Innovations
Working with smallholders to understand their needs and build on their knowledge, CIMMYT brings the right seeds and inputs to local markets, raises awareness of more productive cropping practices, and works to bring local mechanization and irrigation services based on conservation agriculture practices. CIMMYT helps scale up farmers’ own innovations, and embraces remote sensing, mobile phones and other information technology. These interventions are gender-inclusive, to ensure equitable impacts for all.
Plant breeding innovations
Climate adaptation and mitigation
Over millennia, natural selection and humans have systematically adapted the plant species that provide food and other vital products, changing their physical and genetic makeup for enhanced productivity, nutrition and resilience. Plant breeders apply science to continue improving crop varieties, making them more productive and better adapted to climate extremes, insects, drought and diseases.
New CIMMYT maize hybrids available from Eastern Africa Breeding Program
Innovations
CIMMYT is offering a new set of improved maize hybrids to partners, to scale up production for farmers in the region.
New publications: Genome-wide breeding to curtail wheat blast
Environmental health and biodiversity
Researchers evaluate the use of genomic selection in wheat breeding against deadly fungal disease.
Climate change slows wheat breeding progress for yield and wide adaptation, new study finds
Climate adaptation and mitigation
Increasingly unpredictable weather poses challenges for breeding widely-adapted wheat lines, but stress tolerance breeding is boosting wheat’s hardiness under rising temperatures.
New grafting technique could combat the disease threatening Cavendish bananas
Innovations
Scientists find novel way to combine two species of grass-like plants including banana, rice and wheat, that allows disease resistance and other beneficial characteristics to be added to the plants.
State-of-the-art maize doubled haploid facility inaugurated in India
Innovations
The facility will offer maize doubled haploid production services to public and private sector partners in South Asia.
2021 GAP Report endorses CIMMYT’s integrated agri-food systems methodology
Climate adaptation and mitigation
CIMMYT’s programs in Colombia and Mexico showcased as examples of successful public–private partnerships for sustainable agriculture, economic growth and improved nutrition.
Bringing wild wheat’s untapped diversity into elite lines
Environmental health and biodiversity
Researchers hypothesized that many wild wheat accessions in genebanks feature useful traits that can help diversify breeding programs.
CIMMYT scientists recognized for impact
Capacity development
Researchers listed among world’s most influential scholars, based on citations.
Less water for better crops
Innovations
Researchers explore how coupling automation with drip irrigation can enhance water use efficiency and productivity, especially in South Asia’s cereal-based systems.
Singh receives lifetime award for wheat breeding successes
Environmental health and biodiversity
Source: World Grain (11 Nov 2021)
Ravi Singh, head of global wheat improvement at CIMMYT, received the 2021 Borlaug Global Rust Initiative Lifetime Achievement Award.
A new vision of making profits drives mechanization service providers in Zimbabwe
Innovations
Service providers offering mechanized services in Masvingo District, southern Zimbabwe realize quick gains in early months of the pilot.
World-class laboratories and research fields to the service of Mexico and the world
Innovations
Representatives of the Carlos Slim Foundation and Mexico’s National Agriculture Council (CNA) agree on the importance of collaboration between the public and private sectors, civil society and research organizations like CIMMYT.
Ravi Singh earns Lifetime Achievement award from BGRI
Environmental health and biodiversity
Renowned CIMMYT plant breeder recognized for elite wheat varieties that reduced the risk of a global pandemic and now feed hundreds of millions of people around the world.
