PPB in Developing Countries

Smallholder farmers in developing countries typically use only manual labour, little chemical fertiliser and often intercrop different crop varieties and species. They also often harvest their crops a bit at a time for daily meals etc and largely feed off the crops they grow.

In contrast, plant breeding institutes in developing countries usually use herbicides and chemical fertilisers extensively, tractors for preparing the land and grow one crop of one variety in a field at a time. They harvest only once, usually selling the crop.

Furthermore, rural education is often so bad that only city-living children can easily get the qualifications needed to go to university – so graduate staff at agricultural research stations may also not have childhood experiences to bridge the gap. Participatory plant breeding (PPB) enforces the gap to be bridged.

The plant breeders have to consult smallholders to identify the required traits of new varieties, use this information to identify then access suitable parental material and cross them. The progeny are then grown on smallholders’ farms, the smallholders cultivate and use them as they would their own crops and the smallholders and scientists from the research institute come together, for example, on field days, to select superior forms, with the smallholders now having the dominant position. This process is reiterated for several generations until the superior traits have become stabilised in a a small number of plants – the new variety.

PPB with smallholders in developing countries has various antecedents, all active at around the same time.

Dr Pêgo’s project breeding maize varieties participatorily during the 1980s (see previous webpage) was adopted by the Centro International de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo (CIMMYT) in Mexico.

At about the same time, Rhoades & Booth (1982) at the International Potato Center (CIP) in Peru were promoting the idea called ‘Farmer-back-to-farmer’ – that technologies for farmers must begin and end with them.

And both CIMMYT and CIP are members of the worldwide chain of institutes supporting developing country agriculture known as the CGIAR.

The UK has strongly supported of PPB in developing countries. Robert Chambers et al. (1989) at the University of Sussex emphasised the importance of farmers in developing countries in selecting plant varieties in their book ‘Farmer First’  and Professor John Witcombe at Bangor University used PPB extensively in developing countries from at least the early 1990s, eventually calling it ‘client-oriented’ plant breeding. His team’s many achievements are extensively documented!

Both Professor Witcombe’s team and Dr Pêgo’s included ‘hi-tech’ in their PPB, screening seedlings, for example, using genetic markers. Dr Pego also derived parental inbred lines for F1 hybrid production from his PPB programme.

Since then, many others in developing countries including myself have used PPB. My involvement involved two fairly typical such projects, breeding varieties of cassava and sweet potato in Ghana and Uganda respectively.

In both cases, the partners involved were village smallholder groups, my parent institute (The UK Natural Resources Institute (NRI)), a national agricultural research institute and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) or the Centro Internacional de la Papa (CIP), both CGIAR members.

Ghanaian smallholders on their farm explaining to a national scientist their preferred choices of cassava plants

The project on cassava in Ghana resulted in the release of 4 new varieties and the project on sweet potato in Uganda resulted in the release of one, Tomulabula (meaning: Don’t let them know [that it is so good]!).  All varieties are now widely adopted in their respective countries.

Ugandan smallholders harvesting a participatory plant breeding trial of sweet potato with national and international scientists
And the outcome!

And PPB was very enjoyable for everyone. We all got great satisfaction in creating great new varieties. The researchers enjoyed occasional days out in the field and the smallholders enjoyed working collaboratively with their fellow smallholders as well as with us researchers. Visits to research stations fascinated them! We also made a film about how PPB helped create the sweet potato Tomulabula. 

Eventually I retired, developed my garden in the UK and acquired an allotment. And it dawned on me the knowledge I had gained working overseas was highly relevant. I realised the gap between smallholders and research institutes in developing countries was at least equalled by that between gardeners and the breeders of modern plant varieties (see disadvantages for gardeners of modern varieties). And this led me to develop this website, highlighting the need for PPB with gardeners.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The next step is the use of PPB by organic growers and their organisations. Researching this led me to many fascinating insightshich has and is still doing so much to helping to increase the interest in the approach in developing countries.