ADVANCES IN OIL PALM BREEDING: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES

Abstract

Oil palm is the most efficient oil-bearing crop. However, its breeding cycle per generation requires at least a decade of meticulous work. In Malaysia, land under oil palm cultivation has increased by more than 50 per cent over the past 20 years. Price fluctuation in crude palm oil and fertiliser, further shrinkage of arable land and extreme labour shortage have propelled the demand for good quality planting materials as well as good crop management. Breeding plays a crucial role in providing good quality planting materials to boost the production of a crop. The first essential step in oil palm breeding is to choose a good parental combination that has high probability of generating offsprings with desired characteristics. Oil palm breeding requires massive resources. Field trials require large areas for extensive progeny testing to estimate their breeding values. Moreover, data collection of yield records, bunch analysis, and vegetative measurements, is labour-intensive. Since a breeder has limited control over environmental factors that affect genetic response, it is important for selection to be conducted on limited superior parents to achieve manageable populations in order to generate good quality materials. Breeders have been selecting palms based on their visible or measurable traits. Segregation occurs among offsprings as a result of the separation of the allele pairs encoding desired traits in each parent during the formation of reproductive cells. Therefore, selection may be imperfect as genotypic selection is largely overlooked. Hence, palms with visible desirable agronomic trait will be retained whereas crosses with good genetic diversity may be discarded. Phenotyping is a crucial step in generating information required by breeders to make selection. However, conventional phenotyping is labour-intensive, time-consuming and costly. Advancement in geo-informatics and imaging techniques allows high-throughput non-destructive phenotype data collection for quantitative studies of complex traits. Application of these technologies in oil palm breeding will accelerate the introduction of improved planting materials in a shorter time. Keywords: Oil palm, breeding, phenotyping, technology application, biotechnology.