Plant Breeding - Participatory Plant Breeding

Participatory Plant Breeding

The development of agricultural science, with phenomenon like the Green Revolution arising, have left millions of farmers in developing countries, most of whom operate small farms under unstable and difficult growing conditions, in a precarious situation. The adoption of new plant varieties by this group has been hampered by the constraints of poverty and the international policies promoting an industrialized model of agriculture. Their response has been the creation of a novel and promising set of research methods collectively known as participatory plant breeding. Participatory means that farmers are more involved in the breeding process and breeding goals are defined by farmers instead of international seed companies with their large-scale breeding programs. Farmers' groups and NGOs, for example, may wish to affirm local people's rights over genetic resources, produce seeds themselves, build farmers' technical expertise, or develop new products for niche markets, like organically grown food.