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Collaboration
with the European Commission
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| During the EC-funded workshop on participatory plant breeding, held at ICARDA, Dr B. Sakr, Plant Breeder, INRA, Morocco, explains the benefits of PPB to ICARDA Management and other workshop participants. |
The EC provides funding for the CGIAR through the "Food Security and Food Aid" program of the EuropeAid Cooperation Office. This global program was developed "to implement an innovative food security policy to bring assistance to developing countries facing food deficit problems—temporary and mostly structural—linked to poverty."
Since ICARDA's inception in 1977, the European Commission has committed approximately US$ 21 million for the Center’s research programs. The research has helped resource-poor farmers by improving crop production in the Nile Valley and Red Sea and highland areas of the Mediterranean region through the use of disease-resistant, and drought- and cold-tolerant varieties of food and feed legumes, and cereals in more appropriate crop sequences.
More recently, the EC has provided substantial funding in support of ICARDA's germplasm conservation and enhancement research. Some examples of this work include the Mapping Adaptation of Barley to Drought Environments (MABDE) project which aims to understand the genetic and physiological processes that contributed to barley domestication and adaptation to drought, as well as intensive barley breeding conducted in the last century. The project, which began in 2003, will continue until 2005 and will use contemporary genetics and plant physiology tools to formulate a germplasm improvement strategy for water-use efficiency for barley under rainfed Mediterranean environments.
The EC also supports two projects on improving wheat productivity and water-use efficiency. The Improving Durum Wheat for Water-Use Efficiency and Yield Stability through Physiological and Molecular Markers (IDuWUE) project runs from 2003 to 2005 and aims to improve the water-use efficiency and nitrogen-use efficiency in durum wheat production systems in Mediterranean countries. Another project called Exploiting the Wheat Genome to Optimize Water Use in Mediterranean Ecosystems (TRITIMED) will identify crop traits and genetic ideotypes in wheat that impart higher and more stable yields under Mediterranean drought conditions. The project uses an integrated approach combining genomics, quantitative genetics and crop physiology to evaluate a range of different genotypes of durum and bread wheat for water-use efficiency, integrative morpho-physiological traits, and yield and quality under Mediterranean field conditions.
As part of the EC-funded research activities, scientists from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia attended a consultative workshop on Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB) held at ICARDA headquarters on 2-4 April 2005. The workshop was held within the framework of a project to create a network of scientists in Mediterranean countries committed to an innovative way of organizing plant breeding programs to produce diverse, better adapted germplasm, and aligned with the needs of rural communities; formulate plans and strategies on how to implement PPB in important crops; and widely disseminate methodologies and strategies.
The participants developed an action plan to introduce PPB in formal university courses, and recommended a series of follow-up workshops in each of the six countries involved in order to involve a larger number of scientists to facilitate the institutionalization of PPB and a regional project of PPB breeding which will cover different crops and different methodologies.
In addition to the EC, ICARDA receives support from member countries of the European Union.
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