working more with GCP partners from developing countries. “We would receive plant tissue that was not properly packaged and had become mouldy on the journey. The plant kits help researchers package their tissue correctly. The genotyping data you get from undamaged tissue compared to damaged tissue is a thousand times better.”

Getting the genotyping expertise on the ground

Photo: IITA

A trader bagging cowpeas at Bodija market, Ibadan, Nigeria.

To reduce their African partners’ reliance on UCR, researchers from the university, including Phil, have been training young plant breeders and PhD students from collaborating institutes. Independent of the cowpea project, they have also been joining GCP’s Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP) training events in Africa to help breeders understand the new technologies.

“All this capacity building we do really gets at the issue of leaving expertise on the ground when the project ends,” says Phil. “If these breeders don’t have the expertise to use the modern breeding technologies, then we won’t make much progress.”

GCP Capacity Building Theme Leader and TLI Project Manager Ndeye Ndack Diop has been impressed by UCR’s enthusiasm to build capacity in its partner countries. “Capacity building is a core objective for GCP and the TLI project,” says Ndeye Ndack. “While it is built into almost all GCP projects, UCR have gone over and above what was expected of them and contributed towards building capacity not only among its partner institutions, but in many other African national breeding institutes as well.”

Issa Drabo reports that in 2014 two of his young researchers from Burkina Faso completed their training in GCP’s Integrated Breeding Multiyear Course, conducted by UCR and the IBP team.

One of Issa’s researchers at INERA, Jean-Baptiste de la Salle Tignegré, says the course helped him understand more about the background genetics, statistical analysis and data management involved in the process of molecular breeding. “Because of the course, we are now able to analyse the genotype data from LGC,” he says.

Mozambique – insects and drought are the problem

In 2010, the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) joined the cowpea component of TLI, three years after the project started. “We were a little late to the party because we were busy setting up Mozambique’s first cowpea breeding programme, which only began in 2008,” recalls Rogerio Chiulele, a lecturer at the university’s Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering and lead scientist for cowpea research in Mozambique for TLI.

That year (2008), UEM received a GCP Capacity building à la carte grant to establish a cowpea-breeding programme for addressing some of the constraints limiting cowpea production and productivity, particularly drought, pests and diseases.

As in Burkina Faso and Senegal, in Mozambique cowpeas are an important source of food, for both protein and profit, particularly for the poor. Cowpeas rank as the fourth most cultivated crop in Mozambique, accounting for about nine percent of the total cultivated area, or an estimated four million hectares of smallholder farms.

Photo: IITA

Cowpea plants infested by aphids.

Rogerio says that farmers in his country, just as in other parts of Africa, struggle to reach their full yield potential because of climate, pests and diseases. “Several insect pests – such as aphids, flower thrips, nematodes and pod-sucking pests – can substantially reduce cowpea yield and productivity in Mozambique,” he says.

“Cowpea aphids can cause problems at any time in the growing season, but are most damaging during dry weather when they infest seedlings that are stressed from lack of water. In wetter parts of the country, flower thrips – which feed on floral buds – are the most damaging insect pest.” These insects are also major pests in Burkina Faso and Senegal, along with hairy caterpillar (Amsacta moloneyi), which can completely destroy swaths of cowpea seedlings.

Rogerio says breeding for insect resistance and drought tolerance, using marker-assisted techniques, improves breeders’ chances of increased cowpea productivity. “Productivity is key to increasing rural incomes, and new resources can then be invested in other activities that help boost total family income,” says Rogerio. “These new breeding techniques will help us achieve this quicker.”

Three high-yielding varieties to hit the Mozambique market in 2015

Photo: IITA

Mature cowpea pods ready for harvesting.

Since 2010, Rogerio’s team have quickly caught up to Burkina Faso and Senegal and plan to release three higher yielding new lines with drought tolerance in 2015. One of these lines, CB46, is based on a local cowpea variety crossed with a UCR-sourced American black-eyed pea variety that displays drought tolerance, which potentially has huge market appeal.

“Local varieties fetch, on average, half a US dollar per kilogram, compared to black-eyed pea varieties, whose price is in the region of four to five US dollars,” says Rogerio. “Obviously this is beneficial to the growers, but the benefits for consumers are just as appealing. The peas are better quality and tastier, and they take half as long to cook compared to local varieties.”

All these extra qualities are important to consider in any breeding programme and are a key objective of the Tropical Legume II (TLII) project (see box above). TLII activities, led by ICRISAT, seek to apply products from TLI to make an impact among farmers.

“TLII focuses on translating research outputs from TLI into tangible products, including new varieties,” says Ousmane Boukar, who works closely with Ndiaga, Issa and Rogerio in TLI and TLII.

Building a community of breeders to sustain success

Photo: C Peacock/IITA

Cowpea flower with developing pods.

Part of Ousmane’s GCP role as Product Delivery Coordinator for cowpeas was to lead a network of African cowpea and soybean breeders, and he champions the need for breeders to share information and materials as well as collaborating in other ways so as to sustain their breeding programmes post-GCP.

“To sustain integrated breeding practices post-2014, GCP has established Communities of Practice (CoP) that are discipline- and commodity-oriented,” says Ndeye Ndack. “The ultimate goal is to provide a platform for community problem solving, idea generation and information sharing.”

Ousmane says the core of this community was already alive and well before the CoP. “Ndiaga, Issa and I have over 80 years combined experience working on cowpea. We have continually crossed paths and have even been working together on other non-GCP projects over the past seven years.”

One such project the trio worked together on was to release a new drought-tolerant cowpea breeding line, IT97K-499-35, in Nigeria. “The performance of this variety impressed farmers in Mali, who named it jiffigui, which means ‘hope’,” says Ousmane. “We shared these new lines with our partners in Mali and Niger so they could conduct adaptation trials in their own countries.”

For young breeders like Rogerio, the CoP has provided an opportunity to meet and learn from these older partners. “I’ve really enjoyed our annual project meetings and feeling more a part of the world of cowpea breeding, particularly since we in Mozambique are isolated geographically from larger cowpea-producing countries in West Africa.”

For Phil Roberts, instances where more-established researchers mentor younger researchers in different countries give him hope that all the work UCR has done to install new breeding techniques will pay off. “Young researchers represent the future. If they can establish a foothold in breeding programmes in their national programmes, they can make an impact. Beyond having the know-how, it is vital to have the support of the national programme to develop modern breeding effort in cowpea – or any crop.”

Setting up breeders for the next 20 years

Photo: IITA

Farmer harvesting mature cowpea pods.

In Senegal, Ndiaga is hopeful that the work that the GCP project has accomplished has set up cowpea breeders in his country and others for the next 20 years.

“Both GCP’s and UCR’s commitment to build capacity in developing countries like Senegal cannot be valued less than the new higher yielding, drought-tolerant varieties that we are breeding,” says Ndiaga. “They have provided us with the tools and skills now to continue this research well into the future.

“We are close to releasing several new drought-tolerant and pest- and disease-resistant lines, which is our ultimate goal towards securing Senegal’s food and helping minimise the impact of the hungry period.”

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Jun 022015
 
Photo: S Edmeades/IFPRI

A farmer transports bananas to market by bicycle in Uganda.

At whatever time of the day or night you are reading this, somewhere in the world there are sure to be farmers trekking many kilometres to take their bananas to local markets. These small-scale farmers produce almost 90 percent of the world’s bananas, and make up a significant portion of the 400 million people around the globe’s tropical girdle – Africa, Asia and Latin America – who rely on bananas for food and a source of income.

Bananas are often called the world’s most popular fruit, and global production in 2012 was almost 140 million tonnes. India is the largest producer, while South and Central American farmers supply the most to international supermarket shelves, exporting 80 percent of their bananas.

The importance of the banana as a food crop in tropical areas cannot be underestimated. More than a simple snack, plantain-type bananas in particular are a key component in savoury dishes. In Central and East African countries – like Cameroon, Gabon, Rwanda and Uganda – one person will eat an average of between 100 kg and 250 kg of banana each year. That equates to somewhere between 800 and 2000 average-sized bananas. In those four countries, bananas account for up to a quarter of people’s daily calorie intake.

Photo:  A Vezina/Bioversity International

A stallholder offers bananas for sale at a fruit market in Nairobi, Kenya.

Banana’s asexuality inhibits its resilience

Photo: G Stansbury/IFPRI

Bananas growing in Rwanda.

Banana propagates though asexual reproduction. This means that all the bananas of each variety are genetically identical, or nearly so, and therefore susceptible to the same diseases. Indeed, the world has already lost almost its entire banana crop once: before the 1950s, the Gros Michel cultivar dominated banana exports, but it was gradually wiped out in most regions by Panama disease, caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum. Furthermore, with reproduction being asexual, it is difficult to develop new, resistant varieties through conventional breeding.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, pests and diseases were once again becoming a real threat to global banana production. Little genetic research had been done on the fruit, and only a small portion of its genes had been used in breeding new varieties in its 7,000-year history as a cultivated crop.

“Several research groups had developed genetic markers for bananas [‘flags’ on the genome that can be linked to physical traits], but there was no coordination and only sketchy germplasm studies,” recalls Jean Christophe Glaszmann from CIRAD (Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement; Agricultural Research for Development) in France.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT.

A plantain farmer walks through a plantation in Quindió, Colombia.

“It was not a priority,” says Jean Christophe, who was Subprogramme Leader for Genetic Diversity for the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP), an international initiative established in 2004 to encourage the use of genetic diversity and advanced plant science to improve crops.

But between 2004 and 2012, under GCP, a wealth of research work was undertaken that culminated in the complete genetic sequencing of banana. It was a long process, says Jean Christophe, but the GCP-funded work on banana made a significant contribution to important results.

The extensive data on the genetics of banana are now available to scientists worldwide, who can use it to delve deeper into banana’s genes to breed varieties that can sustain the poorer populations in developing countries.

Once finally sequenced, the banana genome was published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals, Nature, in July 2012: “The reference Musa [banana and plantains] genome sequence represents a major advance in the quest to unravel the complex genetics of this vital crop, whose breeding is particularly challenging. Having access to the entire Musa gene repertoire is a key to identifying genes responsible for important agronomic characters, such as fruit quality and pest resistance.”

Filling and full of fuel, and with the major advantage that it fruits year-round, the banana is vital to food security in the tropics. Bananas are potassium-rich and supply people in developing countries with a major source of carbohydrates. They also provide vitamin A, niacin, vitamin B6, thiamine, riboflavin and folic acid.

Passionate people pooled for the work

Photo: UN Women Asia & the Pacific

A banana seller in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Plans to sequence the banana genome started taking shape in 2001 at Bioversity International (a CGIAR centre), where a group of scientists formed the Global Musa Genomics Consortium. At that time, the only plant whose genome had been sequenced was Arabidopsis thaliana (a small flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, used as a model organism in plant science), with rice close behind.

CGIAR established GCP in 2004 “to tap into the rich genetic diversity of crops via a global network of partnerships and breeding programmes,” according to Hei Leung, who was instrumental to GCP’s foundation and a Subprogramme Leader for Comparative Genomics. (During its first phase GCP was organised by Subprogramme; these were later replaced by Research Themes and Research Initiatives.)

Hei acknowledges that banana was ‘somewhat on the fringe’ of GCP’s main focus on improving drought tolerance in crops. However, he says, it was still relevant for GCP to support the emergence of improved genetics for banana.

The work we did in genetic diversity is about future generations. We wanted a programme that is pro-poor, meaning that the majority of the people in the world are depending on [the crop].

Photo: Adebayo/IITA

A typical banana and plantain market at Ikire in Osun State, Nigeria.

“Drought tolerance is a good candidate because drought affects a lot of poor areas, but you really cannot just take one trait as pro-poor. We had a highly motivated group of researchers willing to devote their efforts to Musa,” says Hei.

“Nicolas Roux at Bioversity International was a passionate advocate for the partnership,” notes Hei. “The GCP community offered a framework for novel interactions among banana-related actors and players working on other crops, such as rice.”

Nicolas concurs on the potential for a little banana research to have great value: “Even though banana is among the most important basic food crops for 400 million people, and 100 million tonnes are grown annually on over 10 million hectares in 120 countries, it’s still under-researched and underfunded.”

The resultant research team was led by Japan’s National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, which had vast experience in rice genome sequencing.

“So, living up to its name as a Challenge Programme, GCP decided to take the gamble on banana genomics and help it fly,” says Hei.

To advance genetics, you first need the intelligence

Photo: IITA

Banana bunches on an experimental plot at IITA.

Three global research agencies were charged with working together to develop a reference set for banana: Bioversity International, CIRAD, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).

Creating a reference set – a careful, tactical selection representing the genetic diversity of a crop – is an invaluable first step in enabling scientists to work together to develop more ‘intelligent’ genetic data.

“Initially, we put together a community of institutions that have collections [of banana germplasm],” explains Jean Christophe. “And then we put together these initial materials that we sample in order to develop representative subsamples – this is called a ‘composite’ set because it comes from different institutions.

“Then we genotype this composite collection, and the genotyping allows us to understand how all this [genetic material] is structured. Based on how it is structured, we can re sample a smaller representation – this is what becomes a reference set.”

So, in the case of crops with an extensive genetic resource base, such as rice, there may be more than 100,000 different plant samples, or accessions, that are reduced to a few thousand. For banana, which has a smaller genetic resource base, a few hundred thousand accessions can be reduced to a few dozen.

“A couple of hundred accessions or fewer become manageable for plant breeders or crop specialists. And we want this to serve as a reference, shared among people, so that everybody works on the same reference material,” says Jean Christophe.

“If you work on the same reference material, you can compile information that is more intelligent – you can have the crop specialist who says ‘this is resistant; this is tolerant; this is susceptible’, and you can also have the biochemist, you can have the physiologist; in the end, you can compile the information.”

“We analysed about 500 accessions and narrowed it down to 50,” says Jean Christophe. This reference collection is currently stored at the University of Leuven in Belgium.

The refined data collected on the banana reference set enabled the researchers to unravel the origin and genealogy of the most important dessert banana: the Cavendish, the cultivar subgroup that dominates banana exports worldwide. Thanks to the early GCP work, they were able to show that Cavendish bananas evolved from three markedly different subspecies.

Photo: C Sokunthea/World Bank

65-year-old Cambodian farmer, Khout Sorn, stands in front of his banana trees in Aphiwat Village, Tipo commune, Cambodia.

Malaysian wild subspecies fully sequenced

During these preliminary years of GCP-supported research on banana, the Programme funded several other smaller projects to consolidate genomic resources available for banana. Scientists developed libraries of artificial chromosomes that can be used in sequencing the DNA of banana, as well as genetic maps, which according to Jean Christophe are essential for improving the quality of the sequence.

These projects contributed to the full genome sequencing of a wild banana from Malaysia’s Pahang province in 2008. The ‘Pahang’ subspecies is one of the Cavendish variety’s three ancestors, and has also been shown to have had a role in the origin of many other banana cultivars, including those that are most important for food and economic security.

“GCP did not fund the sequence [of the Pahang banana], but it funded several things that made it possible to undertake full-scale sequencing,” Jean Christophe says. “It supported the development of particular resources and tools, and this made it possible for researchers to start the full-length sequencing.”

Photo: Asian Development Bank

A farmer at work on a banana plantation, Mindanao, the Philippines.

Breeders now need to set to work

The more that is known about the genes responsible for disease resistance and other desirable traits in banana, the more researchers will be able to help farmers in developing countries to improve their yields.

“The road remains long, but now we have a good understanding of genetic diversity,” says Jean Christophe. “We have done a range of studies aimed at unravelling the genes that could control sterility in the species.

“This is undoubtedly an inspiring challenge towards unlocking the genetic diversity in this crop.

“If we have more money in the future, we are going to sequence others of the subspecies so that we can have the full coverage of the current Cavendish genome. But that was a good start,” says Jean Christophe.

“What we have to do now is to create the right populations [of banana] in the field so that we can separate out the characteristics we want to breed for.”

The new intelligence on banana genetics has given breeders the material they need that will ultimately help 400 million people in the tropics sustain food supplies and livelihoods.

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Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Bananas on the way to market in Kenya.

Mar 192015
 
Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

A farmer harvests her pearl millet crop in Ghana’s Upper West Region.

Pearl millet is the only cereal crop that can be grown in some of the hottest and driest regions of Asia and Africa. It is a staple provider of food, nutrition and income for millions of resource-poor people living on these harsh agricultural lands.

Even though pearl millet is well adapted to growing in areas characterised by drought, poor soil fertility and high temperatures, “there are limited genetic tools available for this orphan crop,” reported researcher Tom Hash at the International Crop Science Congress 10 years ago.

“The people who relied on this crop in such extreme environments had not benefitted from the ‘biotechnology revolution’, or even the ‘green revolution’ that dramatically increased food grain production on irrigated lands over a generation ago,” adds Tom, now Principal Scientist (Millet Breeding) in the Dryland Cereals Research Program of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). This lack of research dividends was despite the fact that pearl millet is the sixth most important cereal crop globally.

It was at this time – in 2005 – that the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) stepped up to invest in more genetic research for pearl millet (along with finger and foxtail millet).

Photo: S Mann/ILRI

Newly harvested pearl millet heads in Niger.

The use of genetic technologies to improve pearl millet had already made some advances through work carried out in the United Kingdom. The GCP initiative was established to improve food security in developing countries by expanding such available genetic work to create crops bred to tolerate drought, disease and poor soils.

With financial support from GCP, and with the benefit of lessons learnt from parallel GCP genetic research, ICRISAT scientists were able to develop more advanced tools for breeding pearl millet.

Pearl millet is used for food for humans and animals and is an essential component of dryland crop-livestock production systems like those of the Sahel region of Africa. It is a main staple (along with sorghum) in Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Mali, Niger, northern Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan. It has the highest protein content of any cereal, up to 22 percent, and a protein digestibility of about 95 percent, which makes it a far better source of protein than other crops such as sorghum and maize. Pearl millet grain is also a crucial source of iron and zinc. Pearl millet is the most widely grown millet (a general term for grain harvested from small-seeded grasses), and accounts for approximately 50 percent of the total world millet production. It has been grown in Africa and South Asia, particularly in India, since prehistoric times and was first domesticated in West Africa. It is the millet of choice in hot, dry regions of Asia, Africa and the Americas because it is well adapted to growing in areas characterised by drought, poor soil fertility and high temperatures; it even performs well in soils with high salinity or low levels of phosphorous. In short, thanks to its tolerance to harsh environments, it can be grown in areas where other cereals such as maize or wheat do not survive or do not yield well.

Protein in pearl millet ‘critical’ for nutrition

Photo: P Casier/ICRISAT HOPE

A farmer harvests millet in Mali.

Mark Laing, Director of the African Centre for Crop Improvement (ACCI) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, says the GCP-supported work on pearl millet will have long-term impacts.

He says it is the high protein content of pearl millet that makes it such a crucial crop for developing countries – in Africa, this is the reason people use pearl millet for weaning babies.

“It was interesting to us that African people have used pearl millet as a weaning food for millennia. The reason why was not clear to us until we assessed the protein content,” says Mark. “Its seed has 13–22 percent protein, remarkable for a cereal crop, whereas maize has only eight percent protein, and sorghum has only two percent digestible protein.”

Photo: S Kilungu/CCAFS

Pearl millet growing in Kenya.

Tom Hash agrees, adding: “More importantly, pearl millet grain has much higher levels of the critically important mineral micronutrients iron and zinc, which are important for neurological and immune system development.

“These mineral micronutrients, although not present in a highly available form, can improve blood iron levels when used in traditional pearl millet-based foods. Pearl millet grain, when fed to poultry, can provide a potentially important source of omega-3 fatty acids, which are also essential for normal neurological development.”

Pearl millet endowed with genetic potential

Photo: AS Rao/ICRISAT

A farmer with his pearl millet harvest in India.

In a treasure-trove of plant genetic resources, thousands of samples, or accessions, of pearl millet and its wild relatives are kept at ICRISAT’s gene banks in India and Niger.

For pearl millet alone, in 2004 ICRISAT had 21,594 types of germplasm in its vaults at its headquarters in India. This represents a huge reservoir of genetic diversity that can be mined for data and for genetic traits that can be used to improve pearl millet and other crops.

Between 2005 and 2007, with support from GCP, scientists from ICRISAT set to work to do just that, mining these resources for qualities based on observed traits, geographical origin and taxonomy.

Hari D Upadhyaya, Principal Scientist and Director of Genebank at ICRISAT, led the task of developing and genotyping a ‘composite collection’ of pearl millet. To do this, the team created a selection that reduced 21,594 accessions down to 1,021. This collection includes lines that are tolerant to drought, heat and soil salinity; others resistant to blast, downy mildew, ergot, rust and smut; and accessions resistant to multiple diseases.

Photo: C Bonham/Bioversity International

A traditional pearl millet variety growing in India.

The collection also includes types of pearl millet with high seed iron and zinc content (from traditional farmer varieties, or landraces, from Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Togo), high seed protein content, high stalk sugar content, and other known elite breeding varieties.

The final collection comprised 710 landraces, 251 advanced breeding lines, and 60 accessions from seven wild species.

The GCP-supported scientists then used molecular markers to fingerprint the DNA of plants grown from the collection. Molecular markers are known variations in the sequence of the genetic code, found in different versions within a species, which act as flags in the genome sequence. Some individual markers may be associated with particular useful genes, but markers are useful even without known associations, as the different flags can be compared between samples. In the pearl millet research, scientists searched for similarities and differences among these DNA markers to assess how closely or distantly related the 1,021 accessions were to each other.

This was not only a big step forward for the body of scientific knowledge on pearl millet, but also for the knowledge and skills of the scientists involved. “The GCP work did make some significant contributions to pearl millet research,” says Tom, “mainly by helping a critical mass of scientists working on pearl millet to learn how to appropriately use the genetic tools that have been developed in better-studied fungi, plants and animals (including people).”

GCP extends know-how to Africa

Photos: N Palmer/CIAT

Comparisons of good and bad pearl millet yields in Ghana’s Upper West Region, which has suffered failed rains and rising temperatures.

The semiarid areas of northern and eastern Uganda are home to a rich history and culture, but they are difficult environments for successful food production and security.

In this region, pearl millet is grown for both commercial and local consumption. Its yields, although below the global average, are reasonable given that it is grown on poor sandy soils where other crops fail. Yet despite being a survivor in these harsh drylands, pearl millet can still be affected by severe drought and disease.

GCP helped kick-start work to tackle these problems. With financial support from GCP, and through ACCI, Geofrey Lubade, a scientist from Uganda, was able to study and explore breeding pearl millet that would be suitable for northern Uganda and have higher yields, drought tolerance and rust resistance.

Geofrey now plans to develop the best of his pearl millet lines for registration and release in Uganda, which he expects will go a long way in helping the resource-poor.

But Geofrey’s success is just one example of the benefits from GCP-support. Thanks to GCP, Mark Laing says that his students at ACCI have learnt invaluable skills that save significant time and money in the plant-breeding process.

“Many of our students, with GCP support, have been involved in diversity studies to select for desirable traits,” says Mark – and these students are now working on releasing new crop varieties.

He says that African scientists directly benefitted from the GCP grants for training in biotechnology and genetic studies.

Their work, along with that of a number of other scientists, will have a huge impact on plant breeding in developing countries – long term.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

A farmer inspects his millet crop in northwest Ghana.

As Mark explains, once breeders have built up a head of steam there is no stopping them. “Plant breeders take time to start releasing varieties, but once they get started, then they can keep generating new varieties every year for many years,” he says. “And a good variety can have a very long life, even more than 50 years.

“We have already had a significant impact on plant breeding in some African countries,” says Mark. But perhaps more importantly, he says, the work has changed the status of plant breeding and pearl millets as a subject: “It used to be disregarded, but now it is taken seriously as a way to have an impact on agriculture.”

For research and breeding products, see the GCP Product Catalogue and search for pearl millet.