Review on Participatory Plant Breeding

Broadly, participatory plant breeding (PPB) is the development of a plant breeding program in collaboration between breeders and farmers, marketers, processors, consumers, and policy makers (food security, health and nutrition, employment)(Ceccarelli, 2012). In the context of plant breeding in the developing world, PPB is breeding that involves close farmer-researcher collaboration to bring about plant genetic improvement within a species. PPB is a strategy for plant breeding with its own set of methodologies that applies in situations where the demand for specific varietal traits among producers, traders, industries and consumers is poorly understood and difficult to diagnose with conventional market research methods. Depending on who controls the breeding process (researchers or farmers) and the scale on which the work is undertaken (community-centered or research to extrapolate results) two broad categories are usually differentiated: 'farmer-led' and 'formal-led' PPB(Probst, 2016).