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Nov 062015
 

 

 Photo: C Schubert/CCAFSWhere to begin a decade-long story like that of the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP)? This time-bound programme concluded in 2014 after successfully catalysing the use of advanced plant breeding techniques in the developing world.

Like all good tales, the GCP story had a strong theme: building partnerships in modern crop breeding for food security. It had a strong cast of characters: a palpable community of staff, consultants and partners from all over the world. And it had a formidable structure – two distinct phases split equally over the decade to first discover new plant genetic information and tools, and then to apply what the researchers learnt to breed more tolerant and resilient crops.

In October 2014, at the final General Research Meeting in Thailand, GCP Director Jean-Marcel Ribaut paid tribute to GCP’s cast and crew: “To all the people involved in GCP over the last 12 years, you are the real asset of the Programme,” he told them.

“In essence, our work has been all about partnerships and networking, bringing together players in crop research who may otherwise never have worked together,” says Jean-Marcel. “GCP’s impact is not easy to evaluate but it’s extremely important for effective research into the future. We demonstrated proofs of concept that can be scaled up for powerful results.”

A significant aspect of GCP’s legacy is the abundance of collaborations it forged and fostered between international researchers. A typical GCP project brought together public and private partners from both developing and developed nations and from CGIAR Centres. In all, more than 200 partners collaborated on GCP projects.

Photo: GCP

Just some of the extended GCP family assembled for the Programme’s final General Research Meeting in 2014.

The idea that the ‘community would pave the way towards success’ was always a key foundation of GCP, according to Dave Hoisington, who was involved with GCP from its conception and was latterly Chair of GCP’s Consortium Committee. “We designed GCP to provide opportunities for researchers to work together,” says Dave. He is a senior research scientist and program director at the University of Georgia, and was formerly Director of Research at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and Director of the Genetic Resources Program and of the Applied Biotechnology Center at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).

“GCP was the mechanism that would help us to complete our mission – to tap into the rich genetic diversity of crops and package it so that breeding programme researchers could integrate it into their operations,” says Dave.

Photo: ICRISAT

A little girl tucks into sorghum porridge in Mali.

The dawn of a new generation

Food security in the developing world continues to be one of the greatest global challenges of our time. One in nine people worldwide – or more than 820 million people – go hungry every day.

Although this figure is currently diminishing, a changing global climate is making food production more challenging for farmers. Farmers need higher yielding crops that can grow with less water, tolerate higher temperatures and poorer soils, and resist pests and diseases.

The turn of the millennium saw rapid technological developments emerging in international molecular plant science. New tools and approaches were developed that enabled plant scientists, particularly in the developing world, to make use of genetic diversity in plants that was previously largely inaccessible to them. These tools had the potential to increase plant breeders’ capacity to rapidly develop crop varieties able to tolerate extreme environments and yield more in farmers’ fields.

Photo: J van de Gevel/Bioversity International

Wheat varieties in a field trial.

Dave was one scientist who early on recognised the significance and potential of this new dawn in plant science. In 2002, while working at CIMMYT, he teamed up with the Center’s then Director General, Masa Iwanaga, and its then Executive Officer for Research, Peter Ninnes – another long-term member of the GCP family who at the other end of the Programme’s lifespan became its Transition Manager. Together with a Task Force of other collaborators from CIMMYT, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and IPGRI (now Bioversity International), they drafted and presented a joint proposal to form a CGIAR Challenge Programme – and so GCP was conceived.

The five CGIAR Challenge Programmes were the early precursors of the current CGIAR Research Programs. They introduced a new model for collaboration among CGIAR Research Centers and with external institutes, particularly national breeding programmes in developing countries.

A programme where the spirit is palpable

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Failed harvest: this Ghanaian farmer’s maize ears are undersized and poorly developed due to drought.

From the beginning, GCP had collaboration and capacity building at its heart. As encapsulated in its tagline, “partnerships in modern crop breeding for food security,” GCP’s aim was to bring breeders together and give them the tools to more effectively breed crops for the benefit of the resource-poor farmers and their families, particularly in marginal environments.

GCP’s primary focus on was on drought tolerance and breeding for drought-prone farming systems, since this is the biggest threat to food security worldwide – and droughts are already becoming more frequent and severe with climate change. However, the Programme made major advances in breeding for resilience to other major stresses in a number of different crops, including acid soils and important pests and diseases. It also sought improved yields and nutritional quality.

The model for the Programme was that it would work by contracting partner institutes to conduct research, initially through competitive projects and later through commissioning. These partnerships would ensure that GCP’s overall objectives were met. For Dave, GCP set the groundwork for modern plant breeding.

“GCP demonstrated that you can tap into genetic resources and that they can be valuable and can have significant impacts on breeding programmes,” he says.

“I think GCP started to guide the process. Without GCP, the adoption, testing and use of molecular technologies would probably have been delayed.”

Photo: Meena Kadri/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Harvesting wheat in India.

Masa Iwanaga, who is now President of the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS), says that the key to the proposal and ultimate success of GCP was the focus on building connections between partners worldwide. “By providing the opportunity for researchers from developed countries to partner with researchers in developing countries, it helped enhance the capacity of national programmes in developing countries to use advanced technology for crop improvement.”

While not all partnerships were fruitful, Jean-Marcel has observed that those participants who invested in partnerships and built trust, understanding and communication produced some of the most successful results. “We created this amazing chain of people, stretching from the labs to the fields,” said Jean-Marcel, discussing the Programme in a 2012 interview.

“Perhaps the best way I can describe it is as a ‘GCP spirit’ created by the researchers we worked with.

“The Programme’s environment is friendly, open to sharing and is marked by a strong sense of community and belonging. The GCP spirit is visible and palpable: you can recognise people working with us have a spirit that is typical of the Programme.”

Exploring gene banks to uncover genetic wealth

GCP started operations in 2004 and was designed in two five-year phases, 2004–2008 and 2009–2013. 2014 was a transition year for orderly closure.

Phase I focussed on upstream research to generate knowledge and tools for modern plant breeding. It mainly consisted of exploration and discovery projects, funded on a competitive basis, pursuing the most promising molecular research and high-potential partnerships.

“GCP’s first task was to go in and identify the genetic wealth held within the CGIAR gene banks,” says Dave Hoisington.

Photo: IITA

Gene bank samples give a small snapshot of cowpea diversity.

CGIAR’s gene banks were originally conceived purely for conservation, but breeders increasingly recognised the tremendous value of studying and utilising these collections. Over the years they were able to use gene banks as a valuable source of new breeding material, but were hampered by having to choose seeds almost blindly, with limited knowledge of what useful traits they might contain.

“We realised we could use molecular tools to help scan the genomes and discover genes in crops of interest and related species,” says Dave. “The genes we were most interested in were ones that helped increase yield in harsh environments, particularly under drought.”

By studying the genomes of wild varieties of wheat, for example, researchers found genes that increase wheat’s tolerance of water stress.

Photo: International Potato Center (CIP)

Sweetpotato diversity.

GCP-supported projects analysed naturally occurring genetic diversity to produce cloned genes, informative markers and reference sets for 21 important food crops. ‘Reference sets’, or ‘reference collections’ reduce search time for researchers: they are representative selections of a few hundred plant samples (‘accessions’) that encapsulate each crop’s genetic diversity, narrowed down from the many thousands of gene bank accessions available. The resources developed through GCP have already proved enormously valuable, and will continue to benefit researchers for years to come.

For example, researchers developed 52 new molecular (DNA) markers for sweetpotato to enable marker-assisted selection for resistance to sweet potato virus disease (SPVD). For lentils, a reference set of about 150 accessions was produced, a distillation down to 15 percent of the global collection studied. And for barley, 90 percent of all the different characteristics of barley were captured within 300 representative plant lines.

Photo: ICARDA

Harvesting barley in Ethiopia.

The leader of GCP’s barley research, Michael Baum, who directs the Biodiversity and Integrated Gene Management Program at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), says the reference set is a particular boon for a researcher new to barley.

“By looking at 300 lines, they see the diversity of 3,000 lines without any duplication,” says Michael. “This is much better and quicker for a plant breeder.”

Similarly, the lentil reference set serves as a common resource for ICARDA’s team of lentil breeders, facilitating efficient collaboration, according to Aladdin Hamweih of ICARDA, who was charged with developing the lentil collection for GCP.

“These materials can be accessed to achieve farming goals – to produce tough plants suitable for local environments. In doing this, we give farmers a greater likelihood of success, which ultimately leads to improving food security for the wider population,” Aladdin says.

An important aspect of the efforts within Phase I was GCP’s emphasis on developing genomic resources such as reference sets for historically under-resourced crops that had received relatively little investment in genetic research. These made up most of GCP’s target crops, and included: bananas and plantains; cassava; coconuts; common beans; cowpeas; chickpeas; groundnuts; lentils; finger, foxtail and pearl millets; pigeonpeas; potatoes; sorghum; sweetpotatoes and yams.

Although not all of these historically under-resourced crops continued to receive research funding into Phase II, the outcomes from Phase I provided valuable genetic resources and a solid basis for the ongoing use of modern, molecular-breeding techniques. Indeed, thanks to their GCP boost, some of these previously neglected species have become model crops for genetic and genomic research – even overtaking superstar crops such as wheat, whose highly complex genome hampers scientists’ progress.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Banana harvest for sale in Rwanda.

A need to focus and deliver products

“Phase I provided plenty of opportunity for researchers to tap into genetic diversity,” says Jean-Marcel. “We opened the door for a lot of different topics which helped us to identify projects worth pursuing further, as well as identifying productive partnerships. But at the same time, we were losing focus by spreading ourselves too thinly across so many crops.”

This notion was confirmed by the authors of an external review conducted in 2008, commissioned by CGIAR. This recommended consolidating GCP’s research in order to optimise efficiency and increase outputs during GCP’s second phase, while also enhancing potential for longer term impact.

Transparency and a willingness to respond and adapt were always core GCP values. The Programme embraced external review throughout its lifetime, and was able to make dynamic changes in direction as the best ways to achieve impact emerged. Markus Palenberg, Managing Director of the Institute for Development Strategy in Germany, was a member of the 2008 evaluation panel.

“One major recommendation from the evaluation was to focus on crops and tools which would provide the greatest impact in terms of food security,” recounts Markus, who later joined GCP’s Executive Board. “This resulted in the Programme refocusing its research on only nine core crops.” These were cassava, beans, chickpeas, cowpeas, groundnuts, maize, rice, sorghum and wheat.

Photo: Mann/ILRI

Hard work: harvesting groundnut in Malawi.

GCP’s decision-making process on how to focus its Phase II efforts was partly guided by research the Programme had commissioned, documented in its Pathways to impact brief No 1: Where in the world do we start? This took global data on the number of stunted – i.e., severely malnourished – children, as a truer indicator of poverty than a monetary definition, and overlaid it on maps showing where drought was most likely to occur and have a serious impact on crop productivity. This combination of poverty and vulnerable harvests was used to determine the farming systems where GCP might have most impact.

The Programme also attempted to maintain a balance between types of crops, including each of the following categories: cereals (maize, rice, sorghum, wheat), legumes (beans, chickpeas, cowpeas, groundnuts), and roots and tubers (cassava).

The crops were organised into six crop- specific Research Initiatives (RIs) – legumes were consolidated into one – plus a seventh, Comparative Genomics, which focused on exploiting genetic similarities among rice, maize and sorghum to find and deploy sources of tolerance to acid soils.

Photo: IRRI

Child eating rice.

The research under the RIs built on GCP’s achievements in Phase I, moving from exploration to application. The change in focus was underpinned by the planned shift from competitive to commissioned projects, allowing the Programme to continue to support its strongest partnerships and research strands.

“The RIs focused on promoting the use of modern integrated breeding approaches, using both conventional and molecular breeding methods, to improve each crop through a series of specific projects undertaken in more than 30 countries,” says Jean-Marcel. “More importantly, the RIs were focused on creating new genetic material and varieties of plants that would ultimately benefit farmers.”

Such products released on the ground included new varieties of:

  • cassava resistant to several diseases, tolerant to drought, nutritionally enhanced to provide high levels of vitamin A, and with higher starch content for high-quality cassava flour and starch processing
  • chickpea tolerant to drought and able to thrive in semi-arid conditions, already providing improved food and income security for smallholder African farmers  – yields have doubled in Ethiopia – and set to help them supply growing demand for the legume in India
  • maize with higher yields, tolerant to high levels of aluminium in acid soils, resistant to disease, adapted to local conditions in Africa – and with improved phosphorus efficiency in the pipeline
  • rice with tolerance to drought and low levels of phosphorus in acid soils, disease resistance, high grain quality, and tolerance to soil salinity – with improved aluminium tolerance on the way too
Photo: CSISA

Harvesting rice in India.

Over the coming years, many more varieties developed through GCP projects are expected to be available to farmers, as CGIAR Research Centres and national programmes continue their work.

These will include varieties of:

  • common bean resistant to disease and tolerant to drought and heat, with higher yields in drier conditions – due for release in several African countries from 2015 onwards
  • cowpea resistant to diseases and insect pests, with higher yields, and able to tolerate worsening drought – set for release in several countries from 2015, to secure and improve harvests in sub-Saharan Africa
  • groundnut tolerant to drought and resistant to pests, diseases, and the fungi that cause aflatoxin contamination, securing harvests and raising incomes in some of the poorest regions of Africa
  • maize tolerant to drought and adapted to local conditions and tastes in Asia
  • sorghum that is even more robust and adapted to increasing drought in the arid areas of sub-Saharan Africa – plus sorghum varieties able to tolerate high aluminium levels in acid soils, set for imminent release
  • wheat with heat and drought tolerance – as well as improved yield and grain quality – for India and China, the two largest wheat producers in the world
Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Groundnut harvest, Ghana.

Giving a voice to all the cast and crew

The 2008 external review also recommended slight changes in governance. It suggested GCP receive more guidance from two proposed panels: a Consortium Committee and an independent Executive Board.

Dave Hoisington, who chaired the Committee from 2010, succeeding the inaugural Chair Yves Savidan, explains: “GCP was not a research programme run by a single institute, but a consortium of 18 institutes. By having a committee of the key players in research as well as an independent board comprising people who had no conflict of interest with the Programme, we were able to make sure both the ‘players’ and ‘referees’ were given a voice.”

Jean-Marcel says providing this voice to everyone involved was an important facet of effective management. “Given that GCP was built on its people and partnerships, it was important that we restructured our governance to provide everyone with a representative to voice their thoughts on the Programme. We have always tried to be very transparent.”

The seven-member Executive Board was instated in June 2008 to provide oversight of the scientific strategy of the Programme. Board members had a wide variety of skills and backgrounds, with expertise ranging across molecular biology, development assistance, socioeconomics, academia, finance, governance and change management.

Andrew Bennett, who followed inaugural Chair Calvin Qualset into the role in 2009, has more than 45 years of experience in international development and disaster management and has worked in development programmes in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Pacific and the Caribbean.

“The Executive Board’s first role was to provide advice and to help the Consortium Committee and management refocus the Programme,” says Andrew.

Photo: IRRI

Rice seed diversity.

‘Advice’ and ‘helping’ are not usually words associated with how a Board works but, like so much of GCP’s ‘family’, this was not a typical board. Because GCP was hosted by CIMMYT, the Board did not have to deal with any policy issues; that was the responsibility of the Consortium Committee. As Andrew explains, “Our role was to advise on and help with decision-making and implementation, which was great as we were able to focus on the Programme’s science and people.”

Andrew has been impressed by what GCP has been able to achieve in its relatively short lifespan in comparison with other research programmes. “I think this programme has demonstrated that a relatively modest amount of money used intelligently can move with the times and help identify areas of potential benefit.”

Developing capacity and leadership in Africa

As GCP’s focus shifted from exploration and discovery to application and impact between Phases I and II, project leadership shifted too. More and more projects were being led by developing-country partners.

Harold Roy-Macauley, GCP Board member and Executive Director of the West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development (WECARD), advised GCP about how to develop capacity, community and leadership among African partners so that products would reach farmers.

“The objective was to make sure that we were influencing development within local research communities,” says Harold. “GCP has played a very important role in creating synergies between the different institutions in Africa. Bringing the right people together, who are working on similar problems, and providing them with the opportunity to lead, has brought about change in the way researchers are doing research.”

In the early years of the Programme, only about 25 percent of the research budget was allocated to research institutes in developing countries; this figure was more than 50 percent in 2012 and 2013.

Jean-Marcel echoes Harold’s comments: “To make a difference in rural development – to truly contribute to improved food security through crop improvement and incomes for poor farmers – we knew that building capacity had to be a cornerstone of our strategy,” he says. Throughout its 10 years, GCP invested 15 percent of its resources in developing capacity.

“Providing this capacity has enabled people, research teams and institutes to grow, thrive and stand on their own, and this is deeply gratifying. It is very rewarding to see people from developing countries growing and becoming leaders,” says Jean-Marcel.

“For me, seeing developing-country partners come to the fore and take the reins of project leadership was one of the major outcomes of the Programme. Providing them with the opportunity, along with the appropriate capacity, allowed them to build their self-confidence. Now, many have become leaders of other transnational projects.”

Emmanuel Okogbenin and Chiedozie Egesi, two plant breeders at Nigeria’s National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI), are notable examples. They are leading an innovative new project using marker-assisted breeding techniques they learnt during GCP projects to develop higher-yielding, stress-tolerant cassava varieties. For this project, they are partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Cornell University in the USA, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Uganda’s National Crops Resources Research Institute (NaCRRI).

Chiedozie says this would not have been possible without GCP helping African researchers to build their profiles. “GCP helped us to build an image for ourselves in Nigeria and in Africa,” he says, “and this created a confidence in other global actors, who, on seeing our ability to deliver results, are choosing to invest in us.”

Photo: IITA

Nigerian cassava farmer.

A ‘sweet and sour’ sunset

Photo: Daryl Marquardt/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Maize at sunset.

Jean-Marcel defined GCP’s final General Research Meeting in Thailand in 2014 as a ‘sweet-and-sour experience’.

Summing up the meeting, Jean-Marcel said, “It was sour in terms of GCP’s sunset, and sweet in terms of seeing you all here, sharing your stories and continuing your conversations with your partners and communities.”

From the outset, GCP was set up as a time-bound programme, which gave partners specific time limits and goals, and the motivation to deliver products. However, much of the research begun during GCP projects will take longer than 10 years to come to full fruition, so it was important for GCP to ensure that the research effort could be sustained and would continue to deliver farmer-focused outcomes.

During the final two years of the Programme, the Executive Board, Consortium Committee and Management Team played a large role in ensuring this sustainability through a thoroughly planned handover.

“We knew we weren’t going to be around forever, so we had a plan from early on to hand over the managerial reins to other institutes, including CGIAR Research Programs,” says Jean-Marcel.

One of the largest challenges was to ensure the continuity and future success of the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP). IBP is a web-based, one-stop shop for information, tools and related services to support crop breeders in designing and carrying out integrated breeding projects, including both conventional and marker-assisted breeding methods.

While there are already a number of other analytical and data management breeding systems on the market, IBP combines all the tools that a breeder needs to carry out their day-to-day logistics, plan crosses and trials, manage and analyse data, and analyse and refine breeding decisions. IBP is also unique in that it is geared towards supporting breeders in developing countries – although it is already proving valuable to a wide range of breeding teams across the world. The Platform is set up to grow and improve as innovative ideas emerge, as users can develop and share their own tools.

Beyond the communities and relationships fostered by GCP community, Jean-Marcel sees IBP as the most important legacy of the Programme. “I think that the impact of IBP will be huge – so much larger than GCP. It will really have impact on how people do their business, and adopt best practice.”

While the sun is setting on GCP, it is rising for IBP, which is in an exciting phases as it grows and seeks long-term financial stability. The Platform is now independent, with its headquarters hosted at CIMMYT, and has established a number of regional hubs to provide localised support and training around the world, with more to follow.

It is envisaged that IBP will be invaluable to researchers in both developing and developed countries for many years to come, helping them to get farmers the crop varieties they need more efficiently. IBP is also helping to sustain some of the networks that GCP built and nurtured, as it is hosting the crop-specific Communities of Practice established by GCP.

2014 may be the end of GCP’s story but its legacy will live on. It will endure, of course, in the Programme’s scientific achievements – for many crops, genetic research and the effective use of genetic diversity in molecular breeding are just beginning, and GCP has helped to kick-start a long and productive scientific journey – and in the valuable tools brought together in IBP. And most of all, GCP’s character, communities and spirit will live on in all those who formed part of the GCP family.

For Chiedozie Egesi, the partnerships fostered by GCP have changed the way he does research: “We now have a network of cassava breeders that you can count on and relate with in different countries. This has really widened our horizons.

Fellow cassava breeder Elizabeth Parkes of Ghana agrees that GCP’s impact will be a lasting one: “All the agricultural research institutes and individual scientists who came into contact with GCP have been fundamentally transformed.”

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Photo: E Hermanowicz/Bioversity International

Cowpea seeds dried in their pods.

Oct 182015
 

C-Egesi_w“You can use any technology in the world, you can develop any product, but you need the products that farmers are willing to grow in their field.”

So says Chiedozie Egesi, a plant breeder and geneticist who has been one of the inspirational leaders and Principal Investigators for the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme’s (GCP) Cassava Research Initiative in Africa.

It was his commitment to helping farmers that led Chiedozie to forsake his dream of becoming a surgeon, and instead to train as a plant breeder and help smallholder farmers in Nigeria. Having grown up in a small town in south-eastern Nigeria where poverty was a daily reality, he was particularly concerned about food security and nutrition for the people. He dreamt of developing cassava varieties that could beat the pests and diseases that often devastate such crops.

Photo: IITA

Peeling cassava roots.

“The food people grow should be nutritious, resistant and high-yielding enough to allow them to sell some of it and make money for other things in life, such as building a house, getting a motorbike or sending their kids to school,” Chiedozie says.

Nigeria is the most populous African country, with a population of more than 174 million. The main staple food is cassava, making Nigeria the world’s largest producer and consumer of the crop. But cassava is also important in other African countries. It is grown by nearly every farming family in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa produced nearly 140 million metric tonnes of cassava in 2012 – but most of the production is low-yielding subsistence farming for food by small-scale farmers for food for their own households alone.

After almost eight years working on GCP-supported cassava projects, Chiedozie is proud of what they have managed to accomplish: “That we’ve been able to give African farmers the varieties that they will love to grow is my biggest achievement”.

Meet Chiedozie and hear all about his research and the importance of cassava in the video series below (or watch on YouTube):

Transformation for Chiedozie – and for cassava

Chiedozie’s journey with GCP began after he had gained his PhD in yam breeding from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He undertook further studies and training at Cornell University and the University of Washington, both in the USA. He then returned home to Nigeria to lead the cassava breeding team at the National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI) and, following a promotion in 2010, was made Assistant Director of NRCRI’s Biotechnology Department. In 2004, a chance find on the Internet of a molecular breeding training programme in South Africa first led to Chiedozie’s involvement in GCP.

In 2010, work by Chiedozie and the NRCRI team, in collaboration with a transnational network of partners, resulted in the official release to Nigerian farmers of Africa’s first cassava variety developed using molecular-breeding techniques. Known as UMUCASS33 (or CR 41-10), it was resistant to cassava mosaic disease (CMD) – a devastating plant disease that can wipe out entire cassava crops – and also highly nutritious. In addition to a stream of further disease-resistant varieties, in 2012 they followed this accomplishment with the release of a high-starch variety bred using molecular techniques.

Photo: IITA

Nigerian women at work processing cassava.

In 2011, the cassava team together with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and HarvestPlus (another CGIAR Challenge Programme focussed on the nutritional enrichment of crops), released three cassava varieties rich in pro-vitamin A, which hold the potential to provide children under five and women of reproductive age with up to 25 percent of their daily vitamin A requirement – a figure Chiedozie and his team are now ambitiously striving to increase to 50 percent. In 2014, they released three more pro-vitamin A varieties with higher concentrations of beta-carotene.

These new and improved varieties – all generated as a direct or indirect result of his engagement in GCP projects – are, Chiedozie says, worth their weight in gold for the people of Africa.

Research that delivers benefits to poor farmers is what drives Chiedozie. In addition to the direct rewards of new varieties there are other highlights from his involvement with GCP, indicating a long term change in breeding science: “People are now using improved or modern techniques in breeding; people think about database management in cassava breeding across Africa; and African breeders are getting PhDs in molecular breeding.”

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Cassava leaves.

Building African capacity

Chiedozie believes a crucial element of GCP’s success in breeding better cassava varieties for smallholder African farmers lies in the capacity building and infrastructure support provided by GCP.

After his initial GCP training at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, Chiedozie engaged in other capacity-building opportunities, including a one-year visiting scientist fellowship at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia. The significance of these early GCP opportunities was, Chiedozie says, momentous: “Prior to my GCP work, I was more or less a plant breeder, and a conventional one at that. Whilst I’d been exposed to molecular tools during my early work on yam and other crops, I was not applying them in my work back then.”

Chiedozie quoteChiedozie emphasises that such training opportunities are vital for the future food security of Africa. “We raised up a new crop of cassava breeders in Africa – people who were bold enough to take up a molecular breeding project and pursue it with support from the international centres. And today we are seeing the results of that. Cassava breeding programmes are standing today because of our quality of seeds sown in the past.”

The networking opportunities offered by the Cassava Community of Practice – founded by GCP and now hosted by the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP) – have meant that Chiedozie and his colleagues could expand their collaboration at the local, national and regional levels: “We now have a network of cassava breeders that you can count on and relate with in different countries. This has really widened our horizons and also made our work more visible,” he says, citing effective links formed with Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and South Sudan.

Photo: M Mitchell/IFPRI


Selling fufu, a staple food made with cassava flour, at a market in Nigeria.

A paradigm shift

These opportunities have led to what Chiedozie calls a ‘paradigm shift’ in how national research agencies are viewed by donors and research investors: “GCP helped us to build an image for ourselves in Nigeria and in Africa, and this created a confidence in other global actors, who, on seeing our ability to deliver results, are choosing to invest in us.

“Our work with GCP helped us to gain that capacity that we needed to be able to negotiate or even make a request for funding. And people are able to trust that you can deliver if you have delivered in the past for an organisation like GCP. So it gave us credibility; it gives us a platform to be able to speak to donors directly, and donors can now approach us, which never used to happen in pre GCP days.”

This newly found confidence and profile sees the NRCRI cassava team currently engaging with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB) on research that will expand on and follow through on what GCP started.

Hear from Chiedozie on the beneficial outcomes of GCP – in terms not only of variety releases but also of attracting further projects, prestige, and enthusiastic young breeders – in the video below (or on YouTube):

For Chiedozie, his dream of helping his country’s struggling farmers and people is coming true. He has no regrets about dropping his dream of becoming a surgeon for one of helping his country as a plant breeder: “Coming from Umuahia, a small town in the southeast of the country, I grew up in an environment where you see people who are struggling, weak from disease, poor, and with no opportunities to send their children to school.

“Despite the social injustice around me, I always thought there was opportunity to improve people’s lives. This is what the GCP-supported research has helped me to do, even faster than I would have believed possible.”

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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.”

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Photo: A Paul-Bossuet/ICRISAT

Man and beast team up to transport chickpeas in Ethiopia.

 

Oct 132015
 

 

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

The vibrant colours of a cassava leaf.

Little did some of Ghana’s crop researchers know back in 2007 that they would be cultivating not just their plants but also themselves over the following seven years.

“When you see one person being trained and then another person being trained, it doesn’t mean much. But when you put all the numbers together and they see themselves as a force, as a team, I think that’s where new strength lies for our African researchers,” reflects Elizabeth Parkes on the impacts of the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP).

Elizabeth is a cassava breeder in Ghana. She works for the Crops Research Institute (CRI) of Ghana’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and is currently on a leave of absence working at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).

“Wherever I go, whatever opportunity I have, I refer back to GCP and its capacity-building work. You see, it’s good to release new plant varieties, but it’s also good to release people,” she says.

The internationally funded GCP set out to enhance the local plant-breeding capabilities of people like Elizabeth, and so help developing nations meet ever-growing demands for food in the face of climate change and worsening drought conditions, the threat of crop disease, and other pressures.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Scientists at the Crops Research Institute (CRI) work to improve crop production in Ghana and so ensure national food security and decent livelihoods for people like this Ghanaian cassava farmer.

This has meant empowering scientists with cutting-edge tools and knowledge, as well as overcoming some surprisingly down-to-earth obstacles.

“One thing that really energises me,” enthuses GCP Consultant Hannibal Muhtar, “is seeing people understand why they need to do the work and being given the chance to do the how.”

Hannibal, under his GCP remit, was asked to visit the research sites of GCP-funded projects at research centres and stations across Africa, to identify those where effective research might be hindered by significant gaps in three fundamental areas: infrastructure, equipment and support services. He selected 19 target research sites, in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Tanzania. Two of these were in Ghana, namely the CRI research sites at Kumasi and Tamale.

The mission of CRI is to ensure high and sustainable crop productivity and food security in Ghana through the development and dissemination of environmentally sound technologies. Its research areas are broad and include maize, rice, cowpeas, soybeans, groundnuts, cassava, yams, cocoyams, sweetpotatoes, plantains and bananas.

In developing countries like Ghana that the obstacles to achieving research objectives are often quite mundane in nature: a faulty weather station, a lack of irrigation systems, or fields ravaged by weeds or drainage problems and in dire need of rehabilitation. Yet such factors compromise brilliant research.

Even a simple lack of fencing commonly results not only in equipment being stolen, but also in precious experimental crops being stomped on by roaming cattle and wild animals such as boars, monkeys, hippopotamuses and hyenas; this also poses a serious threat to the safety of field staff.

“The real challenge lies not in the science, but rather in the real nuts and bolts of getting the work done in local field conditions,” Hannibal explains.

He says: “If GCP had not invested in research support infrastructure and services, then their investment in research would have been in vain. Tools and services must be in place as and when needed, and in good working order. Tractors must be able to plough when they should plough.”

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Cassava chips on sale in a Ghanaian market.

Ghana gains a new centre of excellence

CRI Ghana quote 1Elizabeth is one of more than 10 researchers from Ghana who gained their PhDs via GCP-funded research projects. They were given the opportunity to travel to international research laboratories to learn the latest research methods, train in genotyping and establish contacts with leading scientific minds.

“They [GCP] have made us attractive for others to collaborate with,” says Elizabeth.

“GCP gave you the keys to solving your own problems; it put structures in place so that knowledge learnt abroad could be transferred and applied at home.

“Before GCP we really struggled, but now everybody wants to have training in Ghana. Everybody wants to have something to do with us, and I will always say thank you to GCP for that, for making us attractive as researchers,” Elizabeth says.

At the outset of the Programme, Elizabeth was learning how to breed new cassava varieties suitable for African soils. She worked with scientists from IITA in Nigeria to use genetic resources (germplasm) from South America, where cassava originates, to integrate the CMD2 gene into local germplasm using molecular breeding. CMD2 gives cassava resistance to the devastating cassava mosaic disease, which slowly shrivels and yellows leaves and roots, destroying crop yields.

Photo: IITA

Elizabeth Parkes poses with a sturdy and nutritious harvest of cassava roots.

Cassava is a lifeline for African people, and is a particularly important staple food for poorer farmers. More cassava is produced in Africa than any other crop, according to 2012 figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It is grown by nearly every farming family in sub-Saharan Africa, supplying about a third of people’s daily energy intake in the region. This makes cassava mosaic disease a potential disaster, and makes effectively breeding improved varieties an activity with real impact.

“We started out doing low-cost marker-assisted selection, for which we had some grants. Someway, somehow, the government got interested and brought in more resources. So together we started a small biotech lab. Now this lab has become the Centre of Excellence for West African productivity,” says Elizabeth.

“I have attended three GCP Annual Research Meetings, and I have won awards for my posters. This greatly boosted my confidence,” says Elizabeth. She also continues to be an active member of the Cassava Community of Practice – founded by GCP and now hosted by the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP) – which facilitates and supports the integration of marker-assisted selection into cassava breeding. All this has accelerated Elizabeth’s quest to produce and disseminate farmer-preferred cassava varieties that are resistant to pests and diseases.

“We are all forever grateful to GCP and its funders. GCP has had a huge impact on research in Ghana, especially for cassava, rice, maize and yam. All the agricultural research institutes and individual scientists who came into contact with GCP have been fundamentally transformed.”

Capacity building à la carte a real ‘life changer’

For Allen Oppong, a maize pathologist at CRI, GCP was a life changer too: “Indeed, I am very grateful to GCP for making me what I am today.”

CRI Ghana quote 2Allen’s first experience of GCP was in 2007, when he won a Capacity building à la carte grant for research into characterising locally adapted maize varieties. During the project he travelled to international research meetings and received training in marker-assisted selection in advanced laboratories.

Infrastructure improvements funded by GCP also came at a critical time for Allen. There was a drought, which, without the irrigation systems provided through the Programme, would have meant a much longer research process.

Even without drought, these kinds of improvements can dramatically speed up breeding, as Hannibal explains: “By providing glasshouses or the capacity to irrigate in the dry season, we are enabling breeders to accelerate their breeding cycles, so that they can work all year round rather than having to wait until the rain comes.”

“Through the support of GCP,” Allen recalls, “I was able to characterise maize varieties found in Ghana using the bulk fingerprinting technique. This work has been published and I think it’s useful information for maize breeding in Ghana – and possibly other parts of the world.”

One of the biggest challenges that Allen experienced during his GCP work was getting farmers to try the new varieties that are being developed.

“Most people don’t like change. The new varieties are higher yielding, disease resistant, nutritious – all good qualities. But the challenge is demonstrating to farmers that these materials are better than what they have.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

A Ghanaian farmer holds a just-harvested maize ear.

“You can have very good material that has all these attributes, but if the farmer doesn’t have access to it, then how can he know the attributes that you are talking about? How can he see it when it is in your research station?”

Ghanaian farmers generally select maize varieties for their adaptation to specific local environments. But as Allen explains, average maize yields in Ghana, at 1–1.5 tonnes per hectare, are well below the global average of 5.2 tonnes per hectare.

Allen is looking forward optimistically to this next stage. “We have the capacity to more than double what we are producing now. The possibility is there, as long as farmers adopt the good materials.”

A ‘kick-start’ for plant science and for people

The catalytic effect of international funding programmes like GCP on small research laboratories in developing countries is often underestimated.

“We got GCP support to kick-start molecular biology research activities,” says Marian Quain, a senior research scientist at CRI. “It provided us with laboratory chemicals, reagent and equipment. My lab also received funding under the Genotyping Support Service initiative to characterise hundreds of sweetpotato, yam and cassava accessions.

“This support from GCP contributed immensely to transforming the lab.”

Ruth Prempeh – CRI researcher who was able to achieve her PhD with GCP support – hard at work collecting data in the field.

Ruth Prempeh – CRI researcher who was able to achieve her PhD with GCP support – hard at work collecting data in the field.

Funding injections can kick-start careers for young scientists too. In 2009, Ruth Prempeh received funding for her PhD, Genetic analysis of postharvest physiological deterioration in cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) storage roots, which was completed in 2013.

“From my thesis, l have prepared three manuscripts for publication. I have also had the opportunity to attend the three-year Integrated Breeding Multiyear Course, during which l acquired knowledge and skills in data analysis, interpretation and management and also in using modern technologies for crop improvement,” says Ruth.

“This has been very useful and has really had an impact on my career, making me what l am today. With this, l know l have a great future and I believe l will achieve great things. I am really proud to have been associated with GCP and very grateful for the opportunity.”

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Photo: William Haun/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Cassava flour on sale in Ghana.

Oct 122015
 

 

Photo: One Acre Fund/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A Kenyan farmer harvesting her maize.

“The map of Kenya’s maize-growing regions mirrors the map of the nation’s acid soils.”

So says Dickson Ligeyo, senior research officer at the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO; formerly the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, or KARI), who believes this paints a sombre picture for his country’s maize farmers.

Maize is a staple crop for Kenyans, with 90 percent of the population depending on it for food. However, acid soils cause yield losses of 17–50 percent across the nation.

Soil acidity is a major environmental and economic concern in many more countries around the world. The availability of nutrients in soil is affected by pH, so acid conditions make it harder for plants to get a balanced diet. High acidity causes two major problems: perilously low levels of phosphorus and toxically high levels of aluminium. Aluminium toxicity affects 38 percent of farmland in Southeast Asia, 31 percent in Latin America and 20 percent in East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and North America.

Aluminium toxicity in soil comes close to rivalling drought as a food-security threat in critical tropical food-producing regions. By damaging roots, acid soils deprive plants of the nutrients and water they need to grow – a particularly bitter effect when water is scarce.

Maize, meanwhile, is one of the most economically important food crops worldwide. It is grown in virtually every country in the world, and it is a staple food for more than 1.2 billion people in developing countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. In many cultures it is consumed primarily as porridge: polenta in Italy; angu in Brazil; and isitshwala, nshima, pap, posho,sadza or ugali in Africa.

Photo: Allison Mickel/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Ugali, a stiff maize porridge that is a staple dish across East Africa, being prepared in Tanzania.

Maize is also a staple food for animals reared for meat, eggs and dairy products. Around 60 percent of global maize production is used for animal feed.

The world demand for maize is increasing at the same time as global populations burgeon and climate changes. Therefore, improving the ability of maize to withstand acid soils and produce higher yields with less reliable rainfall is paramount. This is why the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) invested almost USD 12.5 million into maize research between 2004 and 2014.

GCP’s goal was to facilitate the use of genetic diversity and advanced plant science to improve food security in developing countries through the breeding of ‘super’ crops – including maize – able to tolerate drought and poor soils and resist diseases.

 By weight, more maize is produced each year than any other grain: global production is more than 850 million tonnes. Maize production is increasing at twice the annual rate of rice and three times that of wheat. In 2020, demand for maize in developing countries alone is expected to exceed 500 million tonnes and will surpass the demand for both rice and wheat.  This projected rapid increase in demand is mainly because maize is the grain of choice to feed animals being reared for meet – but it is placing strain on the supply of maize for poor human consumers. Demand for maize as feed for poultry and pigs is growing, particularly in East and Southeast Asia, as an ever-increasing number of people in Asia consume meat. In some areas of Asia, maize is already displacing sorghum and rice. Acreage allocated to maize production in South and Southeast Asia has been expanding by 2.2 percent annually since 2001. In its processed form, maize is also used for biofuel (ethanol), and the starch and sugars from maize end up in beer, ice cream, syrup, shoe polish, glue, fireworks, ink, batteries, mustard, cosmetics, aspirin and paint.

Researchers take on the double whammy of acid soils and drought

Part of successfully breeding higher-yielding drought-tolerant maize varieties involves improving plant genetics for acid soils. In these soils, aluminium toxicity inhibits root growth, reducing the amount of water and nutrients that the plant can absorb and compounding the effects of drought.

Improving plant root development for aluminium tolerance and phosphorous efficiency can therefore have the positive side effect of higher plant yield when water is limited.

Photo: A Wangalachi/CIMMYT

A farmer in Tanzania shows the effects of drought on her maize crop. The maize ears are undersized with few grains.

Although plant breeders have exploited the considerable variation in aluminium tolerance between different maize varieties for many years, aluminium toxicity has been a significant but poorly understood component of plant genetics. It is a particularly complex trait in maize that involves multiple genes and physiological mechanisms.

The solution is to take stock of what maize germplasm is available worldwide, characterise it, clone the sought-after genes and implement new breeding methods to increase diversity and genetic stocks.

Scientists join hands to unravel maize complexity

Scientists from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) got their heads together between 2005 and 2008 to itemise what maize stocks were available.

Marilyn Warburton, then a molecular geneticist at CIMMYT, led this GCP-funded project. Her goal was to discover how all the genetic diversity in maize gene-bank collections around the globe might be used for practical plant improvement. She first gathered samples from gene banks all over the world, including those of CIMMYT and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). Scientists from developing country research centres in China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Thailand and Vietnam also contributed by supplying DNA from their local varieties.

Photo: X Fonseca/CIMMYT

Maize diversity.

Researchers then used molecular markers and a bulk fingerprinting method – which Marilyn was instrumental in developing – for three purposes: to characterise the structure of maize populations, to better understand how maize migrated across the world, and to complete the global picture of maize biodiversity. Scientists were also using markers to search for new genes associated with desirable traits.

Allen Oppong, a maize pathologist and breeder from Ghana’s Crops Research Institute (CRI), of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, was supported by GCP from 2007 to 2010 to characterise Ghana’s maize germplasm. Trained in using the fingerprinting technique, Allen was able to identify distinctly different maize germplasm in the north of Ghana (with its dry savanna landscape) and in the south (with its high rainfall). He also identified mixed germplasm, which he says demonstrates that plant germplasm often finds its way to places where it is not suitable for optimal yield and productivity. Maize yields across the country are low.

Stocktaking a world’s worth of maize for GCP was a challenge, but not the only one, according to Marilyn. “In the first year it was hard to see how all the different partners would work together. Data analysis and storage was the hardest; everyone seemed to have their own idea about how the data could be stored, accessed and analysed best.

“The science was also evolving, even as we were working, so you could choose one way to sequence or genotype your data, and before you were even done with the project, a better way would be available,” she recalls.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Maize ears drying in Ghana.

Comparing genes: sorghum gene paves way for maize aluminium tolerance

In parallel to Marilyn’s work, scientists at the Brazilian Corporation of Agricultural Research (EMBRAPA) had already been advancing research on plant genetics for acid soils and the effects of aluminium toxicity on sorghum – spurred on by the fact that almost 70 percent of Brazil’s arable land is made up of acid soils.

What was of particular interest to GCP in 2004 was that the Brazilians, together with researchers at Cornell University in the USA, had recently mapped and identified the major sorghum aluminium tolerance locus AltSB, and were working on isolating the major gene within it with a view to cloning it. Major genes were known to control aluminium tolerance in sorghum, wheat and barley and produce good yields in soils that had high levels of aluminium. The gene had also been found in rape and rye.

GCP embraced the opportunity to fund more of this work with a view to speeding up the development of maize – as well as sorghum and rice – germplasm that can withstand the double whammy of acid soils and drought.

Photo: L Kochian

Maize trials in the field at EMBRAPA. The maize plants on the left are aluminium-tolerant and so able to withstand acid soils, while those on the right are not.

Leon Kochian, Director of the Robert W Holley Center for Agriculture and Health, United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service and Professor at Cornell University, was a Principal Investigator for various GCP research projects investigating how to improve grain yields of crops grown in acid soils. “GCP was interested in our work because we were working with such critical crops,” he says.

“The idea was to use discoveries made in the first half of the GCP’s 10-year programme – use comparative genomics to look into genes of rice and maize to see if we can see relations in those genes – and once you’ve cloned a gene, it is easier to find a gene that can work for other crops.”

The intensity of GCP-supported maize research shifted up a gear in 2007, after the team led by Jurandir Magalhães, research scientist in molecular genetics and genomics of maize and sorghum at EMBRAPA, used positional cloning to identify the major sorghum aluminium tolerance gene SbMATE responsible for the AltSB aluminium tolerance locus. The team comprised researchers from EMBRAPA, Cornell, the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS) and Moi University in Kenya.

By combing the maize genome searching for a similar gene to sorghum’s SbMATE, Jurandir’s EMBRAPA colleague Claudia Guimarães and a team of GCP-supported scientists discovered the maize aluminium tolerance gene ZmMATE1. High expression of this gene, first observed in maize lines with three copies of ZmMATE1, has been shown to increase aluminium tolerance.  ZmMATE1 improves grain yields in acid soil by up to one tonne per hectare when introgressed in an aluminium-sensitive line.

Photos: 1 – V Alves ; 2 – F Mendes; both edited by C Guimarães

The genetic region, or locus, containing the ZmMATE1 aluminium tolerance gene is known as qALT6. Photo 1 shows a rhyzobox containing two layers of soil: a corrected top-soil and lower soils with 15 percent aluminium saturation. On the right, near-isogenic lines (NILs) introgressed with qALT6 show deeper roots and longer secondary roots in the acidic lower soil, whereas on the left the maize line without qALT6, L53, shows roots mainly confined to the corrected top soil. Photo 2 shows maize ears from lines without qALT6 (above) and with qALT6 (below); the lines with qALT6 maintain their size and quality even under high aluminium levels of 40 percent aluminium saturation.

The outcomes of these GCP-supported research projects provided the basic materials, such as molecular markers and donor sources of the positive alleles, for molecular-breeding programmes focusing on improving maize production and stability on acid soils in Latin America, Africa and other developing regions.

Kenya deploys powerful maize genes

One of those researchers crucial to achieving impact in GCP’s work in maize was Samuel (Sam) Gudu of Moi University, Kenya. From 2010 he was the Principal Investigator for GCP’s project on using marker-assisted backcrossing (MABC) to improve aluminium tolerance and phosphorous efficiency in maize in Kenya. This project combined molecular and conventional breeding approaches to speed up the development of maize varieties adapted to the acid soils of Africa, and was closely connected to the other GCP comparative genomics projects in maize and sorghum.

MABC is a type of marker-assisted selection (see box), which Sam’s team – including Dickson Ligeyo of KALRO – used to combine new molecular materials developed through GCP with Kenyan varieties. They have thus been able to significantly advance the breeding of maize varieties suitable for soils in Kenya and other African countries.

Marker-assisted selection helps breeders like Sam Gudu more quickly develop plants that have desirable genes. When two plants are sexually crossed, both positive and negative traits are inherited. The ongoing process of selecting plants with more desirable traits and crossing them with other plants to transfer and combine such traits takes many years using conventional breeding techniques, as each generation of plants must be grown to maturity and phenotyped – that is, the observable characteristics of the plants must be measured to determine which plants might contain genes for valuable traits.   By using molecular markers that are known to be linked to useful genes such as ZmMATE1, breeders can easily test plant materials to see whether or not these genes 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. Marker-assisted selection therefore reduces the number of years it takes to breed plant varieties with desired traits.

Maize and Comparative Genomics were two of seven Research Initiatives (RIs) where GCP concentrated on advancing researchers’ and breeders’ skills and resources in developing countries. Through this work, scientists have been able to characterise maize germplasm using improved trait observation and characterisation methods (phenotyping), implement molecular-breeding programmes, enhance strategic data management and build local human and infrastructure capacity.

The ultimate goal of the international research collaboration on comparative genomics in maize was to improve maize yields grown on acidic soils under drought conditions in Kenya and other African countries, as well as in Latin America. Seven institutes partnered up to for the comparative genomics research: Moi University, KALRO, EMBRAPA, Cornell University, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), JIRCAS and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

“Before funding by GCP, we were mainly working on maize to develop breeding products resistant to disease and with increased yield,” says Sam. “At that time we had not known that soil acidity was a major problem in the parts of Kenya where we grow maize and sorghum. GCP knew that soil acidity could limit yields, so in the work with GCP we managed to characterise most of our acid soils. We now know that it was one of the major problems for limiting the yield of maize and sorghum.

“The relationship to EMBRAPA and Cornell University is one of the most important links we have. We developed material much faster through our collaboration with our colleagues in the advanced labs. I can see that post-GCP we will still want to communicate and interact with our colleagues in Brazil and the USA to enable us to continue to identify molecular materials that we discover,” he says. Sam and other maize researchers across Kenya, including Dickson, have since developed inbred, hybrid and synthetic varieties with improved aluminium tolerance for acid soils, which are now available for African farmers.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

A Kenyan maize farmer.

“We crossed them [the new genes identified to have aluminium tolerance] with our local material to produce the materials we required for our conditions,” says Sam.

“The potential for aluminium-tolerant and phosphorous-efficient material across Africa is great. I know that in Ethiopia, aluminium toxicity from acid soil is a problem. It is also a major problem in Tanzania. It is a major problem in South Africa and a major problem in Kenya. So our breeding work, which is starting now to produce genetic materials that can be used directly, or could be developed even further in these other countries, is laying the foundation for maize improvement in acid soils.”

Sam is very proud of the work: “Several times I have felt accomplishment, because we identified material for Kenya for the first time. No one else was working on phosphorous efficiency or aluminium tolerance, and we have come up with materials that have been tested and have become varieties. It made me feel that we’re contributing to food security in Kenya.”

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Maize grain for sale.

Maize for meat: GCP’s advances in maize genetics help feed Asia’s new appetites

Reaping from the substantial advances in maize genetics and breeding, researchers in Asia were also able to enhance Asian maize genetic resources.

Photo: D Mowbray/CIMMYT

A pig roots among maize ears on a small farm in Nepal.

Bindiganavile Vivek, a senior maize breeder for CIMMYT based in India, has been working with GCP since 2008 on improving drought tolerance in maize, especially for Asia, for two reasons: unrelenting droughts and a staggering growth the importance of maize as a feedstock. This work was funded by GCP as part of its Maize Research Initiative.

“People’s diets across Asia changed after government policies changed in the 1990s. We had a more free market economy, and along with that came more money that people could spend. That prompted a shift towards a non vegetarian diet,” Vivek recounts.

“Maize, being the number one feed crop of the world, started to come into demand. From the year 2000 up to now, the growing area of maize across Asia has been increasing by about two percent every year. That’s a phenomenal increase. It’s been replacing other crops – sorghum and rice. There’s more and more demand.

“Seventy percent of the maize that is produced in Asia is used as feed. And 70 percent of that feed is poultry feed.”

In Vietnam, for example, the government is actively promoting the expansion of maize acreage, again displacing rice. Other Asian nations involved in the push for maize include China, Indonesia and The Philippines.

Photo: A Erlangga/CIFOR

A farmer in Indonesia transports his maize harvest by motorcycle.

The problem with this growth is that 80 percent of the 19 million hectares of maize in South and Southeast Asia relies on rain as its only source of water, so is prone to drought: “Wherever you are, you cannot escape drought,” says Vivek. And resource-poor farmers have limited access to improved maize products or hybrids appropriate for their situation.

Vivek’s research for GCP focused on the development – using marker-assisted breeding methods, specifically marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) – of new drought-tolerant maize adapted to many countries in Asia. His goal was to transfer the highest expression of drought tolerance in maize into elite well-adapted Asian lines targeted at drought-prone or water-constrained environments.

Asia’s existing maize varieties had no history of breeding for drought tolerance, only for disease resistance. To make a plant drought tolerant, many genes have to be incorporated into a new variety. So Vivek asked: “How do you address the increasing demand for maize that meets the drought-tolerance issue?”

The recent work on advancing maize genetics for acid soils in the African and Brazilian GCP projects meant it was a golden opportunity for Vivek to reap some of the new genetic resources.

“This was a good opportunity to use African germplasm, bring it into India and cross it to some Asia-adapted material,” he says.

Photo: E Phipps/CIMMYT

Stored maize ears hanging in long bunches outside a house in China.

A key issue Vivek faced, however, was that most African maize varieties are white, and most Asian maize varieties are yellow. “You cannot directly deploy what you breed in Africa into Asia,” Vivek says. “Plus, there’s so much difference in the environments [between Africa and Asia] and maize is very responsive to its environment.”

The advances in marker-assisted breeding since the inception of GCP contributed significantly towards the success of Vivek’s team.

“In collaboration with GCP, IITA, Cornell University and Monsanto, CIMMYT has initiated the largest public sector MARS breeding approach in the world,” says Vivek.

The outcome is good: “We now have some early-generation, yellow, drought-tolerant inbred germplasm and lines suitable for Asia.

“GCP gave us a good start. We now need to expand and build on this,” says Vivek.

GCP’s supported work laid the foundation for other CIMMYT projects, such as the Affordable, Accessible, Asian Drought-Tolerant Maize project funded by the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture. This project is developing yet more germplasm with drought tolerance.

A better picture: GCP brightens maize research

Dickson Ligeyo’s worries of a stormy future for Kenya’s maize production have lifted over the 10 years of GCP. At the end of 2014, Kenya had two new varieties that were in the final stage of testing in the national performance trials before being released to farmers.

“There is a brighter picture for Kenya’s maize production since we have acquired acid-tolerant germplasm from Brazil, which we are using in our breeding programmes,” Dickson says.

In West Africa, researchers are also revelling in the opportunity they have been given to help enhance local yields in the face of a changing climate. “My institute benefited from GCP not only in terms of human resource development, but also in provision of some basic equipment for field phenotyping and some laboratory equipment,” says Allen Oppong in Ghana.

“Through the support of GCP, I was able to characterise maize landraces found in Ghana using the bulk fingerprinting technique. This work has been published and I think it’s useful information for maize breeding in Ghana – and possibly other parts of the world.”

The main challenge now for breeders, according to Allen, is getting the new varieties out to farmers: “Most people don’t like change. The new varieties are higher yielding, disease resistant, nutritious – all good qualities. But the challenge is demonstrating to farmers that these materials are better than what they have.”

Photo: CIMMYT

This Kenyan farmer is very happy with his healthy maize crop, grown using an improved variety during a period of drought.

Certainly GCP has strengthened the capacity of researchers across Africa, Asia and Latin America, training researchers in maize breeding, data management, statistics, trial evaluations and phenotyping. The training has been geared so that scientists in developed countries can use genetic diversity and advanced plant science to improve crops for greater food security in the developing world.

Elliot Tembo, a maize breeder with the private sector in sub-Saharan Africa says: “As a breeder and a student, I have been exposed to new breeding tools through GCP. Before my involvement, I was literally blind in the use of molecular tools. Now, I am no longer relying only on pedigree data – which is not always reliable – to classify germplasm.”

Allen agrees: “GCP has had tremendous impact on my life as a researcher. The capacity-building programme supported my training in marker-assisted selection training at CIMMYT in Mexico. This training exposed me to modern techniques in plant breeding and genomics. Similarly, it built my confidence and work efficiency.”

There is no doubt that GCP research has brightened the picture for maize research and development where it is most needed: with researchers in developing countries where poor farmers and communities rely on maize as their staple food and main crop.

More links

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

A farmer displays maize harvested on his farm in Laos.

Oct 092015
 

 

Photo: IITA

Elizabeth Parkes

Elizabeth Parkes grew up in Ghana as the youngest child and only girl in a middle-class family of nine children. Through visiting poor communities with her family, she began from an early age to build her understanding of the lives of resource-poor families in this part of West Africa and their need for reliable and nutritious food.

She also knows first-hand the important role women play on a farm and in a family. “Rural families are held together by women, so if you are able to change their lot, you can make a real mark,” says Elizabeth.

It was this sense of social conscience that drew her to a career in agricultural research: “My father, a Regional Education Officer, was not very amused; he thought agricultural research was a man’s job!” she recalls.

But Elizabeth was on a mission. “I see African communities where poverty and hunger are seemingly huge problems with no way out,” she says. “If I put in enough effort, I can bring some solutions. My primary target group is the less privileged, and women in particular have been my friends throughout. This sometimes means subtly getting the men to consider some changes in roles.”

This sense of destiny led to Elizabeth gaining a Bachelor’s degree in Agriculture, a Diploma in Education and a Master’s in Crop Science.

Meet Elizabeth in the complete podcast below (or see a playlist on PodOmatic)  – and be inspired by her warmth and passion!

 

Photo: IITA

A worker in a Ghanaian cooperative producing garri, or gari, a kind of granular cassava flour used to prepare a range of foods.

Turning point: cassava to help the vulnerable

During a stint of national service between academic degrees, she was based in the tiny poor village of Aworowa in the Brong Ahafo Region. There was no electricity in her room, and the street lights came on once a week.

Photo: Tini Maier/Flickr (Creative Commons)

In a poor Ghanaian community everyone has to pitch in to the heavy daily round of chores.

“We all fetched water from the stream to drink and cook,” Elizabeth recalls. The plight of the villagers inspired Elizabeth to approach a scientist engaged in root and tuber projects at the Crops Research Institute (CRI) of Ghana’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). She offered to carry out some research on cassava, hoping this might help the local people.

“I saw the struggle for households,” says Elizabeth. “I lived with them for one year, which transformed my interest and focus onto the vulnerable and less privileged.”

As a result, Elizabeth established CRI cassava trials in the region, and these trials continue today with Elizabeth still in touch with the villagers.

When her year of national service finished, Elizabeth was appointed as Assistant Research Officer at CRI – their first woman to be assigned to a research project. Already, she was beginning to fulfil her destiny.

Photo: IITA

Healthy cassava plants.

Challenges and opportunities

Photo: IITA

Unlike most crops, cassava is propagated, not by seed, but using cut sections of stem like these – just one of the many challenges this previously neglected crop offers breeders.

But cassava is not the easiest crop for a young researcher to cut their teeth on. It has long been regarded as an ‘orphan’ crop – one that researchers and funders have forgotten in their drive to work with the higher profile crops of wheat, rice and maize.

Cassava is a challenging crop for breeders to work with. “In addition to factors such as pests and disease, cassava is a long-season and very labour-intensive crop. It can take a whole year before you can expect to reap any rewards, and if you don’t have a strong team who can step in at different points throughout the breeding process, you can often find unexpected results at the end of it, and then you have to start all over again,” Elizabeth says.

But while many other young researchers gave up on with cassava, Elizabeth stuck with it, knowing the importance of this crop to farmers, especially women. And this is where Elizabeth’s involvement with the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) really started to make a difference to her future.

During GCP’s first research phase, Elizabeth’s path crossed with GCP scientist Martin Fregene, who encouraged Elizabeth to lead the Ghana partners involved in GCP’s cassava projects. She soon climbed the GCP research ranks, receiving multiple study grants, managing projects, and mixing and mingling with elite scientists. Along the way, Elizabeth also learnt new molecular breeding techniques. More recently, she was appointed Ghana’s lead researcher for GCP’s Phase II Cassava Research Initiative.

A place at the table, and sharing joy

Photo: IITA


Elizabeth Parkes examines a healthy crop of monster roots from an improved cassava variety.

Elizabeth believes the support GCP gave her to develop her skills and capacity is what has made a difference to her own and others’ destinies as research scientists: “GCP has made us visible and attractive to others; we are now setting the pace and doing science in a more refined and effective manner. I see GCP as the pace setters.

Elizabeth Parkes quote 2

“GCP gave you the keys to solving your own problems and put structures in place so that knowledge learnt abroad could be transferred and applied at home.

“When I first joined GCP,” Elizabeth recalls, “I saw myself as somebody from a national research programme being given a place at the table; my inputs were recognised and what I said carried weight in decision-making.”

Elizabeth has attended three GCP Annual (later General) Research Meetings and won awards for her posters. “This greatly boosted my confidence,” she says. She is an active member of the Cassava Community of Practice – founded by GCP and now hosted by the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP) – which facilitates and supports the integration of marker-assisted selection into cassava breeding. All this has accelerated Elizabeth’s quest to produce and disseminate farmer-preferred cassava varieties that are resistant to pests and diseases.

Elizabeth Parkes quote 3“With the Community of Practice you can call on other scientists; you share talk, you share ideas, you share joy. We share everything together,” Elizabeth enthuses. ‘Joy’ is a word that is often on Elizabeth’s lips when she describes the help that GCP has given her and others.

“We are all forever grateful to GCP and its funders. GCP has had a huge impact on research in Ghana, especially for cassava, rice, maize and yam. All the agricultural research institutes and individual scientists who came into contact with GCP have been fundamentally transformed.”

Photo: A Hoel/World Bank

A farmer in Benin transforms cassava into garri, or gari, used as the basis of many different dishes.

Elizabeth Parkes quoteIn less than a decade, Elizabeth has become a valued researcher at CRI (currently on secondment at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, IITA) as well as Ghana’s leading GCP-supported scientist working on cassava. But in fulfilling her own destiny, she’s also passionate about helping others to achieve their potential.

“Building human capacity is my greatest joy,” she says. Farmers, breeders and a Ghanaian private-sector company are just a few of the fortunate beneficiaries of her expertise over recent years.

“Wherever I go, whatever opportunity I have, I refer back to GCP and its capacity-building work. You see, it’s good to release new plant varieties, but it’s also good to release people who will do the job.”

Nurturing women

Photo: O Girard/CIFOR

Angelique Ipanga tends her cassava plants in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cassava is often seen as a “women’s crop,” and the work of cultivating and preparing it falls largely on women’s shoulders.

Elizabeth talks about one of her favourite people, a farmer called Bea: “She’s very serious. She wants to learn more and she keeps expanding her farm.”

Bea hadn’t planted cassava before, so she pestered Elizabeth to find out more about how to do it properly. With Elizabeth’s guidance, Bea’s cassava-growing skills flourished, and she became so successful that she was recognised as the best farmer in her community.

“These are things that make me glad… that at least I have impacted somebody who hadn’t planted cassava before, and it’s amazing,” says Elizabeth. “There are people out there who need us, and when we give them our best, they will give the world their best as well.”

Elizabeth is also passionate about helping other women researchers: “I’ve pushed to make people recognise that women can do advanced agricultural science, and do it well. To see a talented woman researcher firmly established in her career and with her kids around her is thrilling.”

And so Elizabeth is now herself firmly established in world-class agricultural research, and further interesting stories are sure to follow.

“Before GCP we really struggled, but now everybody wants to have training in Ghana. Everybody wants to have something to do with us, and I will always say thank you to GCP for that, for making us attractive as researchers,” Elizabeth says.

“I’ve stuck with cassava because that’s my destiny! I may add other root and tuber crops, but cassava is my pivot.”

More links

Oct 082015
 

 

Photo: IITA

Ousmane Boukar

“There is a clear need to develop a range of varieties that meet diverse requirements”

For 30 years, Ousmane Boukar has been working towards a singular goal: to improve and secure cowpea production in sub-Saharan Africa.

Cowpeas are very important in sub-Saharan Africa,” he says. “They are an important source of protein, and contribute to the livelihood and food security of millions.”

Despite their dietary importance, cowpea yields in Africa are low – on average a mere 10 to 30 percent of their potential. This is primarily because of attacks from insects and diseases, but is often further compounded by chronic drought.

Since 2007, Ousmane has worked for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) as cowpea breeder and Station Representative in Kano, Nigeria. As a breeder, his mission is to improve yields by identifying additional genetic sources of resistance to pests and diseases, tolerance of parasitic weeds, improved drought tolerance and adaptation to low soil fertility.

To accomplish this, he searches for genes associated with these kinds of valuable traits. He then uses this information to develop breeding populations comprising of plant lines with multiple useful traits, and works with farmers to grow these populations to make sure they do grow well in the field before releasing them as new varieties.

“Cowpea breeding is very challenging because of the range of production environments and cropping systems, and the diverse preferences among consumers and producers for grain, leaves, pods and fodder,” Ousmane says. “There is a clear need to develop a range of varieties that meet those diverse requirements, combining high yield potential and resistance to the major production constraints.”

Photo: IITA

A farmer’s field full of cowpea plants (with maize at the background) in Kano, Nigeria.

Joining an international programme

The same year Ousmane joined IITA, he joined forces in a new collaboration with cowpea breeders and geneticists from Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Senegal and the USA. He was Product Delivery Coordinator for the cowpea component of the Tropical Legumes I project (TLI) – a seven-year project funded by the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) that sought to use marker-assisted breeding techniques to breed high yielding, drought-tolerant and insect- and disease-resistant varieties of four important legumes.

Photo: IITA

Cowpea plants at podding stage.

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

Key outcomes from the cowpea component of the project were a cowpea genome map and molecular markers that have helped breeders like Ousmane locate the genes in cowpeas that determine and regulate desirable traits. These markers can be used like flags to indicate which potential parent plants have useful genes, and which of the progeny from each cross have inherited them, making breeding more efficient.

“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 such as thrips [insects which feed on cowpeas] and Striga [a parasitic weed]. We expect these lines to be available to plant breeders by the end of 2015.”

Photo: IITA

Cowpea seed.

Ousmane says the success of the cowpea component of TLI owes much to the pre-existing relationships the partners had before the project. “TLI was an extension of a USAID collaborative project [Bean/Cowpea Collaborative Research Support Program] we had been working on since 2002,” he explains. “I had also crossed paths with breeders in Senegal, Burkina Faso and USA many times when I worked with the Institute of Agricultural Research for Development [IRAD] in Cameroon.”

Photo: IITA

Striga in a cowpea plot.

Ousmane was with IRAD in his home country of Cameroon from 1990 to 2007. He also worked by correspondence during this time to complete both his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Plant Breeding and Genomics from the University of Purdue in Indiana, USA. His thesis involved characterising and mapping Striga resistance in cowpeas. Striga is a parasitic weed widespread in West Africa, which can reduce susceptible cultivar yields by up to 100 percent. Resistance within the host plant is the only practical control method (see ‘Cowpea in between’, GCP Partner and Product Highlights 2006, page 23).

Photo: IITA

A trader sells cowpeas in Moniya market, Ibadan, Nigeria.

Taking the lead in the Community of Practice

In 2011, in addition to his TLI and Product Delivery Coordinator roles, Ousmane became the coordinator of the Cowpea Community of Practice (CoP) – a newly created network founded by GCP to develop capacity in Africa and help GCP researchers share their new expertise in molecular breeding.

“The CoP was designed for cowpea researchers and people interested in cowpeas to ask questions and to share their expertise and knowledge, particularly with people who don’t have the experience, such as graduate students or breeders new to cowpeas,” Ousmane explains. Members are from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and USA.

“My role as coordinator is to collect ideas, find funding opportunities, and understand member expertise and resources so I can direct members of the community to the right people.”

Photo: TREE AID

Ghanaian farmer Alanig Bawa drying cowpeas.

Ousmane says the position has opened his eyes to all the new research going on in cowpea. The number of new researchers in the field also heartens him. “There are more researchers that are practising molecular breeding than ever before, which is great, because we can enhance their impact and efficiency in cowpea breeding.”

As membership grows, Ousmane is confident that the community and capacity that have developed with help from GCP will remain sustainable after GCP’s close at the end of 2014. “Governments in Nigeria and Burkina Faso understand the importance of cowpeas and are investing in our research. As the set of skills and the number of personnel grow in other sub-Saharan countries, we are confident that cowpea research will expand and produce higher yielding varieties for their farmers.”

More links

 

Oct 072015
 

Young Nigerian scientists often leave Africa and look for jobs with international research agencies overseas. But with the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP)-funded Cassava Research Initiative (RI), two young nationals have been leading the international collaboration and injecting confidence into Africa’s research capacity.

Leadership is a quality admired and consistently sought after, particularly when overcoming a challenge. Some leaders direct from afar; others rise through the ranks and work with their peers on the ground – winning respect from the people they lead as they get their hands dirty.

Photo: G Norton

Dream team: Emmanuel Okogbenin (left) and Chiedozie Egesi (right), both of Nigeria’s National Root Crops Research Institute.

“If you want to work for the people, you have to walk with the people – that’s an African concept,” says Emmanuel Okogbenin, a plant breeder and geneticist at Nigeria’s National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI). “Then when you work with the people, you really understand what they want. When you speak, they know they can trust you.”

This powerful sentiment is one reason why GCP sought the collaboration of NRCRI in overcoming the challenge of sustaining Africa’s, and indeed the world’s, cassava production.

Having started as a small farm in 1923, NRCRI has taken giant strides to become one of Nigeria’s best research institutes, contributing immensely to the country’s economic development and making it the leading producer of cassava in the world. NRCRI Executive Director Julius Chukwuma Okonkwo says, “This would not have been attainable if not for the trust and support that GCP had in us when they made two of our young cassava researchers the leaders of an international collaboration.”

The two researchers to whom Julius refers are Emmanuel and his colleague Chiedozie Egesi, also a plant breeder and geneticist at NRCRI. Their combined 36 years’ of cassava research experience is matched by their passion to get the best out of Nigeria’s main staple crop.

And they are happy to get some dirt under their fingernails. “It’s just as important to work with the farmers in the field and understand what they want, as it is to do the research in the lab,” says Emmanuel. “At the end of the day we need to please the farmers, as they are the ones who will be using the new varieties that we are developing to sustain their livelihoods.”

Photo: IITA

Nigerian farmers display their cassava harvest.

Developing and leading Africa’s cassava research

Between 2010 and 2014, both Emmanuel and Chiedozie led three different projects within GCP’s Cassava RI, working with other colleagues in national breeding programmes in Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the Brazilian Corporation of Agricultural Research (EMBRAPA) and Cornell University in the USA. The aim of the initiative was to use molecular-breeding techniques to accelerate the development of high-starch cassava varieties with resistance to diseases and tolerance to drought – and so ensure both food supplies and income for farmers.

Meet Chiedozie and Emmanuel in the video playlist below, learn more about cassava in Africa, and hear all about their research (or watch on Youtube):

Emmanuel explains that before GCP, “most African national programmes didn’t really have established crop-breeding programmes, and didn’t have the resources” to do the scale of research GCP assisted with. Nor did they have the capacity to use molecular-breeding techniques, which can potentially halve the time it takes to develop new varieties.

With help from GCP and CIAT, NRCRI was able to equip a new molecular-breeding laboratory, and staff were trained to incorporate molecular-breeding techniques into their breeding programme. “GCP was there not only to provide technology, but also to guide us in how to operate that technology,” explains Chiedozie.

Julius points out that both Chiedozie and Emmanuel were also influential in disseminating this knowledge and, in turn, building and sustaining NRCRI’s human capacity. “They both mentored many young scientists who have chosen a career in cassava and molecular breeding because of this.”

Photo: IITA

Transporting a bountiful cassava harvest from farm to market in Nigeria.

With training and infrastructure in place, NRCRI led an international collaboration that in 2010 released Africa’s first cassava variety developed using molecular-breeding techniques. Known as UMUCASS33 (or CR 41-10), it was resistant to cassava mosaic disease (CMD) – a devastating plant disease that can wipe out farmers’ entire cassava crops – and also highly nutritious. This was swiftly followed by a second similar variety, CR 36-5, and supplied to farmers.

Between this landmark release and GCP’s close in 2014, the cassava team had already released nearly 20 higher yielding, more nutritious varieties resistant to diseases and pests, and had begun working on developing drought-tolerant varieties.

These new and improved varieties – all generated as a direct or indirect result of his engagement in GCP projects – are, Chiedozie says, worth their weight in gold: “Through these materials, people’s livelihoods can be improved. The food people grow should be nutritious, resistant and high-yielding enough to allow them to sell some of it and make money for other things in life, such as building a house, getting a motorbike or sending their kids to school.” This social aspect is particularly pertinent in Nigeria, where these cassava varieties will have the greatest impact.

Five years, 20 new varieties for African farmers Between 2010 and 2014, NRCRI and its collaborators developed and released multiple new cassava varieties with a combination of traits. This work has continued after the closure of GCP, with more releases in the pipeline. Disease and pest resistance During 2010-2014 the team released several varieties of cassava resistant to cassava mosaic disease (CMD) for different environments in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania as well as several varieties resistant to cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) – a similarly devastating disease originating in Tanzania but quickly spreading into Uganda and further west. They have also developed new varieties with combined resistance to CMD and CBSD. These have the potential to double the yield of existing commercial varieties. The team has also worked with Tanzanian breeders to develop cassava varieties that are resistant to bacterial blight and green mites. These new Tanzanian varieties are on their way to commercial breeders and will be available to farmers by 2015–16. High starch content In 2012 the team released a variety with very high starch content – an essential element of good cassava.  Improved nutrition In 2011, the NRCRI team, together with IITA and HarvestPlus (another CGIAR Challenge Programme focussed on the nutritional enrichment of crops), released three cassava varieties rich in pro-vitamin A, which hold the potential to provide children under five and women of reproductive age with up to 25 percent of their daily vitamin A requirement. Since then, the team has aimed to increase this figure to 50 percent. In 2014, they released three more pro-vitamin A varieties with higher concentrations of beta-carotene.

Feeding a giant

Photo: IITA

Nigerian farmer with his bountiful cassava harvest.

Nigeria is often referred to as the ‘Giant of Africa’. It is the most populous African country, with over 174 million inhabitants. The population’s main staple food is cassava, making Nigeria the world’s largest producer and consumer of the crop. At the same time, the country imports almost USD 4 billion of wheat every year – a figure that is expected to quadruple by 2030 if wheat consumption continues to grow at the same rate it is today.

The government is wary of this ‘overreliance’ on imported grain and is working towards making the country less reliant on wheat by imposing a wheat tariff. It also hopes to boost cassava production and commercialisation by promoting 20 percent substitution of cassava flour for wheat in breadmaking.

“The government feels that to quickly change the fortunes of farmers, cassava is the way to go,” explains Emmanuel, who liaises with the Nigerian Government to promote to farmers the benefit of cassava varieties with high starch concentrations. It is the flour from these varieties that is being used to partially replace wheat flour to make bread. GCP support has been crucial here too, in providing vital scientific information to the government. Emmanuel explains: “The tariff from wheat is expected to be ploughed back to support agricultural development – especially in the cassava sector – as the government seeks to increase cassava production to support flour mills.”

Cassava offers a huge opportunity to transform the agricultural economy, stimulate rural development and further improve Nigeria’s gross domestic product. In 2014, Nigeria’s economy surpassed that of South Africa’s to become the largest on the continent. By 2050, Nigeria is expected to rise further and become one of the world’s top 20 economies.

Unfortunately, however, like many growing economies worldwide, Nigeria is still working to address severe inequality, including in the distribution of wealth and in feeding the country’s expanding population.

Photo: IITA

A woman with her children at work in a cassava processing centre in Nigeria.

It’s a problem Chiedozie understands well: “Nigeria is an oil-producing country, but you still see grinding poverty in some cases,” he says. “Coming from a small town in the southeast of the country, I grew up in an environment where you see people who are struggling, weak from disease, poor, and with no opportunities to send their children to school,” he reveals. The poverty challenge, he explains, hits smallholder farmers particularly hard: “Urban development caught up with them in the end: some of them don’t even have access to the land that they inherited, so they’re forced to farm along the street.”

For Chiedozie, the seemingly bleak picture only served to ignite a fierce determination and motivation to act: “Despite the social injustice around me, I always thought there was opportunity to improve people’s lives.” And thus galvanised by the plight of Nigerian farmers, Chiedozie promptly shelved his plans for a career in medical surgery and pursued biological sciences and a PhD in crop genetics, a course he interspersed with training stints in the USA at Cornell University and the University of Washington, before returning to his homeland to accept a job as head of the cassava breeding team, and – following a promotion in 2010 – to become Assistant Director of the Biotechnology Department at NRCRI.

Empowering African researchers

Photo: IITA

Carrying cassava at a processing centre in Nigeria.

Emmanuel, who followed a similar educational route to Chiedozie, says both he and his colleague are exceptions to the norm in Africa, where African researchers tend to look for opportunities at international or private institutes rather than in national breeding programmes.

“It is difficult being a researcher in Africa,” says Emmanuel. “We don’t get paid as much as breeders in more developed countries, and funding is very hard to obtain.”

Emmanuel says his proudest moment was when GCP was looking for Africans to take up leadership roles. “They felt we could change things around and set a precedent to bring people back to the continent,” he says. “They appreciated our values and the need to install African leaders on the ground in Africa rather than in Europe, Asia or the Americas.”

Jean-Marcel Ribaut, GCP’s Director, says that seeking this local leadership was a novel approach for a transnational programme like GCP at the time, and proved to be an imperative feature for all GCP Research Initiatives. “The reasoning behind the approach is two-fold: Firstly, it’s important that our national partners share in feeling ownership of the projects and outcomes; secondly, they are gaining experience in the role so they can continue to do so after the close of the Programme in 2014,” he says. “We feel that most of our leading institutes, NRCRI included, are in a better position now than when they joined the project, and that this, along with their experience, has already gained them more exposure and funding opportunities.”

This is indeed true of the NRCRI cassava team, which is engaging with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Cornell University, IITA and Uganda’s National Crop Resources Research Institute in an initiative that Chiedozie promises will be at the front of cutting-edge technology. “We are still working out specifics, but it will see us continuing to use marker-assisted breeding techniques to develop higher yielding, stress-tolerant cassava varieties.”

Chiedozie adds this would not have been possible without GCP, which helped them to develop their capacity in Nigeria and in Africa, and this has “created a confidence in other global actors, who, on seeing our ability to deliver results, are choosing to invest in us.”

Photo: IITA

Before GCP came along, cassava was something of an orphan crop in agricultural research. Among the challenges to efficient breeding of cassava are that it is slow to grow and is propagated, not by seed, but using cut sections of stem like those shown. But with investment and capacity building from GCP, particularly in molecular breeding tools, African cassava scientists have gained a new confidence and prestige.

Continuing the momentum

One organisation that has been impressed by the work done at NRCRI is the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB). RTB Director Graham Thiele has been following the work done at NRCRI since 2010 with great interest. “We have been really impressed to see a national programme like NRCRI playing a leading role in these successful GCP projects, and grow as a result of this,” he says.

One area of research that has particularly impressed Graham is Chiedozie and Emmanuel’s pre-emptive breeding for cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) resistance. “CBSD isn’t currently an issue in Nigeria but it has the potential to wipe out all crops, as it has in Uganda and Tanzania, if it continues to spread west from these countries,” he explains.

“What Chiedozie and Emmanuel are doing is using molecular markers, developed in collaboration with IITA, to search for genes in their varieties that confer resistance to brown streak virus. They can then use these when breeding for CBSD resistance without exposing cassava to the virus. It’s very exciting and forward thinking, as normally people breed for resistance only when the disasters happen.”

As GCP approached its sunset in December 2014, Chiedozie and Emmanuel were reaching out to RTB to seek funding to continue this and other projects they are currently working on. “They’ve already created some great varieties but have plenty more in the pipeline, so we want to help them finish this work and, most importantly, keep the momentum going,” says Graham.

Chiedozie looks forward to the next steps with optimism, confirming that the new collaboration will continue in the quest to “give African farmers varieties of cassava that they will love to grow.”

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Photo: IITA


Healthy improved cassava varieties growing in the field.

 

Oct 052015
 

Cassava brings life to African people

Photo: N Palmer/CIATBeyond the glittering coastline of what was once known as the Gold Coast, Ghana’s shrublands and rich forested hills are split by forking rivers that reach inland through the country’s lush tropics, into drier western Africa. In the past 40 years, seven major droughts have battered the people of Africa – with the most significant and devastating occurring in the Sahel region and the Horn of Africa in the early 1970s and 1980s.

Photo: Y Wachira/Bioversity International

This little girl in Kenya already seems to know that cassava roots are precious.

But despite the massive social disruption and human suffering that these droughts cause, life goes on. In south-eastern Ghana and in Togo, the three-million-plus people who speak the Ewe language have a word for this. It is agbeli: ‘There is life’. It is no coincidence that this word is also their name for a tropical and subtropical crop that survives through the worst times to feed Africa’s families: cassava.

Cassava is a lifeline for African people, and is a particularly important staple food for poorer farmers. More cassava is produced in Africa than any other crop, and it is grown by nearly every farming family in sub-Saharan Africa, supplying about a third of the region’s daily energy intake. In the centuries since Portuguese traders introduced this Amazonian plant to Africa, cassava has flourished, yielding up to 40 tonnes per hectare.

Hear more on just why cassava is so important to food security from Emmanuel Okogbenin, of Nigeria’s National Root Crops Research Institute, in the video below (or watch on Youtube):

 

African countries produced nearly 140 million tonnes of cassava in 2012 – but most of the production is subsistence farming by small-scale farmers. Even the undisputed global cassava giant, Nigeria, currently produces only just enough to feed its population – and although the country is increasingly moving towards production of cassava for export as an industrial raw material, the poorest farmers often do not produce enough to sell, or have access to these markets.

Because cassava does so well on poor soils, on marginal land and with little rainfall, it can outlast its more sophisticated crop competitors: wheat, rice and maize. In fact, under harsh conditions such as drought, the amount of energy a given area of cassava plants can produce in the form of starchy carbohydrates outstrips all other crops. Chiedozie Egesi, a plant breeder and geneticist at Nigeria’s National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI), describes cassava as “the crop you can bet on when every other thing is failing”.

Benefits of cassava to African farmers and families Most cassava grown is consumed as food – for instance, as starchy, fine powder called tapioca or the fermented, flaky garri. The tubers can also be eaten boiled or fried in chunks, and are used in many other local dishes.  If cassava is grown in favourable conditions, its firm, white flesh can be rich in calcium and vitamin C and contain other vitamins such as B1, B2 and niacin. Some improved varieties are fortified with increased vitamin A levels, giving them a golden hue.   As well as being eaten directly, cassava can also be processed into ingredients for animal feed, alcohol production, confectionery, sweeteners, glues, plywood, textiles, paper and drugs.  Cassava tubers are easy to save for a rainy day – unlike other crops, they can be left in the ground for up to two years, so harvesting can be delayed until extra food is needed, or to await more optimal processing or marketing conditions.

Despite cassava’s superhero cape, however, there’s no denying that its production is not at its highest when faced with diseases, pests, low-nutrient soils and drought. How plants deal with problems like low nutrients or dry conditions is called ‘stress tolerance’ by scientists. Improving this tolerance – plus resistance to diseases and pests – is the long-term goal for staple crops around the world so that they have higher yields in the face of capricious weather and evolving threats.

In the 1980s, catastrophe struck cassava production in East and Central Africa. A serious outbreak of cassava mosaic disease (CMD) – which first slowly shrivels and yellows cassava leaves, then its roots – lasted for almost 15 years and nearly halved cassava yields in that time. Food shortages led to localised famines in 1993 and 1997.

Other diseases affecting cassava include cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), cassava bacterial blight, cassava anthracnose disease and root rot. CBSD is impossible to detect above ground. Its damage is revealed only after harvest, when it can be seen that the creeping brown lesions have spoilt the white flesh of the tubers, rendering them inedible. Many cassava diseases are transmitted through infected cuttings, affecting the next generation in the next season. Pests that also prey on cassava include the cassava green mite and the variegated grasshopper.

Between the effects of drought, diseases, pests and low soil nutrients, cassava yields vary widely – losses can total between 50 and 100 percent in the worst times.

Photo: IITA

Symptoms of cassava mosaic disease (CMD) and cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), both of which can cripple cassava yields.

GCP takes the first steps to kick start cassava research

The next step forward for cassava appeared to be research towards breeding stronger and more resilient cassava varieties. However, cassava research had long been neglected – scientists say it’s a tricky crop that has garnered far less policy, scientific and monetary interest than the comparatively glamorous crops of maize, rice and wheat.

Watch as Emmanuel tells us more about the complexities and challenges of cassava breeding in the video below (or on YouTube):

 

Cassava is a plant which ‘drags its feet’: creating new plants has to be done from cuttings, which are costly to cut and handle and don’t store well; the plant takes up to two years to grow to maturity; and it is onerous to harvest. Elizabeth Parkes, of Ghana’s Crops Research Institute (CRI) (currently on secondment at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, IITA), says the long wait can be difficult.

This is where the work of scientists funded by the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) came in. Plant breeder and molecular geneticist Emmanuel Okogbenin of NRCRI led the cassava research push launched in 2010. He explains that before GCP, “most national programmes didn’t really have established crop breeding programmes, and didn’t have the manpower” to do the scale of research GCP supported.

Usually, researchers looking to breed crops that are more resistant to drought, diseases and pests would use conventional breeding methods that could take considerable time to deliver any results, especially given cassava’s slow path to maturity. Researchers would be trying to select disease- and pest-resistant plants by looking at how they’re growing in the field, without any way to see the different genetic strengths each plant has.

Photo: M Mitchell/IFPRI

An IITA researcher exams cassava roots in the field.

This is where new ‘molecular breeding’ tools are particularly useful, given that – genetically – cassava presents more of a challenge to breeders than its cereal counterparts. Like many other vegetatively propagated crops, cassava is highly heterozygous, meaning that the counterpart genes on paired chromosomes tend to be different versions, or alleles, rather than the same. This makes it difficult to identify good parent plants for breeding and, after these are crossed, to accurately select progeny with desired traits. Useful – or detrimental – genes can be present in a cassava plant’s genetic code but not reflected in the plant itself, making breeding more unpredictable – and adding extra obstacles to the hunt for the exact genes that code for better varieties of cassava.

Although late to the world of molecular breeding, cassava had not missed its chance. Guided by GCP’s ambitious remit to increase food security through modern crop breeding, GCP-supported scientists have applied and developed molecular breeding methods that shorten the breeding process by identifying which plants have good genes, even before starting on that long cassava growth cycle. Increasing the capacity of local plant breeders to apply these methods has great potential for delivering better varieties to farmers much faster than has traditionally been the case.

Charting cassava’s genetic material was the first step in the researchers’ molecular quest. Part of the challenge for African and South American researchers was to create a genetic map of the cassava genome. Emmanuel describes the strong foundation that these early researchers built for those coming after: “It was significant when the first draft of the cassava genome sequence was released. It enabled rapid progress in cassava research activities and outcomes, both for GCP and cassava researchers worldwide.”

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

Cassava on sale in Kampala, Uganda.

Once cassava’s genome had been mapped, the pace picked up. In just one year, GCP-supported scientists phenotyped and genotyped more than 1000 genetically different cassava plants – that is, measured and collected a large amount of information about both their physical and their genetic traits – searching for ‘superstar’ plants with resistance to more than one crop threat. During this process, scientists compare plant’s physical characteristics with their genetic makeup, looking for correlations that reveal regions of the DNA that seem to contain genes that confer traits they are looking for, such as resistance to a particular disease. Within these, scientists then identify sequences of DNA, or ‘molecular markers’, associated with these valuable genes or genetic regions.

Plant breeders can use this knowledge to apply an approach known as marker-assisted selection, choosing their breeding crosses based directly on which plants contain useful genes, using markers like tags. This makes producing better plant varieties dramatically faster and more efficient. “It narrowed the search at an early stage,” explains Emmanuel, “so we could select only material that displayed markers for the genetic traits we’re looking for. There is no longer any need to ship in tonnes of plant material to Africa.”

Like breadcrumbs leading to a clue, breeders use markers to lead to identifying actual genes (rather than just a site on the genome) that give certain plants desirable characteristics. However, this is a particularly difficult process in cassava. Genes are often obscured, partly due to cassava’s highly heterozygous nature. In trials in Africa, where CMD is widespread, resistant types were hard to spot when challenged with the disease, and reliably resistant parents were hard to pin down.

This meant that two decades of screening cassava varieties from South America – where CMD does not yet exist yet – had identified no CMD-resistance genes. But screening of cassava from Nigeria eventually yielded markers for a CMD-resistance gene – a great success for the international collaborative team led by Martin Fregene, who was based in Colombia at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

This finding was a win for African plant breeders, as it meant they could use molecular breeding to combine the genes producing high-quality and high-yielding cassava from South America with the CMD-resistance gene found in cassava growing in Nigeria.

Chiedozie Egesi, who led the work on biotic trait markers, explains the importance of combining varieties from South America with varieties from Africa: “Because cassava is not native to Africa, those varieties are not as genetically diverse, so we needed to bring genetic diversity from the centre of origin: South America. Coupling resistance genes from African varieties with genes for very high yields from South America was critical.”

Cassava research leaps forward with new varieties to benefit farmers

GCP’s first investment phase into cassava research stimulated a sturdy injection of people, passion, knowledge and funds into the second phase of research. From the genome maps created during the first phase, some of the world’s best geneticists would now apply genomic tools and molecular breeding approaches to increase and accelerate the genetic gains during breeding, combining farmers’ favourite characteristics with strong resistances and tolerances to abiotic and biotic constraints.

In the sprawling, tropical city of Accra on Ghana’s coast, the second phase of the research was officially launched at the end of the wet season in mid-2010. NRCRI’s Emmanuel Okogbenin coordinated product delivery from the projects, but the roles of Principal Investigator for the different projects were shared between another four individuals.

These were breeder and geneticist Chiedozie Egesi (NRCRI, Nigeria), molecular geneticist Morag Ferguson (IITA), genomic scientist Pablo Rabinowicz (University of Maryland, USA) and physiologist and geneticist Alfredo Alves (Brazilian Corporation of Agricultural Research, EMBRAPA). The team shared the vision of enabling farmers to increase cassava production for cash, well beyond subsistence levels.

Photo: A Hoel/World Bank

Garri, or gari, a kind of granular cassava flour used to prepare a range of foods.

If the Accra launch set the stage for the next five years of cassava collaboration, a breakthrough in Nigeria at the end of 2010 set the pace, with the release of Africa’s first cassava variety developed using molecular-breeding techniques. “It was both disease-resistant and highly nutritious – a world-first,” recalls Emmanuel proudly.

Known as UMUCASS33 (or CR41-10), it took its high yield and nutritional value from its South American background, and incorporated Nigerian resistance to devastating CMD attacks thanks to marker-assisted selection. It was also resistant to several other pests and diseases. UMUCASS33 was swiftly followed by a stream of similar disease-busting varieties, released and supplied to farmers.

Never before had cassava research been granted such a boost of recognition, scientific might and organisational will. And never before had there been so much farmer consultation or so many on-farm trials.

“Cassava was an orphan crop and with the help of GCP it is becoming more prominent,” says Chiedozie. “GCP highlighted and enhanced cassava’s role as a major and reliable staple that is important to millions of poor Africans.”

Another important challenge for scientists was to develop a higher-yielding cassava for water-limited environments. The aim was to keep mapping genes for resistance to other diseases and pests and then combine them with favourable genetics that increase yield in drought conditions – no easy feat. Drought’s wicked effect on cassava is to limit the bulk of the tuber, or sometimes to stop the tuber forming altogether. Emmanuel led the work on marker-assisted recurrent selection for drought.

Hear from Chiedozie on the beneficial outcomes of GCP – in terms not only of variety releases but also of attracting further projects, prestige, and enthusiastic young breeders – in the video below (or on YouTube):

Many traits and many varieties

As closely as the cassava teams in Africa were working together, Chiedozie recalls that each country’s environment demanded different cassava characteristics: “We had to select for what worked best in each country, then continue with the research from there. What works fine for East Africa may not be so successful in Nigeria or Ghana”. A core reference set representing most of the diversity of cassava in Africa was improved with the addition of over 564 varieties. Improving the reference set, says project leader Morag Ferguson, “enables the capture of many diverse features of cassava” within a relatively small collection, providing a pathway for more efficient trait and gene discovery.

While mapping of cassava’s genetic makeup carried on, with a focus on drought tolerance, researchers continued to develop a suite of new varieties. They mapped out further genes that provided CMD resistance. In Tanzania, four new varieties were released that combined resistance to both CMD and CBSD – two for the coastal belt and two for the semi-arid areas of central Tanzania. These new varieties had the potential to double the yield of existing commercial varieties. In Ghana too, disease-resistant varieties were being developed.

Photo: IITA

Built-in disease resistance can make a huge difference to the health of cassava crops. This photo shows a cassava variety resistant to African cassava mosaic virus (ACMV), which causes cassava mosaic disease (CMD), growing on the left, alongside a susceptible variety on the right.

Meanwhile in Nigeria, another variety was released in 2012 with very high starch content – an essential factor in good cassava. This is a critical element to breeding any crop, explains Chiedozie: “A variety may be scientifically perfect, based on a researcher’s perspective, but farmers will not grow it if it fails the test in terms of taste, texture, colour or starchiness.”

Geoffrey Mkamilo, cassava research leader at Tanzania’s Agricultural Research Institute, Naliendele, says that farmer awareness and adoption go hand in hand. Once they had the awareness, he says, “the farmers were knocking on our doors for improved varieties. They and NGOs were knocking and calling.”

After groundwork in Ghana and Nigeria to find potential sources of resistance, cassava varieties that are resistant to bacterial blight and green mites were also developed in Tanzania and then tested. By the time GCP closed in December 2014, these varieties were on their way to commercial breeders for farmers to take up.

Scientists seeking to resolve the bigger challenge of drought resistance have achieved significant answers as well. Researchers have been able to map genetic regions that largely account for how well the crops deal with drought.

Developing new varieties takes people, and time The numbers of new cassava varieties so far released through GCP-supported research do not tell the full story.   They certainly do not illustrate the patience and skill required from many different people to get to that end-stage of having a new cassava variety. In the first step, after the plants that seem to have resistance to CMD are identified, those plants are cloned and grown.   The DNA of these plantlets is then exposed to markers specific to valuable resistance genes, or regions of the genome known as quantitative trait loci (QTLs), in order to confirm the presence of the gene or QTL in question. Confirmed plants can be used as parents in breeding crosses after growing out and flowering – although sometimes plants don’t flower, another hurdle for the cassava breeder.  This parental selection using genetic information is a powerful way to make cassava breeding more efficient. Breeders also use markers to identify which of the progeny from each cross have inherited the genes they are interested in. Over several generations of crosses, scientists can combine genes and QTLs for useful traits from different plant lines, to eventually develop a new variety for cultivation.  In cassava, this complex process can take seven years – although it takes even longer using only conventional breeding techniques. While fruition is slow, the research aided by GCP has sown the seeds for many more new varieties and bumper harvests for farmers into the future.

Hunt for ‘super powered’ cassava

The hunt was on for drought-tolerance genes in African cassava plants. The end goal was to find as many different drought-related genes as possible, then to put them all together with the applicable disease and pest resistance genes, to make a ‘super powered’ set of cassava lines. Molecular breeders call this process ‘pyramiding’, and in Ghana, Elizabeth Parkes led these projects.

With the help of Cornell University scientists, the researchers compared plants according to their starch content, how they endured a dry season, how they used sunlight and how they dealt with pests and diseases.

Fourteen gene regions or quantitative trait loci (QTLs) were identified for 10 favourable traits from the genetic material in Ghana, while nine were found for the plants in Nigeria – with two shared between the plants from both Ghana and Nigeria. After that success, the identified genes were used in breeding programmes to develop a new generation of cassava with improved productivity.

Pyramiding is important in effective disease resistance; Chiedozie explains in the video below (or on YouTube):

Photo: HarvestPlus

New cassava varieties rich in pro-vitamin A have a telltale golden hue.

The research has also delivered results in terms of Vitamin A levels in cassava. In 2011, the NRCRI team, together with IITA and HarvestPlus (another CGIAR Challenge Programme focussed on the nutritional enrichment of crops), released three cassava varieties rich in pro-vitamin A, which hold the potential to provide children under five and women of reproductive age with up to 25 percent of their daily vitamin A requirement. Since then, the team has aimed to increase this figure to 50 percent. In 2014, they released three more pro-vitamin A varieties with even higher concentrations of beta-carotene.

Photo: IITA

A field worker at IITA proudly displays a high-yielding, pro-vitamin A-rich cassava variety (right), compared with a traditional variety (left).

The new varieties developed with GCP support are worth their weight in gold, says Chiedozie: “Through these varieties, people’s livelihoods can be improved. The food people grow should be nutritious, resistant and high-yielding enough to allow them to sell some of it and make money for other things in life, such as building a house, getting a motorbike or sending their kids to school.”

Turning from Nigeria to Tanzania, Geoffrey has some remarkable numbers. He says that the national average cassava yield is 10.5 tonnes per hectare. He adds that a new cassava variety, PWANI, developed with GCP support and released in 2012, has the potential to increase yields to 51 tonnes per hectare. And they don’t stop there: the Tanzanian researchers want to produce three million cuttings and directly reach over 2,000 farmers with these new varieties, then scale up further.

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT

A farmer tends her cassava field in northern Tanzania.

Cassava grows up: looking ahead to supporting African families

Emmanuel reflects on how the first release of a new disease-resistant high-yielding cassava variety took fundamental science towards tangible realities for the world’s farmers: “It was a great example of a practical application of marker technology for selecting important new traits, and it bodes well for the future as markers get fully integrated into cassava breeding.”

Emmanuel further believes that GCP’s Cassava Research Initiative has given research communities “a framework for international support from other investors to do research and development in modern breeding using genomic resources.” Evaluations have demonstrated that molecular-assisted breeding can slash between three and five years from the timeline of developing better crops.

Photo: M Perret/UN Photo

Women tend to bear most of the burden of cassava cultivation and preparation. Here a Congolese woman pounds cassava leaves – eaten in many regions in addition to cassava roots – prior to cooking a meal for her family.

But, like cassava’s long growth cycle underground, Emmanuel knows there is still a long road to maturity for cassava as a crop for Africa and in research. “Breeding is just playing with genetics, but when you’re done with that, there is still a lot to do in economics and agronomics,” he says. Revolutionising cassava is about releasing improved varieties carefully buttressed by financial incentives and marketing opportunities.

Rural women in particular stand to benefit from improved varieties – they carry most of the responsibility for producing, processing and marketing cassava. So far, Elizabeth explains: “Most women reported an increase in their household income as a result of the improved cassava, but that is still dependent on extra time spent on cassava-related tasks” – a burden which she aims to diminish.

Elizabeth emphasises that future improvement research has to take a bottom-up approach, first talking to female farmers to ensure that improved crops retain characteristics they already value in addition to the new traits. “Rural families are held together by women, so if you are able to change their lot, you can make a real mark,” she says. Morag echoes this hope: “We are just starting to implement this now in Uganda; it’s a more farmer-centric approach to breeding”. The cassava teams emphasise the importance of supporting women in science too; the Tanzanians teams are aiming for a target of 40 percent women in their training courses.

Meet Elizabeth in the podcast below (or on PodOmatic), and be inspired by her passion when it comed to women in agriculture and in science:

 

This direct impact goes much further than individuals, says Chiedozie. “GCP’s daring has enabled many national programmes to be self-empowered, where new avenues are unfolding for enhanced collaboration at the local, national and regional level. We’re seeing a paradigm shift.” And Chiedozie’s objectives reach in a circle back to his compatriots: “Through GCP, I’ve been able to achieve my aims of using the tools of science and technology to make the lives of poor Africans better by providing them with improved crops.”

GCP has been crucial for developing the capacity of countries to keep doing this level of research, says Chiedozie: “The developing-country programmes were never taken seriously,” he says. “But when the GCP opportunity to change this came up we seized it, and now the developing-country programmes have the boldness, capacity and visibility to do this for themselves.”

Emmanuel says his proudest moment was when GCP was looking for Africans to take up leadership roles. “They felt we could change things around and set a precedent to bring people back to the continent,” he says. “They appreciated our values and the need to install African leaders on the ground in Africa rather than in Europe, Asia or the Americas.”

“If you want to work for the people, you have to walk with the people – that’s an African concept. Then when you work with the people, you really understand what they want. When you speak, they know they can trust you.” GCP trusted and trod where others had not before, Chiedozie says.

Elizabeth agrees: “In the past, the assumption was always that ‘Africa can’t do this.’ Now, people see that when given a chance to get around circumstances – as GCP has done for us through the provision of resources, motivation, encouragement and training – Africa can achieve so much!”

More links

Photo: A Hoel/World Bank

Walking into the future: farmer Felicienne Soton in her cassava field in Benin.

Sep 282015
 

 

Photo: Agência BrasíliaSorghum is already a drought-hardy crop, and is a critical food source across Africa’s harsh, semi-arid regions where water-intensive crops simply cannot survive. Now, as rainfall patterns become increasingly erratic and variable worldwide, scientists warn of the need to improve sorghum’s broad adaptability to drought.

Crop researchers across the world are now on the verge of doing just that. Through support from the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP), advanced breeding methods are enhancing the capacity of African sorghum breeders to deliver more robust varieties that will help struggling farmers and feed millions of poor people across sub-Saharan Africa.

Photo: ICRISAT

A farmer in her sorghum field in Tanzania.

Sorghum at home in Africa

From Sudanese savannah to the Sahara’s desert fringes, sorghum thrives in a diverse range of environments. First domesticated in East Africa some 6000 years ago, it is well adapted to hot, dry climates and low soil fertility, although still depends on receiving some rainfall to grow and is very sensitive to flooding.

In developed countries such as Australia, sorghum is grown almost exclusively to make feed for cattle, pigs and poultry, but in many African countries millions of poor rural people directly depend on the crop in their day-to-day lives.

Photo: ICRISAT

A Malian woman and her child eating sorghum.

In countries like Mali sorghum is an important staple crop. It is eaten in many forms such as couscous or (a kind of thick porridge), it is used for making local beer, and its straw is a vital source of feed for livestock.

While the demand for, and total production of, sorghum has doubled in West Africa in the last 20 years, yields have generally remained low due to a number of causes, from drought and problematic soils, to pests and diseases.

“In Mali, for instance, the average grain yield for traditional varieties of sorghum has been less than one tonne per hectare,” says Eva Weltzein-Rattunde, Principal Scientist for Mali’s sorghum breeding programme at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid-Tropics (ICRISAT).

In a continued quest to integrate ways to increase productivity, GCP launched its Sorghum Research Initiative (RI) in 2010. This aimed to investigate and apply the approaches by which genetics and molecular breeding could be used to improve sorghum yields through better adaptability, particularly in the drylands of West Africa where cropping areas are large and rainfall is becoming increasingly rare.

Kick starting the work was a GCP-funded collaboration between project Principal Investigator Niaba Témé, plant breeder at Mali’s Institut d’économie rurale (IER) and the RI’s Product Delivery Coordinator Jean-François Rami of the Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD; Agricultural Research for Development), France, with additional support from the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture in Switzerland.

The collaboration aimed to develop ways to improve sorghum’s productivity and adaptation in the Sudano-Sahelian zone, starting with Mali in West Africa, and expanding later across the continent to encompass Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger and Sudan.

Photo: F Noy/UN Photo

A farmer harvest sorghum in Sudan.

Sorghum gains from molecular research

Since 2008, with the help of CIRAD and Syngenta, Niaba and his team at IER have been learning how to use molecular markers to develop improved sorghum germplasm through identifying parental lines that are more tolerant and better adapted to the arid and volatile environments of Mali.

The two breeding methods used in the collaboration are known as marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) and backcross nested association mapping (BCNAM).

MARS

Photo: N Palmer/CIAT“MARS identifies regions of the genome that control important traits,” explains Jean-François. “It uses molecular markers to explore more combinations in the plant populations, and thus increases breeding efficiency.”

Syngenta, he explains, became involved through its long experience in implementing MARS in maize.

“Syngenta advised the team on how to conduct MARS and ways we could avoid critical pitfalls,” he says. “They gave us access to using the software they have developed for the analysis of data, and this enabled us to start the programme immediately.”

With the help of the IER team, two bi-parental populations from elite local varieties were developed, targeting two different environments found in sorghum cropping areas in Mali. “We were then able to use molecular markers through MARS to identify and monitor key regions of the genome in consecutive breeding generations,” says Jean-François.

“When we have identified the genome regions on which to focus, we cross the progenies and monitor the resulting new progenies,” he says. “The improved varieties subsequently go to plant breeders in Mali’s national research program, which will later release varieties to farmers.”

Jean-François is pleased with the success of the MARS project so far. “The development of MARS addressed a large range of breeding targets for sorghum in Mali, including adaptation to the environment and grain productivity, as well as grain quality, plant morphology and response to diseases,” he says. “It proved to be efficient in elucidating the complex relationships between the large number of traits that the breeder has to deal with, and translating this into target genetic ideotypes that can be constructed using molecular markers.”

Jean-François says several MARS breeding lines have already shown superior and stable performance in farm testing as compared to current elite lines, and these will be available to breeders in Mali in 2015 to develop new varieties.

Photo: ICRISAT

Eva Weltzein-Rattunde examines sorghum plants with farmers in Mali.

BCNAM

Like MARS, the BCNAM approach shows promise for being able to quickly gain improvements in sorghum yield and adaptability to drought, explains Niaba, who is Principal Investigator of the BCNAM project. BCNAM may be particularly effective, he says, in developing varieties that have the grain quality preferences of Malian farmers, as well as the drought tolerance that has until now been unavailable.

“BCNAM involves using an elite recurrent parent that is already adapted to local drought conditions, then crossing it with several different specific or donor parents to build up larger breeding populations,” he explains. “The benefit of this approach is it can lead to detecting elite varieties much faster.”

Eva and her team at ICRISAT have also been collaborating with researchers at IER and CIRAD on the BCNAM project. The approach, she says, has the potential to halve the time it takes to develop local sorghum varieties with improved yield and adaptability to poor soil fertility conditions.

“We don’t have these types of molecular-breeding resources available in Mali, so it’s really exciting to be a part of this project,” she says. “Overall, we feel the experience is enhancing our capacity here, and that we are closer to delivering more robust sorghum varieties which will help farmers and feed the ever-growing population in West Africa.”

Indeed, during field testing in Mali, BCNAM lines derived from the elite parent variety Grinkan have produced more than twice the yields of Grinkan itself. As they are rolled out in the form of new varieties, the team anticipates that they will have a huge positive impact on farmers’ livelihoods.

Photo: E Weltzein-Rattunde/ICRISAT

Malian sorghum farmers.

Mali and Queensland similar problem, different soil

In Mali and the wider Sahel region within West Africa, cropping conditions are ideal for sorghum. The climate is harsh, with daily temperatures on the dry, sun-scorched lower plains rarely falling below 30°C. With no major river system, the threat of drought is ever-present, and communities are entirely dependent on the 500 millimetres of rain that falls during the July and August wet season.

“All the planting and harvesting is done during the rainy season,” says Niaba. “We have lakes that are fed by the rain, but when these lakes start to dry up farmers rely mostly on the moisture remaining in the soil.”

Over 17 thousand kilometres to the east of Mali, in north-eastern Australia’s dryland cropping region, situated mainly in the state of Queensland, sorghum is the main summer crop, and is considered a good rotational crop as it performs well under heat and moisture stress. The environment here is similar to Mali’s, with extreme drought a big problem.

Average yields for sorghum in Queensland are double those in Mali—around two tonnes per hectare—yet growers still consider them low, directly limited by the crop’s predominantly water-stressed production environment in Australia.

One of the differentiating factors is soil. “Queensland has a much deeper and more fertile soil compared to Mali, where the soil is shallow, with no mulch or organic matter,” says Niaba. “Also, there is no management at the farm level in Mali, so when rain comes, if the soil cannot take it, we lose it.”

Photo: Bart Sedgwick/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Sorghum in Queensland, Australia.

Making sorghum stay green, longer

Another key reason for the difference in yields between Queensland and Mali is that growers in Queensland are sowing a sorghum variety of with a genetic trait that makes it more tolerant to drought.

This trait is called ‘stay-green’, and over the last two decades it has proven valuable in increasing sorghum yields, using less water, in north-eastern Australia and the southern United States.

Stay-green allows sorghum plants to stay alive and maintain green leaves for longer during post-flowering drought—that is, drought that occurs after the plant has flowered. This means the plants can keep growing and produce more grain in drier conditions.

“We’ve found that stay-green can improve yields by up to 30 percent in drought conditions with very little downside during a good year,” says Andrew Borrell from the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia.

“Plant breeders have known about stay-green for some 30 years,” he says. “They’d walk their fields and see that the leaves of certain plants would remain green while others didn’t. They knew it was correlated with high yield under drought conditions, but didn’t know why.”

Stay-green’s potential in Mali

With their almost 20 years working on understanding how stay-green works, Andrew and his colleagues at UQ were invited by GCP in 2012 to take part in the IER/CIRAD collaborative project, to evaluate the potential for introducing stay-green into Mali’s local sorghum varieties and enriching Malian pre-breeding material for the trait.

A pivotal stage in this new alliance was a 12-month visit to Australia by Niaba and his IER colleague Sidi Coulibaly, to work with Andrew and his team to understand how stay-green drought resistance works in tall Malian sorghum varieties.

“African sorghum is very tall and sensitive to variation in day length,” explains Andrew. “We have been looking to investigate if the stay-green mechanism operates in tall African sorghums (around four metres tall) in the same way that it does in short Australian sorghum (one metre tall).”

Having just completed a series of experiments at the end of 2014, the UQ team consider their data as preliminary at this stage. “But it looks like we can get a correlation between stay-green and the size and yield of these Malian lines,” says Andrew. “We think it’s got great potential.”

Photo: S Sridharan/ICRISAT

Sorhum growing in Mozambique.

Sharing knowledge as well as germplasm

Eva Weltzein-Rattunde has played more of an on-the-ground capacity development role in Mali since accepting her position at ICRISAT in 1998. She says “the key challenges have been improving the infrastructure of the national research facilities [in Mali] to do the research as well as increasing the technical training for local agronomists and researchers.”

Photo: ICRISAT

A Malian farmer harvests Sorghum.

A large part of GCP’s focus is building just such capacity among developing country partners to carry out crop research and breeding independently in future, so they can continue developing new varieties with drought adaptation relevant to their own environmental conditions.

A key objective of the IER team’s Australian visit was to receive training in the methods for improving yields and drought resistance in sorghum breeding lines from both Australia and Mali.

“We learnt about association mapping, population genetics and diversity, molecular breeding, crop modelling using climate forecasts, and sorghum physiology, plus a lot more,” says Niaba. This training complemented previous training Niaba and IER researchers had from CIRAD and ICRISAT through the MARS and BCNAM projects.

“We [CIRAD] have a long collaboration in sorghum research in Mali and training young scientists has always been part of our mission,” says Jean-François. “We’ve hosted several IER students here in France and we are always interacting with our colleagues in Mali either over the phone or travelling to Mali to give technical workshops in molecular breeding.”

Photo: Rita Willaert/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Harvested sorghum in Sudan.

Working together to implement MARS in the sorghum breeding program in Mali represented many operational challenges, Jean-François explains. “The approach requires a very tight integration of different and complementary skills, including a strong conventional breeding capacity, accurate breeders’ knowledge, efficient genotyping technologies, and skills for efficient genetic analyses,” he says.

Because of this requirement, he adds, there are very few reported experiences of the successful implementation of MARS.  It is also the reason why these kinds of projects would normally not be undertaken in a developing country like Mali, but for the support of GCP and the dedicated mentorship of Jean-François.

sorghum quote 2“GCP provided the perfect environment to develop the MARS approach,” says Jean-François. “It brought together people with complementary skills, developed the Integrated Breeding Platform (IPB), and provided tools and services to support the programme.”

In addition to developing capacity, Jean-François says one of the great successes of both the MARS and the BCNAM projects was how they brought together Mali’s sorghum research groups working at IER and ICRISAT in a common effort to develop new genetic resources for sorghum breeding.

“This work has strengthened the IER and ICRISAT partnerships around a common resource. The large multiparent populations that have been developed are analysed collectively to decipher the genetic control of important traits for sorghum breeding in Mali,” says Jean-François. “This community development is another major achievement of the Sorghum Research Initiative.” The major challenge, he adds, will be whether this community can be kept together beyond GCP.

Considering the numerous ‘non-GCP’ activities that have already been initiated in Africa as a result of the partnerships forged through GCP research, Jean-François sees a clear indication that these connections will endure well beyond GCP’s time frame.

GCP’s sunset is Mali’s sunrise

Photo: S Sridharan/ICRISAT

Sorghum at sunset in Mozambique.

Among the new activities Jean-François lists are both regional and national projects aimed at building on what has already been achieved through GCP and linking national partners together. These include the West African Agricultural Productivity Program (WAAPP), the West Africa Platform being launched by CIRAD as a continuation of the MARS innovation, and another MARS project in Senegal and Niger through the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sorghum and Millet at Kansas State University.

“These are all activities which will help maintain the networks we’ve built,” Jean-François says. “I think it is very important that these networks of people with common objectives stick together.”

sorghum quoteFor Niaba, GCP provided the initial boost needed for these networks to emerge and thrive. “We had some contacts before, but we didn’t have the funds to really get into a collaboration. This has been made possible by GCP. Now we’re motivated and are making connections with other people on how we can continue working with the material we have developed.”

“I can’t talk enough of the positive stories from GCP,” he adds. “GCP initiated something, and the benefits for me and my country I cannot measure. Right now, GCP has reached its sunset; but for me it is a sunrise, because what we have been left with is so important.”

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Photo: ICRISAT

A sorghum farmer in her field in Tanzania.