No 3 WIRFP Participatory Plant Breeding:Concepts and Examples

The centralised plant breeding techniques of the green revolution have yielded good results in the more favourable
agricultural environments. Most low-resource farmers in the marginal areas of the project, however, have not benefited
from these varieties (Figure 1). As an alternative to centralised breeding, farmer participatory approaches - participatory
plant breeding (PPB) - are being adopted in the Western India Rainfed Farming Project.
PPB is an extension of Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS) (see WIRFP Farmer-managed Participatory Research
for Varietal Selection, May 2002). In PPB, farmers are actively involved in the breeding process, from setting goals to
selecting variable, early-generation material. In PVS, farmers are given a wide range of new cultivars to test for
themselves in their own fields. In our PPB programmes we have exploited the results of PVS by using identified
cultivars as parents of crosses.