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The record grain outputs of India’s Green Revolution in the 1970’s established India as one of the world’s largest agricultural producers, transforming the country from a starving nation to a food exporter, creating jobs and boosting the economy. However, behind this extraordinary achievement were varying levels of success across different Indian regions, and overuse of water, fertilisers, pesticides and other chemicals on an unsustainable scale. In terms of agricultural productivity, the technologies of the Green Revolution plateaued in the 1980s, yet the continued adherence to a strategy of intensive agriculture has led to increasing pressure on water and nutrient resources. Read more………………….

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is the second most important food legume worldwide. Green seeded chickpea and vegetable chickpea is a plant-based protein diet having good nutritive value. Higher nutrient density for carotenoids such as beta-carotene that are observed in the green-seeded chickpea could contribute to improving the nutritional status of consumers.

The difficulty of comparing crops species for their “drought tolerance” is that “tolerance” is often confused with simple differences in plant water needs. For instance peanut develops a larger leaf area, has longer duration and higher yield potential than cowpea, but needs more water to fulfil its growth cycle. Both peanut and cowpea are considered drought tolerant, but each species fits specific environments where the rainfall and length of the growing season matches their water and duration requirement.

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

Postrainy sorghum is important for about 5 million households of India. Both grain and stover residues play an almost equally important role in the sorghum value chain, and the price of stover is linked to stover quality. Postrainy sorghum production is constrained by water limitation. The purpose of that project is therefore two-folds: (i) generate cultivars with higher productivity and quality under such limitation; (ii) generate knowledge to speed up the generation of improved cultivars for similar constraints across the world.

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.