Participatory Plant Breeding: Approaches to Address Market Failures to Benefit Farmers Under Heterogeneous Environments.

This paper examines participatory plant breeding (PPB) from a socioeconomic perspective. It argues that an important rationale for PPB is to respond to “market failure,” i.e. when markets do not recognize and correctly price traits, varieties, and crops that certain farmers and consumers value, particularly poor farmers under heterogeneous production environments. Market failures are common in the developing world, especially among the poor, and have been found to be central to understand why farmers maintain crop diversity on farm. Under market failure, plant breeding investments cannot be guided by the assumption that farmers’ goal is to maximize profits under environmental conditions that can be controlled in a cost-effective manner. Under market failure and heterogeneous conditions, PPB represents valuable set of approaches to enhance the benefits of scientific plant breeding to farmers, but accomplishing this also presents many technical and socioeconomic challenges that have to be addressed with new tools drawn from biological and social sciences, and a crop diversity perspective is fundamental.