Initiative:

Breeding Resources

What is Crops to End Hunger?

Crops to End Hunger (CtEH) is a CGIAR initiative to accelerate and modernize the development, delivery and widescale use of a steady stream of new crop varieties. These new varieties are developed to meet the food, nutrition and income needs of producers and consumers, respond to market demand and provide resilience to pests, diseases and new environmental challenges arising from climate change.

In 2017-18, a multi-Funder group, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), agreed to launch a modernization program for public plant breeding in lower-income countries. The CtEH initiative will invigorate breeding for the staple crops most important to smallholder farmers and poor consumers.

How does it work?

CtEH supports focused, science-based, well-resourced and long-term CGIAR Programs and investments in modern plant breeding on priority crops, which build on:

  1. CGIAR’s demonstrated impact on food security and poverty reduction through plant breeding;
  2. CGIAR’s comparative advantages in global public goods research on crop breeding and genetics;
  3. CGIAR’s central role and responsibility for the conservation and characterization of the world’s crop biodiversity, which is held in trust by CGIAR Research Centers for the world community.

This initiative aims to accelerate a transition in CGIAR crop breeding to address very different challenges from those faced in the Green Revolution. Twenty CGIAR crops, including cereals, legumes and root crops, have been chosen for this breeding initiative.

One part of this challenge is for breeding to modernize in terms of its objectives beyond pure yield gain – to address the expanding demand for improved varieties to meet biotic and abiotic stresses, such as climate change and environmental degradation, and to include a wider set of nutritional and market traits, as well as traits relevant to both end-users and value chains, which would increase the adoption rate of newly-bred varieties.

The first step towards modernization of breeding programs is to identify the gaps – the areas that need to be addressed or improved. The Breeding Program Assessment Tool (BPAT) has been developed for this purpose. The deployment of BPAT has been administered by the University of Queensland and has now been used to assess the breeding programs across CGIAR Research Centers. Examples of gaps include cross-CGIAR data management tools, access to low-cost genotyping, and sharing high-quality technical advice across programs and with partners.

About the current program

Crops to End Hunger, funded by Germany through GIZ for the period 2023–2025, is upgrading facilities on breeding stations, building staff capacity to use more advanced equipment and breeding techniques, and developing foundational tools required to improve the efficiency and speed of crop breeding cycles. This modernization effort will enable the development of new, improved varieties quicker, making them available to smallholders sooner. There are currently 14 subprojects, following a competitive proposal process. The subprojects range in investment from $578,000 to a 16-station coordinated $15 million subproject. Each subproject is designed by the Centers and stations to meet their needs within the scope of Crops to End Hunger’s objective.

Download the project factsheet.

Benefits of modernizing breeding programs

  • Modernization reduces drudgery in field operations, improves the accessibility of research and technical roles to women, and enhances the quality of breeding activities.
  • Technology for improved phenotyping enables breeders to accurately and quickly measure variety performance and effectively target market in-demand traits.
  • Facility development with irrigation and screenhouses enables year-round breeding operations, leading to more trials and quicker advancement of varieties.
  • Investments in regional coordination will expand the reach of Crops to End Hunger benefits to breeding programs, and thereby the smallholder markets that can be impacted.
  • Continued environmental and financial sustainability is achieved through appropriate maintenance capabilities and restructuring of financial management for cost-recovery.

What will result?

This process of improvement and modernization of CGIAR breeding programs will provide multiple benefits:

  1. For a given level of investment it is anticipated that each breeding program will achieve increased rates of genetic gain and scale of impact – through adoption of farmer-preferred, market-demanded, climate-resilient varieties.
  2. There will be further opportunity to integrate and support allied CGIAR crop programs, and to apply best practices across CGIAR Research Centers.
  3. A stronger partnership and closer cooperation with national breeding programs, including national research institutes, universities and small and medium-sized enterprises in the private sector in low-income countries, as well as multilateral seed companies and advanced research institutes.
  4. Adopting standardized ways of reporting needs, opportunities and progress will provide Funders with a transparent view of where and how they are getting high rates of return for their investment.

With this new initiative, CGIAR will enhance its contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals towards 2030 through high-priority staple crops tailored for the specific needs of targeted regions and their populations.

Implementation dashboards

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