Countries of focus: India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia
Mung bean growers in developing countries (around 10 M farmers – 7 M ha in Asia and Africa) are exposed to declining and/or erratic yields which puts mung bean cultivation in jeopardy. Hence, mung bean farmers are looking for high yielding varieties with improved biotic and abiotic stress tolerance. Mung bean is a protein-rich crop which provides nutritional food for households locally and contributes to soil improvement as well as sustainable crop diversification.
ACIAR (Australian Center for International Agriculture Research) is financing a program called IMIN2 – standing for The International Mung bean Improvement Network. This program is designed to ensure that smallholder farmers have access to high-quality seeds of new improved mung bean varieties: high-yielding and yellow mosaic virus tolerant. In this multi-stakeholder program:
The World Vegetable Center (WVC) and National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) missionwas to breed for high-yielding, disease- and pest- resistant mung bean varieties.
SFSA’s (Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture) complementary mission was to build capabilities at the NARS level and support the commercialization of the new selected improved varieties, using the Seeds2B commercialization toolkit.
Contributions
SFSA organized a workshop on Demand-Led Breeding (DLB) in December 2020. Over 80 mung bean researchers from 20 countries of Asia and Africa came together virtually in order to brainstorm on DLB approaches for market segmentation and to collaborate on the designing of mung bean product profiles for some of the major mung bean growing countries.
SFSA contributed to the phenotyping of selected lines by financing micro-nutrients analyses in the early development stage in 2021 and 2022. Furthermore, SFSA supported the organization of IMIN2 Annual Workshops, where the last event took place in Brisbane in November 2022 during the TropAg Conference.
