Why CGIAR crop breeding is shifting focus to breakthrough products

By Peter Coaldrake, CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow’s Interim Director and Christian Werner, Quantitative Geneticist for Accelerated Breeding 

For over five decades, CGIAR has made major contributions to crop improvement, developing thousands of improved varieties that have helped safeguard food security across the Global South. But the challenges ahead are rising, as is the bar for success in public plant breeding. Today, delivering improved varieties means more than releasing them. It means ensuring they are adopted at scale by farmers, and capable of truly enhancing livelihoods. 

That’s why CGIAR is embracing a new level of ambition in breeding, by focusing on breakthrough products. 

What are breakthrough products?

Together with the Gates Foundation, CGIAR is operating a shift toward breakthrough products: varieties that deliver clear, measurable improvements, and are widely adopted by farmers over currently grown varieties. Breakthrough products are backed by strong market demand and high-quality evidence and replace one or more widely grown varieties. They represent a shift in how breeding success is defined: no longer by the number of varieties released and their performance on managed trial sites, but by the real-world impact of those varieties, year after year, in farmers’ fields.  

To quality as breakthrough products, varieties must meet three criteria.  

First, they must have the potential to measurably impact national or regional production and productivity. 

Second, they must be clearly differentiated, targeting a 25 to 30% improvement in productivity and/or value compared to the varieties they are replacing. This improvement can come through enhanced traits such as climate resilience and adaptation, pest and disease resistance, end-use and quality traits or agronomic traits.  

Finally, breakthrough products must be adoption-ready with adequate off-take potential to reach farmers at scale. This means they must be farmer-focused, directly addressing farmers’ needs and preferences across major market segments. Ultimately, meeting farmers’ needs is what allows these varieties to “break through the adoption barrier”. 

Sorting breakthrough products with concepts

Breakthrough products can be categorised, providing a high-level organizational framework for grouping target products with similar profiles into “concepts”. Take the CGIAR maize breeding program, for example. Its breakthrough product concept include: 

• Maize, Africa – Extra Early to Early 3-way hybrids that are drought and heat tolerant with native Striga resistance and fall armyworm (FAW) tolerance 
• Maize, West Africa – Mid to Late 3-way hybrids with the same disease and essential pest resistance traits 
• Maize, West Africa – Mid to Late SPTA & BT hybrids with the same essential disease and pest traits as the products described above. 

The concepts represent generalized groupings of related varieties but are not a substitute for target product profiles or clearly defined market segments. Each breakthrough product must still be tailored to meet the unique requirements of a specific sub-region – just as a 2-door convertible, a 4-door sedan, or a pickup must meet different safety, fuel, or design standards depending on the country where it is sold. 

In short, product categories provide a useful organizing framework, but delivering local impact still depends on the development of varieties aligned with distinct market needs, defined through TPPs, localized breeding targets, and able to reach scale and make a difference on the ground. 

Why this shift matters

Historically, new varieties were often released based on meeting minimum national standards or marginal improvements in one or a few essential traits. However, experience has shown that these incremental improvements did not always translate into large-scale farmer adoption or improved livelihoods. 

Today’s landscape demands more. The stakes are higher, and the resources must be used more efficiently. 

Breeding must be sharply focused on the crops, market segments, and essential traits that promise the greatest return on investment for food systems and small-scale farmers. This requires both innovation and discipline: streamlined pipelines, clear Target Product Profiles, and rigorous performance validation. Breakthrough products are how we get there. 

Strategy without compromise: product design and population improvement

The focus on breakthrough products does not imply turning away from the foundations of breeding, including product design, population improvement and trait introgression. On the contrary, strategically integrating those activities is more important than ever. To deliver truly transformational varieties, breeders must continue investing in advanced genotyping and phenotyping tools, making strategic crosses, and strengthening early- and late-stage testing under farmers’ field conditions. And these efforts must now be clearly linked to the goal of delivering a specific, high-performing variety to a specific market. 

For the first time in our history, CGIAR’s entire breeding portfolio has been comprehensively captured and documented. Supported by Breeding for Tomorrow Science Program and its Accelerated Breeding Areas of Work, CGIAR breeding programs are aligning their efforts toward the largest, most promising market segments. 

The logic is simple: if varieties serve large market segments, it means that replacing these varieties with better-performing ones will offer outsized benefits in terms of yield, resilience and income. 

This is not a departure from science-led breeding. It’s a recalibration to ensure the farmers and end-users remain at the center of everything we do. 

A commitment to measurable outcomes

Breakthrough products are built around measurable expectations: 

• Their performance must be tracked through robust systems, including multi-site, on-farm trials. 
• They must be tested and validated under realistic conditions in the field within five years; 
• They must replace dominant varieties 5 to 10 years, depending on the crop; 
• They must show documented improvements in on-farm productivity or profitability; 

This results-driven approach ensures that breeding outputs are not just technically superior, but impactful, and adopted where they matter most. 

Moving forward together

The path to breakthrough products requires strong collaboration across CGIAR Centers, national research programs, seed systems actors, and private-sector partners.  

To succeed, CGIAR is pursuing a clear strategy that promotes earlier and deeper involvement of national research programs in every stage of the process.  

An increasing share of our budget will also be dedicated to augmenting national research programs’ role in the breeding network and the development and deployment of breakthrough products.  

By aligning behind this shared vision, CGIAR breeding programs and national partners will be well-positioned to deliver the next generation of improved crops, designed for real-world conditions, adopted at scale and delivering impact where it matters most: in the hands of farmers. 

Resources:

• Webinar: Population improvement: the driving force behind breakthrough products! 
• Webinar: Breeding for where it matters: increasing genetic gains in the Target Population of Environments (TPE) 

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Main image: Felistus Chipungu (left), orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) breeder and scientist with the International Potato Center. Photo by C. de Bode/CGIAR. Written with Julie Puech. This work contributes to CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow (B4T) Science Program.