Delivering Higher Rates of Genetic Gain to Farmers in the Developing World through Genomics-Assisted Breeding.

Most smallholder farmers in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are growing varieties that are between 20 and 50 years old. Genetic gains delivered by breeding programs serving these regions are well under 1% annually. Massive investments in crop genomics have had limited impact on the development of improved cultivars of staple crops for the world’s poorest smallholder farmers. Marker-assisted and genomic selection have the potential to accelerate genetic gains, but breeding pipelines must be redesigned to exploit these technologies. The public sector breeding programs that develop most staple crop varieties in these regions well need much greater levels of technical support to effectively apply genomics tools in cultivar development. The international public crop improvement system must adopt and adapt many of the tools and approaches of multinational seed companies to the problem of raising the rate of genetic gain delivered to smallholders, substantially increasing population sizes, reducing line development costs, and increasing phenotyping, genotyping, and information management capacity. Breeders need technical and organizational assistance to engage with commercial genotyping and bioinformatics services if genomic information is to be used in forward breeding. Effective programs also need clear and formal product profiles, institutionally managed advancement systems, and new approaches to dissemination wherein the breeding organization takes full responsibility for making the case for replacing currently grown varieties with new products. Most public breeding programs will require extensive redesign to deliver the gains needed by African and South Asian farmers. The CGIAR will support this redesign through the newly-established Excellence in Breeding Platform.