Focus: Improving crops and livestock for current and emerging biophysical constraints and markets, adapted to the agro-ecologies of dry areas and future climates. The crop and livestock breeding programs at ICARDA have the overall objective of developing resilient plant and animal resources that meet current and future challenges faced by non-tropical dry areas. Working through partners and networks, we will apply conventional and molecular breeding in order to develop highly-adapted crops and livestock with resistance or tolerance to major biotic and abiotic constraints and current and future climates. SRP2 will build upon the outputs of SRP1, which involves introgressing new alleles from landraces and wild relatives into elite germplasm. Mainstreaming nutritional quality (including biofortification) in current breeding programs and widening the genetic base will be pursued as major breeding strategies to realize the full potential of yield, yield stability, quality, and nutrition. Because water scarcity is a key driver of yield instability in non-tropical dry areas, ICARDA will identify genotypes with better water-use efficiency to minimize yield losses during drought and maximize yield gains during good seasons. ICARDA will play an important role in the surveillance, identification, and characterization of wheat rust diseases, in collaboration with CIMMYT and in partnership with other stakeholders. Collaboration with the Regional Cereal Rust Research Center (RCRRC) and biocontainment facility in Izmir, Turkey, a state-of- the-art research facility for the identification of rusts using the latest advances in molecular biology, will be core to this work. The focus of the Research Center will be to improve regional cooperation for cereal rust in general, and the wheat stripe rust monitoring systems in particular, and to strengthen collaboration and capacity development on crop breeding for durable rust resistance and resistance management. Delivering on our agreement with CIMMYT to develop a One Global Wheat Program, and engaging ARIs, will be promoted in order to ensure that the breeding programs use cutting-edge technologies with increased efficiencies.
ICARDA Strategic Plan 2017 - 2026: https://dx.doi.org/20.500.11766/8237