Our elite food legume lines are available to National Agricultural Research System partners through ICARDA’s international nurseries. ICARDA’s food legumes team is also working alongside other CGIAR centers to develop the One CGIAR initiatives that seek to unify efforts in crop improvement globally and across CWANA.
ICARDA’s food legumes projects receive funding from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, the Government of Odisha, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the European Union, the CGIAR Research Program on Grain Legumes and Dryland Cereals, the Grains Research and Development Corporation, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Fund for International Development, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation, among others.
Significant 2021 developments in our work on food legumes were:
ICARDA’s Lentil Breeder, Dr. Shiv Kumar Agrawal, was elected as Chair of the Scientific Program Committee of International Food Legume Research Conference. The conference and its committee aim to build global communication linkages to promote research collaboration and the interchange of scientific and technical information covering all aspects of research and development of cool-season food legumes.
In 2021, ICARDA’s Legume Breeder, Dr. Fouad Maalouf, was nominated as a Special Guest Editor for the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute’s special issue of Plants—an international, scientific, peer-reviewed, open access journal published semimonthly online—on legume genomics and breeding. The same year, Dr. Shiv Kumar Agrawal and Dr. Michael Baum were Special Guest Editors for a special issue of Frontiers in Plant Sciences titled “Accelerating Genetic Gains in Pulses”.
Improved pulses technologies are being promoted in rice fallows and traditional areas in 14 districts of Odisha under the Odisha Pulse Mission Phase II. Incentivization of non-paddy crops such as red gram is also being promoted in 2,847 hectares of farmland in Odisha. In Madhya Pradesh, lentil technologies were upscaled in partnership with Jawaharlal Nehru Agricultural University and its six Agricultural Science Centers. Two varieties of lentil performed excellently for seed yield and disease resistance. Furthermore, a new cropping pattern, which includes the super-early lentil variety, Barimasur-9, in the new rice-lentil-rice pattern, is being recommended to intensify the rice system in Bangladesh, eastern India, and Nepal.