Testing Farmers Evolutionary Plant Breeding Strategies for Coping with Climate Change

The programme "Use of genetic diversity and evolutionary plant breeding for enhanced farmer resilience to climate change, sustainable crop productivity and nutrition under rainfed conditions" is a $5.6 million evolutionary plant breeding programme, funded by an IFAD grant of $3.5 million and national co-funding of $2.1 million. It will pioneer a productive alternative in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East: decentralized breeding to produce and exploit evolutionary crop populations (EP), linked to activities that ensure the availability, multiplication and distribution of quality EP seeds, and a policy environment to support it.