Breeding future-ready crops: Incorporating key traits in breeding programs via product profiles

Developing crop varieties that meet the needs of all stakeholders, with farmers, value chain actors and end-use consumers having specific needs for attributes of breeds or varieties, is a challenging task. Defining, communicating and incorporating desirable traits into breeding programs requires focused interaction between different disciplines and stakeholder groups in a process known as product profile development. 

With this in mind, partners of the AVISA project (https://www.avisaproject.org/) got together to brainstorm about market demands, climate change adaptation and nutrition needs, so that these could be brought together most efficiently in product profiles for the project target crops – sorghum, millet, pigeonpea, chickpea and groundnut. They also learnt to use tools and techniques to enable effective product profiles to be developed.