CIMMYT’s accomplishments in 2023 show how agriculture can mitigate climate change, and adapt to it. CIMMYT is working with leaders in Africa to confirm the crop traits that farmers there will need to adapt to climate change. CIMMYT’s groundbreaking work on wheat anticipates how warmer nights will rob the crop of its yield. Genetic advances will help future plant breeders develop maize that releases less nitrogen into the atmosphere. CIMMYT and partners are breeding maize varieties that improve nutrition, by avoiding anemia and vitamin A deficiency. As a global thought leader, CIMMYT is helping farmers to nourish the world in the midst of a climate crisis, ensuring food and nutrition security, especially for vulnerable regions of the Global South.
CIMMYT’s 2030 strategy aims to achieve food and nutrition security in a changing climate. The crop varieties for 2030 have to be bred now. CIMMYT is identifying the traits that these crops will need.
CIMMYT and partners surveyed nearly 600 agricultural experts in East and West Africa, asking which plant traits would allow food crops to adapt to climate change. CIMMYT led the study in strategic partnership with national agricultural research programs in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda, and with two CGIAR centers: the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). The 588 surveyed experts considered six staple African food crops: maize, sorghum, pearl millet, groundnut, cowpea, and common bean. Experts predicted that most current breeding priorities will remain important, but that rates of genetic gain must increase to keep pace with climate challenges and consumer demands. Crops must also become more water-efficient, and able to thrive in intercropped fields, which is how smallholders plant their crops. New varieties also need to enhance microbial diversity in the soil, for more efficient nutrient and water use. “Future breeding will have to be bolder, smarter, and faster,” explained CIMMYT’s Dryland Crops Program Director, Kevin Pixley.
Using social science techniques, like surveys, to place the needs of smallholders on plant breeding agendas is an example of CIMMYT’s transdisciplinary work to become an innovative partner, transforming agrifood systems to become more inclusive, efficient, productive, sustainable and climate-resilient. CIMMYT is uniquely able to partner with research institutions and experts across Africa, making such a survey possible. This work showcases a renewed interest in product-oriented trait discovery and pre-breeding activities, as outlined in CIMMYT’s 2030 strategy. Following up on the survey, CIMMYT is using cutting-edge breeding techniques like genomic selection, gene editing, and speed breeding to rapidly create climate-resilient crop varieties. Besides the new crop traits mentioned in this case, the world will also need wheat bred to withstand warmer nighttime temperatures.
Nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime ones. Previous studies have suggested that a 1°C increase in nighttime lows could cut wheat yields by 3 to 8%. In 2023, in partnership with the University of Nottingham and the Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora, Mexico, CIMMYT applied its scientific skills to quantify the impact of warmer nights on wheat yields.
CIMMYT researchers held day-time temperatures constant, while artificially warming the nights. A 1°C rise in nighttime temperature lowered wheat yields by an average of 1.9%. Paradoxically, heat-tolerant varieties lost the most yield. This is worrying, because these are the varieties being recommended to farmers to manage the heat, but this advice was based only on daytime temperatures. Planting the wrong varieties for warmer nights could jeopardize food security and farmers’ livelihoods.
Understanding that even heat-tolerant wheat varieties lose yield on warm nights is a major discovery. “In the future, plant breeders will need to create wheat varieties that are adapted to warmer nights, as well as hotter days,” says CIMMYT’s Head of Wheat Physiology, Matthew Reynolds. Those future varieties will have to be scalable worldwide, to ensure that smallholder farmers and their livelihood trajectories are resilient and significantly improved. Another discovery by CIMMYT and partners may help to breed maize that releases less nitrogen.
Since the 1970s, chemical nitrogen fertilizer has boosted crop yields. But the nitrogen has also polluted water, degraded the soil’s long-term fertility, and become a major greenhouse gas. CIMMYT’s global leadership in science may help to change that in the coming years.
In a 2023 paper in Scientific Reports, researchers from CIMMYT, the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Science (JIRCAS), and the Universidad de la República (Uruguay) report a breakthrough with biological nitrification inhibition (BNI). Many plants release antibiotics through their roots that inhibit nitrifying bacteria in soil. BNI holds more nitrogen in the soil instead of gassing it off, thus reducing fertilizer demand. Farmers can buy chemical nitrification inhibitors, but they are expensive. A better option would be to breed new maize varieties with naturally high BNI. The CIMMYT-JIRCAS team identified six genes that may be linked to BNI (see figure below).
More genetic research is needed, but in the future it may be possible to breed maize that naturally keeps more nitrogen in the soil, releasing less of it into the atmosphere. “We are now building on the promising results from our research, refining the genetic map for BNI activity in maize,” said César Petroli, a CIMMYT scientist, and senior author of the paper in Scientific Reports. Genetic science to reduce the fertilizer requirements of maize will help to reduce nitrogen-based greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. CIMMYT is a global leader in climate-smart innovation, continuously improving its human and infrastructural capacities to solve the worldwide challenge of reducing agricultural emissions. CIMMYT’s innovations are applicable globally, contributing to sustainable agriculture (and mitigating climate change) worldwide. Similar advances are being made with wheat. The Novo Nordisk Foundation will soon invest in CropSustaiN, a visionary BNI platform being created by CIMMYT. This platform will develop wheat varieties enhanced with the BNI trait, which suppresses soil nitrification and curbs the excessive use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. This pioneering approach has the potential to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use in wheat by up to 20%, mitigating soil degradation and greenhouse gas emissions.
Maize is the daily bread in much of East Africa, but a viral disease, maize lethal necrosis (MLN), emerged in 2011. MLN could devastate whole fields, and CIMMYT scientists realized that most of the commercial maize in East Africa was susceptible to the disease. Africa urgently needed new MLN-resistant maize hybrids, but that required intensive screening of germplasm, and breeding MLN-resistant maize lines and hybrids. The maize would need other adaptive traits as well.
In 2023, CIMMYT and partners celebrated the tenth anniversary of two centers of scientific excellence, which play key roles in developing improved maize varieties for sub-Saharan Africa. The MLN screening facility in Naivasha, and the Maize Doubled-Haploid (DH) facility in Kiboko, are both hosted by the Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO). Both facilities were built with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The MLN screening facility, which has also received funding from the Syngenta Foundation, quickly identifies maize germplasm that is resistant to the deadly viral disease. The facility has given African farmers access to over 20 maize hybrids that are tolerant or resistant to MLN, and played a key role in the release of Bazooka, the first-generation MLN-tolerant hybrid in Uganda, to minimize economic losses from the disease. The DH process doubles maize chromosomes in the laboratory, creating pure breeding lines in two seasons, instead of seven or eight. This saves years of work (and resources) when breeding elite maize hybrids. In Africa, several CIMMYT partners, including public and private-sector institutions, have embraced the new DH technology, using it to breed many of the new hybrids released across the continent. CIMMYT and KALRO distribute the new seed in collaboration with other public and private partners, including Seed Co Ltd (Kenya), Kenya Seed Company Ltd., COSTEC and Meru-Agro (Tanzania), the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) and NASECO Seeds (Uganda).
Through these two facilities, CIMMYT supports a key national research partner in Kenya, KALRO, while enhancing breeding programs across Africa, developing high-yielding maize, as stakeholders embrace excellence in science and innovation for positive and transformative change in agrifood systems. The breeding is translated into impact for farmers though strategic partnerships with government agencies and private companies to distribute disease-resistant seed. CIMMYT’s Director General Bram Govaerts explains that “These two facilities demonstrate the holistic methods which are key to working towards a more productive, inclusive and resilient agrifood system.” CIMMYT also aims to secure funding to double the production of drought-tolerant, certified maize seed in sub-Saharan Africa from 208,000 metric tons in 2023 to 400,000 by 2033. This will more than double the area sown to drought-tolerant maize in the region from 8.5 million hectares to about 17 million hectares. Besides breeding maize that is healthier and adapted to climate change, CIMMYT is also developing more nutritious varieties, for example, in Nepal.
Across much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, millions of people are lacking in essential micronutrients, contributing to the mortality of mothers and children. For example, in Nepal, a third of the children under five are stunted because of zinc and vitamin A deficiencies. In partnership with Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC), CIMMYT is developing high-yielding maize varieties that are rich in zinc and vitamin A.
Trials by CIMMYT and NARC since 2020 compared new hybrid maize with local varieties. The new maize was biofortified, bred to be naturally high in essential micronutrients like zinc and vitamin A. Field trials found that the improved maize had high levels of zinc and carotenoid (the material that human bodies use to make vitamin A): between 14.2 and 24.8 mg/kg for zinc and between 1.8 and 3.6 mg/100 for carotenoid. This maize could be a valuable source of essential micronutrients, improving food and nutrition security. The new maize varieties also yielded 2% to 55% more than popular hybrids. Similarly, CIMMYT and the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) have developed zinc-enriched wheat varieties that have reached 13 million farm families in Pakistan. Biofortification is an ecological solution, being rapidly scaled to make diets healthier (for farmers and consumers).
Innovations like biofortified wheat and maize are more than just a solution for today, and they go far beyond Nepal and Pakistan. These advances are part of a larger strategy to reshape global food systems by 2030. Breeding biofortified crops to alleviate childhood malnutrition is a key part of CIMMYT’s core competence, and it aligns with our 2030 vision of food security within planetary boundaries.
CIMMYT is transforming agrifood systems to become climate-smart, resilient and inclusive. For example, fostering collaboration between machine manufacturers and farmers in India and in Benin to co-design the equipment that smallholders need to make farming an attractive career. This international partnership is a systemic change, to meet smallholder farmers’ needs for innovation in the future. Pakistani farmers are now planting heat-adapted wheat varieties on a massive scale, transforming the country’s agrifood system towards self-sufficiency in cereals. In India and Mexico, wheat and maize farmers are transforming their agrifood systems with conservation agriculture, to improve soil fertility, save water, and produce more food while adapting to climate change. Breeding and delivering the latest maize hybrids require new national seed systems, as CIMMYT and partners are building in Bhutan. Systems thinking is necessary to link producers with seed supplies, machinery, and markets, as is being explored with a farmers’ hub in Nigeria.
