Building a network to attract new members and investors in mungbean research in southeast Asia and Australia.

Improving smallholder incomes in southern Bangladesh through productivity and profitability of dry-season cropping on non-saline land and, with improved saline-tolerant pulses and wheat, on saline land.

This project aimed to make water use more efficient and to increase wheat yield in the rain-fed and minimally irrigated zones of India and Australia. The researchers were searching for new methods, germplasm and molecular markers for efficient water use that could be used to improve wheat in both countries. The project focused on two important research areas:

This project aimed to develop improved wheat varieties for India and Australia using molecular technologies. Modern wheat breeding is changing rapidly. Scientists can use molecular markers linked to important traits, DNA fingerprinting technologies, integrated breeding strategies, and data management to make wheat breeding more efficient and effective.

This project aimed to modernise the Ethiopian sorghum breeding program at the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR). Sorghum is the world's fifth most important cereal and a staple food crop of millions in the semi-arid tropics. It is crucially important to food security in Africa as it is grown in the drier and resource-poor areas, where its capacity to better tolerate drought, high temperature, and low fertility make it a preferred crop to maize.

Oil palm is economically the most important crop in both Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. This project is improving the livelihoods of smallholders and communities dependent on oil palm, through greater productivity and production sustainability. 

This project aimed to introduce new, high-yielding, drought-tolerant and disease-resistant varieties of wheat and maize to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has one of the highest per capita wheat consumptions in the world but does not produce enough to meet domestic demands. Afghan wheat research lacks a home-grown wheat breeding programme, and research in other disciplines also needs support to develop and disseminate useful implementable technologies.

Seeds of Life (SoL) is a program within the Timor-Leste Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) funded jointly by the Australian and Timorese Governments. SoL evolved from the recognition that a lack of good food crop varieties in Timor-Leste was constraining crop production and impinging on national food security. SoL aims to improve food security through increased productivity of major food crops.

​Legume production in Bangladesh has fallen significantly short of consumer demand becoming a major concern to national food security. Increasing the cropping intensity by replacing fallow with a legume between rice-rice cropping systems in western Bangladesh offered the prospect of increased legume production and improved farm household livelihoods. The project aimed to provide the research to reinvigorate pulse production in western Bangladesh through lentil and pea during rabi season (i.e. November to February) and mungbean during kharif 1 season (i.e. March to June).

In Bangladesh the rise in demand for maize - as human food and from the poultry and fish industries - has led to a trend away from traditional rice-rice and rice-wheat cropping systems and toward rice-maize systems. But actual farm yields of rice and maize fall below their potential. This project identifed, tested and promoted key interventions in four districts that could lead to sustainable cropping intensification - resulting in double- and/or triple-cropping rice-maize systems. Specific objectives to improve these systems were:

This project aimed to increase the yield and resilience of farmers' dry season sorghum crop. In south-west India many farmers grow sorghum during the post-rainy (dry) season, either for subsistence on the grain, but also to sell grain for human consumption or stover residue for cattle feed in markets. Stover has become an important part of the sorghum value chain, and crop improvement now targets dual purpose types. Water limits grain and stover yield. Plants with the stay-green (SG) trait can use soil water later in the dry season.

Ug99 is a strain of stem rust first identified in Uganda in 1998 and confirmed in 1999. It attacks many commercial cultivars of wheat by overcoming important resistance genes, and there is evidence of its continued rapid evolution. Thus 50 million hectares - potentially 25% of the world's wheat - is at risk, with more than 90% of cultivars deemed susceptible along the predicted spore migration route.

This project aimed to extend dryland wheat breeding success to north-western China by working with leading breeding programs for dryland wheats in north-western China. In both north-western China and Australia, conservation farming practices are being promoted as an important component of more-sustainable farming systems. CSIRO Plant Industry has been achieving considerable breeding success for dryland wheat in Australia by targeting specific traits that make more effective use of available water.