Accelerated Breeding developed a data-driven approach to aligning breeding objectives with the needs of over 100 million farmers and consumers in Africa.
CGIAR breeding partnerships have a profound global impact, contributing to food security, nutrition, climate resilience, and poverty reduction. This impact is now further amplified through key innovations introduced by the CGIAR Research Initiative on Accelerated Breeding, in collaboration with the CGIAR Research Initiative on Market Intelligence. These innovations enable breeders to better understand the needs of farming communities and develop high-impact crop varieties faster. By transforming breeding processes, CGIAR Centers and partners have enhanced effectiveness and responsiveness to agricultural challenges. This is feeding into CGIAR’s extensive partnership network that, between 2022 and 2024 alone, registered varieties that are relevant to 50–100 million low-income people.
Breeding is a powerful tool that helps farmers adapt to climate change, enhance food security, build resilience, and improve income. Improved crop varieties have been the main technology through which CGIAR crop Centers, in collaboration with their national counterparts, have made welfare impacts over the past decades. Approximately 40 percent of all modern varieties in the developing world originate from such collaboration, generating an economic surplus of USD 40 billion annually.
Breeding, however, is also a costly endeavor that needs to be carefully targeted to be successful. This is particularly true in Africa where the needs of farmers, users and growing environments are highly diverse, and a wide range of crops are cultivated; and yet breeding investments often rely on scarce public funds.
How can we provide farmers with better varieties faster? Over the past three years, CGIAR and local breeding communities have tackled this challenge – not just in theory but also in practice.
Take beans, maize or cassava, for example, staple foods for millions of smallholders in Africa. Who needs what type of variety? This seemingly simple question has a complex answer. A variety must be tailored to both how it is grown and how it is consumed. Social and economic factors influence the choices of farmers and consumers, which sometimes vary even within the same village.
Even without solid data, a genuine commitment to finding the right answer can go a long way. In this case, it was the determination to gather diverse stakeholder insights on the future varieties needed by African farmers that made the difference. Teaming up across the breeding community, 16 countries mobilized over 90 expert consultations, involving farmer organizations, extension staff and local processors. They captured these insights systematically, introducing many to the concept of market segments and Target Product Profiles (TPPs).
Market segments and target product profiles define the unique combinations of grower and consumer requirements for a given crop in a particular country or region. They allow comparisons across countries and extraction of similarities. Most importantly, grassroot information, originating from stakeholder consultations, can be combined with indicators such as agroecological zones, hectares cultivated, average yields, the number of people in poverty or undernourished, or the expected climate change impact.
Connecting the dots was key – and that is exactly what the research community achieved. The result? Grassroots feedback suddenly had a much louder voice. Some market segments affected just a few thousand people, while others impacted millions, including some of the world’s poorest communities. At the same time, the TPPs revealed a critical insight: the traits most valued by farmers did not always align with the priorities breeders had been targeting.
With such data-driven insights at hand, also beyond Africa, establishing a locally informed breeding strategy became easier. For example, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture’s (CIAT’s) bean breeding program previously managed four overlapping breeding pipelines, breeding for the same market segments. After mapping market segments, the program streamlined its focus, aligning each pipeline with the most critical traits and limited market segments, while serving a greater number of potential beneficiaries.
Indeed, this feedback suggests that resources can be strategically focused on fewer, more impactful pipelines, ultimately delivering better varieties to farmers faster – turning into reality the very ambition breeders set out to achieve.
Variety development is an iterative process, with each breeding cycle building on the progress of the last. The faster the cycle turns, the greater the potential for improvement. Whether for climate adaptation, high-value market traits, or resistance to emerging crop diseases, understanding which traits communities prioritize in each market segment allows breeders to incorporate them early in the process. This not only accelerates the breeding cycle but also ensures that new varieties are selected based on data that reflects farmers’ needs and real-world conditions.
Likewise, with these datasets in hand, it becomes much easier to pinpoint the benefits of the more than 900 crop varieties registered by CGIAR partners between 2022 and 2024 across 66 countries. Once scaled, these varieties could benefit as many as 50–100 million people who need them most.
It’s actually quite simple. We are running faster in the right direction, a direction we would not have known with such precision if we had not teamed up as a community across crops, countries and institutions to acquire more systematic stakeholder input and make some truly insightful data linkages. Combined with cutting-edge breeding tools, it will make forthcoming crop varieties even more impactful.
Clare Mukankusi, Global Breeding Lead – Common Bean, The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT
A gorilla bean vendor at a market in Bukavu, South Kivu province. Credit: Neil Palmer for HarvestPlus/CIAT