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Abstract
Crop production plays a significant role in the Ethiopian economy. The sub-sector\'s output has, however, been very low partially due to the biophysical challenges constraining productivity in smallholder farms and inadequate technological interventions. Genetic modification of crops to improve productivity is preferred to the continual manipulation of the growing environment because of cost particularly to the large majority of resource-poor farmers who cannot afford for production inputs. Consideration of varietal selection vis-à-vis actual target production environment is vital to maximizing gains from breeding efforts. The tradition across most of the breeding programs in Ethiopia is to develop varieties under optimum management despite the fact that marginal management characterizes the ultimate target production environments. Whether selection under optimum management is likely to result in better productivity gain than under the actual target production environments is a crucial issue in varietal development. This paper discusses the logical framework for breeding success and the conventional approach to varietal selection and its challenges in Ethiopia. Based on the analyses, the paper proposes that the wheel of the current variety development schemes should be redirected and made more objective and focused towards better serving the major target beneficiaries, i.e. the resource-poor farmers. Keywords: Direct Selection; Indirect Selection; Selection Environment; Target Environment East African Journal of Sciences Vol. 1 (2) 2007: pp. 93-103
Highlights
Agriculture is the backbone of the Ethiopian economy
The concept of direct and indirect selection was suggested by Falconer (1960) and later used in several investigations related to the determination of optimum selection environments (Ceccarelli, 1989; Ceccarelli and Grando, 1996; Banziger and Edmeades, 1997; Banziger et al, 1997; Banziger and Lafitte, 1997)
Apart from some variety evaluations made both under fertilized and unfertilized conditions during the 1980's and a number of genotype by management interaction studies conducted on different crops, systematic efforts made to establish optimum selection environments in Ethiopia are very limited
Summary
Agriculture is the backbone of the Ethiopian economy. The sector contributes 85% of total employment, 46% of GDP and 92% of total export earnings (Beintema and Menelik, 2003). Crop production takes the lion's share of the contribution by agriculture as a whole in terms of employment, food, industrial raw materials and export earnings. Improved cultivars of most of the crops are not yet sufficiently put under production and more than 95% of the cultivated areas in the country are still planted with local seeds produced by the farmers themselves. The weakness, or sometimes even the irrelevance, of “improved” technologies (including crop varieties) is coming into picture, the main complaint being technology development processes including varietal generation often do not take into consideration the biophysical and the socio-economic situations of the target production systems (Franzel, 1992). I hope, would provoke critical discussion and useful dialogues among the scientific community on the need to revisit and redirect the scheme of variety development in order to make future breeding efforts in Ethiopia more objective and focused
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