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The participation to this large project is through Work Package number 4, which involve collaborative activities between several labs in India and Europe. Below are the respective Europe and India packages

Millet plays different roles in food security. It remains a staple of millions among the poorest in both India and Africa. At the same time, its growing value in the food and feed industry offers opportunities for income generation. This economic value is evident in the growth in production in both regions, even if acreage has declined. While among the staples most adapted to harsh environments, productivity gains from increased and broad stress tolerance will be significant.

The drier parts of the world are where development challenges are the greatest and market failure is most acute, and few if any of these are more urgent than the ‘Sahel’ region of Africa. Its unusual tolerance of low inputs, especially water, make the cereal crop sorghum essential to human populations in the Sahel, where episodic drought is a fact of life. Despite its importance, sorghum improvement has lagged that of maize, wheat and rice, largely if not entirely due to greater effort invested in the ‘Big Three’.

Chickpea is the world’s second most important pulse legume, with particular importance in the semi-arid tropics of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Like the majority of cultivated legumes, chickpea has exceedingly narrow genetic and phenotypic diversity. This has consequences for breeding of climate-resilient crop varieties, because much of the historical phenotypic plasticity necessary to tolerate environmental extremes has been lost through domestication.