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Anne Wangalachi/CIMMYT
works with 14 African countries and has
released more than 40 varieties. Since 2003,
collaborating seed companies have produced
seed for more than 3 million hectares, but 30
million to 40 million more African farmers,
as well as farmers in Asia and Latin America,
need these seed gains.
“Breeding for drought tolerance is both urgent
and effective, but relatively few breeding programs
in the developing world actually do it,” Atlin
said. Delivering drought tolerance requires an
integrated pipeline with clearly defined target
environments, expensive and intensive new
phenotyping tools and extensive multi-location
rainfed testing systems in the target environment.
Inspecting drought-tolerant maize in Tanzania
Accomplishing it will take public consortia,
public-private partnerships and open-source
breeding models.
“There is going to be a revolution in breeding
methods based on low-cost, high-density
genotyping in the next three years,” Atlin
concluded. “It’s already happened in the private
sector. It’s going to happen now in the public
sector. We need to make sure that farmers in
drought-prone environments, the poorest
farmers in rainfed regions of the world, are
among the first to benefit.”
Proceedings of the 2010 Water for Food Conference 41