Enhancing Groundnut Productivity and Profitability for Smallholder Farmers in Asia through Varietal Technologies

Bangladesh, India, Laos PDR, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Vietnam

The project aims to help alleviate rural poverty, improve livelihoods, and ensure food and nutritional security of poor smallholder farmers in Asia. It will focus on increasing the productivity and profitability of groundnut cultivation in Asia, through the development and deployment of new groundnut varieties that meet the needs of the farmers, traders and industry in partnership with national partners in Bangladesh, India, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. The project is expected to directly benefit National Agriculture Research Systems and ultimately poor smallholder groundnut farmers in the targeted countries. The project met it targets as follows: The project activities reached 16,982 direct and 226,229 indirect beneficiaries during 2018 and 2019 through 46 on-farm demonstrations, 23 Farmer Participatory Varietal Selection (FPVS) trials and 24 minikit trials. To enhance adoption of new varieties, 2124 small seed packets were distributed to farmers. The project partners and ICRISAT produced 66,344 kgs of Nucleus/Breeder Seed (N/BS) of 17 groundnut varieties to strengthen the formal seed chain and to distribute seeds to the farmers. Famers’ awareness was conducted through over 80 farmers’ field days/meetings/training during 2018-19 in the target countries. The Groundnut Network Group-Asia (GNG-A), a multi-stakeholder platform of NARS, ICRISAT, NGOs and the private sector from six target countries, was established and furthered the strengthening of the ‘groundnut breeding, testing, and delivery pipelines’ in Asia through innovations along the groundnut value chain. The GNG-A network meets the continuous capacity building needs of the stakeholders. In Myanmar and Vietnam, stakeholder consultations provided feedback on designing groundnut product profiles, and current and emerging market needs. National groundnut breeding programs were strengthened by sharing 3519 advanced breeding lines/populations with collaborators from 11 countries and training 16 researchers from six target countries. Cost-efficient genomic tools and robust and non-destructive phenotyping tools enhanced operational efficiency and optimized resources. The project’s progress, the news and resources are available on the CGIAR’s MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning) platform (https://mel.cgiar.org/projects/838).