Generation Challenge Programme

While farmers in the developing world face agricultural challenges largely similar to their counterparts in industrialised countries, access to resources for mitigation makes all the differerence. For the majority of crop farmers in the developing world, the ravages of drought, low soil fertility, crop pests and diseases are aggravated by their limited access to improved crops. Moreover, irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides are often beyond their reach.

Access to improved plants is a critical tipping point between healthy and hungry families.

By using advances in molecular biology and harnessing the rich global stocks of crop genetic resources, the Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) aims to bridge this gap. Through its five Subprogrammes, GCP creates and provides a new generation of plants that meet farmer needs, as reflected in our mission, vision and objectives in our Strategy Framework.

GCP focuses on selected crops and trait-crop combinations.

The GCP Mission:
To use plant genetic diversity, advanced genomic science and comparative biology to develop tools and technologies that help plant breeders in the developing world produce better crop varieties for resource-poor farmers.

The GCP Vision:
A future where plant breeders have the tools to breed crops in marginal environments with greater efficiency and accuracy for the benefit of the resource-poor farmers and their families.

GCP Objectives:
In line with its mission, by 2013 Generation is expected to have contributed to the following objectives:

Provide access to and promote the use of genetic diversity in plant improvement programmes.
Develop a public platform of genetic and genomic resources and tools, and support a global community that can use them.
Generate and apply knowledge across crops, and demonstrate the potential of comparative genomics to impact plant improvement programmes.
Use genetic diversity and advanced science to develop products for plant breeding programmes to improve the livelihoods of resource-poor farmers in marginal, drought-prone environments.

Who We Are:
GCP is a multinational, multisectoral and multidisciplinary 'true' collaboration in the plant sciences. More

Forthcoming SP2-related events: Tropical Legume Genomics Workshop (part of the IV International Conference on Legume Genomics and Genetics), Sunday 7th December 2008, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.