Overview
The "Demand-Led Plant Breeding" project aims to contribute to the transformation of African agriculture by enabling small scale farmers to participate in local and regional markets, by increasing the availability and adoption of high performing plant varieties that meet market demands. Impactful plant breeding is a product development activity.
African plant breeders and their teams will be supported in their evolution towards "The Business of Plant Breeding". The intended research outcome is that plant breeders in Africa will adopt more demand-led approaches to plant breeding to respond to the preferences of farmers, consumers, and others along the value chain. The demand led breeding (DLB) project is supported by an Alliance for Food Security, formed in 2014 by ACIAR and the Crawford Fund Australia, and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA), Switzerland. The project is managed by the University of Queensland, on behalf of its three co-sponsors and the partners in Africa.
News on project activities and access to educational and technical resource materials can be found on the project website: demandledbreeding.org
Expected outcomes
- To enable plant breeders to develop more high performing varieties that meet customer requirements and market demand.
- To build capacity within plant breeding programs on demand-led plant variety design.
- To provide evidence to support the development of new policies investments in plant breeding that will generate more high performing varieties to meet emerging market demands, with emphasis on Africa.
