CGIAR crop breeding in 2025: delivering under pressure

CGIAR crop breeding in 2025: delivering under pressure

By Makram Geha, CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow Science Program Director and Peter Coaldrake, former Acting Director

Improving crops has never been more relevant. In Africa, over 300 million people suffer from hunger, while three-quarters of the countries are experiencing food price inflation, putting healthy diets out of reach. CGIAR’s breeding partnerships have the potential to reduce chronic hunger by up to 29% and generate USD 182 billion in economic benefits. 

At the same time, the reality we operate in is changing. Funding is tighter while expectations are rising. Donors are asking for stronger focus on climate adaptation, nutrition, and gender equity, as well as clear evidence of accountability and impact. 

So how did CGIAR crop improvement Science Program, Breeding for Tomorrow, respond to this reality in 2025, and what have we accomplished?

Turning funding pressure into innovation pressure

Breeding for Tomorrow, as part of CGIAR’s 2025–2030 Research Portfolio, is not a reinvention. It builds on more than 60 years of CGIAR leadership in crop improvement, our founding mission. What has changed is how we prioritize this work. 

In 2025, we made deliberate, sometimes difficult choices. We undertook a strategic prioritization of crops and countries, aligning breeding investments more closely with national priorities, market demand, and funder expectations. With limited resources, this meant focusing on the breeding pipelines with the greatest potential for impact. 

This approach aligned with CGIAR’s broader prioritization process, which identified the countries where our portfolio can achieve the strongest outcomes. Breeding for Tomorrow then prioritized crop market segments within those countries and aligned breeding pipelines with the prioritized country-level crop market segments.  

Because market segments often span multiple countries, including fragile and conflict-affected settings, potential spillover effects across borders were also considered in the prioritization decisions.

Strengthening accountability across the system

Impact requires accountability. Over the past year, we strengthened the foundations that allow CGIAR breeding to deliver results transparently and credibly. 

Across our breeding Centers, we are harmonizing data systems, including our internal breeding portal, and CGIAR-maintained breeding data management platform and analytics pipeline, to ensure that decisions are based on standardized and centralized data. 

At the same time, breeding investments are now fully aligned with CGIAR’s funding allocation processes. Funding is linked to public indicators, with a clear accountability chain from research programs to their components, objectives and relevant Centers. 

To bring this together, we launched the Harmonized Crop Report, an integrated crop strategy tool that brings together data from across all breeding programs, linking crop strategies, investments, target markets, and expected benefits. The HCR enables breeding teams to make data-driven decisions, identify strengths and gaps, measure progress, update strategies, and present compelling evidence for fundraising and reporting.

Working as part of a cohesive CGIAR portfolio

Breeding for Tomorrow does not operate in isolation. Our impact depends on close collaboration with the other Science Programs and Accelerators that make up CGIAR.  

For example, Sustainable Farming works alongside us to pair improved crops with climate-smart, resource-efficient agronomic practices maximizing productivity while reducing water and fertilizer use. Climate Action supports our work by modelling the impacts of climate change, while Better Diets and Nutrition designs food-system solutions that address barriers to healthy and sustainable diets, guiding us on biofortification strategies, for instance. Scaling for Impact complements our work by developing and testing scaling strategies that can be applied after varietal release. 

Together, these inputs help us define, develop, and deliver the ideal products of tomorrow for farmers and consumers. 

We also listen and adapt. In response to donor priorities, Breeding for Tomorrow and the Gates Foundation are co-designing a farmer-centered approach to on-farm verification trials. This methodology will strengthen evidence before variety release and scale in 2026.

What this means in practice

Across Breeding for Tomorrow’s Areas of Work, these strategic shifts are already delivering tangible results.* 

Market Intelligence made progress in future-proofing Breeding for Tomorrow portfolio by projecting the current market segments to the future (2030-2050) and integrating foresight indicators of climate change, land use change and nutrition in the Global Market Intelligence Platform (GloMIP). 

The Area of Work integrated with Better Diets and Nutrition to build impactful pipeline investment cases for biofortified and health-enhancing staples. For example, it examined how consumers balance low-glycemic rice’s health benefits with sensory quality to help design improved varieties that satisfy consumer preferences while reducing risks of type 2 diabetes. 

Accelerated Breeding continues to support breeding teams in refining and improving their breeding strategies, processes and methods. The Area of Work defined 2025 breeding goals, a set of endorsed “must-have achievements” that every CGIAR crop breeding team is expected to meet to ensure effectiveness. The team then visited breeding programs worldwide, conducted assessments, and helped deliver tangible genetic gains. Examples include reducing barley line re-cycling times from 4 to 2 years; releasing four new disease-resistant cassava varieties in the DRC; validating zinc-biofortified rice lines with 15–40% higher zinc content; and introducing highland cooking bananas in East Africa with 245% yield increases, etc. 

Breeding Resources keeps fostering data harmonization and integration across Centers and partners, while reducing the cost of shared tools and services. Existing and new services – such as drone-based image analysis and XRF-based nutritional analysis -feed data directly into shared platforms like EBS and Bioflow. This helps breeding teams improve data accuracy and quality, shorten breeding cycles, and increase efficiency, achieving more with the same, or fewer, resources through greater standardization and interoperability. 

Inclusive Delivery supported seed system prioritization by refining African Seed Sector Performance Index data (2020–2024) to guide Breeding for Tomorrow's 2025 country prioritization and began adapting the approach for Asia, strengthening investment decisions and measuring seed-system change. 

The Area of Work strengthens variety impact tracking by analyzing crop-specific varietal ages, turnover, and concentration to create a harmonized protocol for tracking whether released varieties reach farmers and deliver real-world impact. 

It also identified leading farmer-preferred varieties in priority market segments to inform product design and ensure new varieties meet or exceed farmers’ expectations. 

ENABLE continues to deepen partnerships by strengthening capacity sharing, aligning breeding priorities with national programs, and supporting structured product planning through partner programs’ assessments and Product Design Team (PDT) meetings. 

The Area of Work developed and piloted a standardized product advancement process across three regional breeding networks; it designed and tested a new costing approach to improve transparency and investment planning; supported the Africa Dryland Crops Improvement Network (ADCIN) in finalizing its network membership agreement; delivered global webinars to update the breeding community on new licensing and costing approaches; and started expanding activities to Southeast Asia for the first time, with initial partner program assessments and PDT meetings conducted in the Philippines and Vietnam. 

A final word

We are operating through a period of uncertainty. Budgetary constraints are very real, and the challenges ahead are important. But together, we are turning these difficulties into progress by focusing on clarity, priorities with the greatest impact, accountability, and collaboration. 

Breeding for Tomorrow Leadership would like to thank all the teams at CGIAR Breeding Centers, Areas of Work, and our many partners around the world. Thank you for your commitment, your efforts, and your hard work during these challenging times. Thank you for your continued support; the work we do is essential for farmers in the years to come. 

*** 

This work contributes to CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow Science Program.

*The examples highlighted reflect progress to date but they are not exhaustive and will be complemented by additional outcomes as activities conclude and annual reporting is finalized.