Yield improvement of important African food crops will get a boost with the launch of the Modern Breeding Project, to be implemented by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in collaboration with Bayer. The research will focus on ensuring...

Rice is a food crop of global importance, cultivated in diverse agro-climatic zones of the world. However, in the process of domestication, many beneficial alleles have been eroded from the gene pool of the rice cultivated globally and eventually has...

For more than 8000 years in an area that now includes Turkey and Afghanistan hundreds of local varieties — or landraces— evolved to be uniquely adapted to their environment and ideally suited for local production and consumption. Over the years,...

This study performed a descriptive analysis of 202 papers and showed that small-scale producers adopted climate-resilient crops and varieties to cope with abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, flooding and salinity. The most important determinants of adoption of climate-resilient crops...

Over the last two decades, 75% of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost. Genetic diversity is the basis of all crop improvement. Crop varieties, as an integral part of genetic diversity, are the result of human selection...