Crop Breeding

The Crop Breeding Cluster is dedicated to tackling pressing challenges such as hunger, poverty, malnutrition, environmental degradation, and climate change. At the heart of our efforts lies an innovative breeding program that focuses on enhancing crop resilience, nutrition, and sustainability. Crop breeding is key to this vision — sustainably increasing production on less land relies on new genetics. Breeders are leveraging new and time-tested technologies and approaches to accelerate the development of climate-smart, resource-friendly, nutritious and high-yielding varieties — vital to feeding a global population and enhancing the livelihoods of farming communities. With agriculture and food production contributing up to 29% of total GHG emissions, and land expansion often only possible in biodiversity hotspots, a new paradigm for meeting needs is required. Climate-smart agriculture, including climate-smart varieties, is one element of the needed paradigm shift to sustainable agriculture within a greener and the more food-secure planet. Climate-smart crop varieties can help farmers sustainability mitigate abiotic crop stressors — those imposed on plants by their environment — while still contributing to more and better food supplies.