Ex-ante priority setting in crop breeding: Towards inclusive innovation for impact

Abstract

CONTEXTCrop breeding teams should ideally work a-priori to rank research priorities and varietal product concepts to make decisions considering social, environmental, production and market conditions that an improved crop variety will be entering upon release. Frequently, this research prioritization is guided by a cost-benefit optimization framing, which leaves the potential derived by alternative approaches, such as inclusive innovation, unexplored. OBJECTIVEIn this study, we apply PEEP (Participatory Ex-ante framework for Plant breeding), a new methodological framework for ex-ante participatory priority setting for plant breeding programs. This framework explores how, given a set of hypothetical crop varieties (varietal product concepts) it is possible to assess which will have the highest potential to deliver research impacts. PEEP is designed to support crop breeders to understand the impact potential of a new varietal product concept, and strategically make decisions based on this. METHODSPEEP ranks varietal product concepts across five impact domains: breeding, processing, marketing, climate, and cross-cutting themes. This paper reports on how an interdisciplinary breeding team from the Institute of Environment and Agricultural Research (INERA) in Burkina Faso working on cowpea (Vigna unguiculata [L.] Walp) applied PEEP and discusses the results from this application. We chose cowpea as a crop focus, based on prior research that showed that gender and social differences shape roles, responsibilities, and benefits from its cultivation in Burkina Faso. We engaged 650 stakeholders using tools and methods (choice experiment, surveys and focus group discussions) tailored to collect information according to their spheres of knowledge. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSWe present a reflection on the application process, results, and feedback from the INERA cowpea breeding team on these. We show that breeders and farmers ranked the potential impact of the varietal product concepts differently. We also show that differences in evaluation of impact from varietal product concepts vary based on market orientation, agroecological zones, farming systems and gender. SIGNIFICANCEWe demonstrate that PEEP contributes to inclusive agricultural innovation as a feasible method to consider the knowledge and preferences of diverse stakeholders. We show that it is informative to include diverse groups when conceptualizing new varieties before investing in varietal development. Making such research prioritization decisions early on enables breeding programs to avoid “missing the mark” on assumed impacts on smallholder women and men farmers and increases their visibility and voice in these upstream decisions.