History of Wheat Breeding: A Personal View

Abstract

For more than a century, breeding has delivered huge benefits as a major driver of increased wheat productivity and of stability in the face of inevitable dis­ease threats. Thus, the real cost of this staple grain has been reduced for billions of consumers. Steady breeding progress has been seen across many important traits of wheat, currently for potential yield averaging about 0.6% p.a. This yield progress continues to rely of extensive multilocational yield testing but has, however, become more difficult, even as new breeding techniques have improved efficiency. Breeding will continue to evolve as new approaches, being proposed with increasing fre­quency, are tested and found useful or not. High throughput phenotyping (HTPP), applying modern crop physiology, and molecular markers and genomic selection (GS) are in this phase right now. Such new techniques, along with pre-breeding for new traits, will likely play a larger role in this future improvement of wheat. New tools will also include genetic engineering (GE), as society’s need for its benefits become more urgent. The steady privatization of breeding seems unlikely to cease in the developed world but will continue to struggle elsewhere. It would seem wise, however, that a significant portion of the world’s pre-breeding research remains in the public sector, while maintaining close and equitable contact with those deliver­ing new varieties.