NARS partners in Asia pick up advanced groundnut breeding lines with market traits for their national trials

Advanced breeding lines which included high-oleic groundnut and those with market-preferred kernel size, shape and color were selected for further trials by National Agricultural Research System (NARS) partners from Bangladesh, Myanmar, India, Laos PDR and Vietnam.

The activity was part of the Groundnut Network Group-Asia (GNG-A) workshop which served as a knowledge-sharing platform for NARS partners with industry partners from the food processing and seed sectors.

Progress on developing ‘Product Profiles’

GNG-A is a multi-stakeholder network engagement for Groundnut Product Profile design, development, testing, advancement and delivery. The concept of designing groundnut ‘Product Profiles’ was introduced at the last GNG-A workshop in 2018 by Dr George Kotch from the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform (EiB) team. Value chain studies on the needs of current and emerging markets were required to guide the design; hence studies¹ were conducted in Gujarat-India and Myanmar for groundnut. Guided by the studies, NARS designed the Product Profiles which are dynamic and are revised when needed, most often based on insights from panel discussions such as the one held at the workshop.