Bean and Sorghum Research in Costa Rica Supports Farmers, Fights Hunger

Climate change is negatively impacting people and ecosystems across the globe, but some of its harshest effects are being felt in Central America and the Caribbean. High temperatures, more frequent and severe weather events, and decreased crop yields have destabilized incomes and food supplies in Central America: between 2018-2021, the number of food-insecure people in the region almost quadrupled. To mitigate some of those impacts, researchers associated with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement (ILCI) are racing to breed new varieties and test alternative crops that can better tolerate extreme heat and drought.

Researchers with ILCI’s Central American and Caribbean Crop Improvement Alliance (CACCIA) are sequencing the genomes of bean and sorghum varieties to find those most capable of enduring high temperatures, and they’re working with farmers to test sorghum as an alternative livestock feed; sorghum is roughly as nutritious as corn but requires far less water to grow. The researchers presented their findings June 26-30 at the Programa Cooperativo Centroamericano en Cultivos y Animales – one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific conferences in Mesoamerica.

Beans are the second most important agricultural product in Costa Rica’s domestic market, and cattle production uses more than 20% of the territory of Costa Rica, said Luis A. Sánchez, an agricultural economist and CACCIA priority setting leader at INTA.

“Through CACCIA, technologies are being developed to promote the resilience of these production systems, which has a very important impact on the country’s food security, the rural economy and the environment,” Sánchez said.

Some of the ILCI researchers presenting at the conference were:

Joyce Estrada Gamboa, a biotechnologist with the Instituto Nacional de Innovación y Transferencia en Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), is leading projects to identify promising varieties of beans and sorghum. She and her colleagues assessed the genetic diversity of distinct breeding lines and cultivars, looking in particular for indications that plants could tolerate heat and drought. Gamboa and her colleagues have mapped genetic diversity among 282 common bean lines and 188 sorghum lines. Their work will be used to choose promising parental lines for plant breeding trials.

Manuel Solano Sibaja and Juan Carlos Hernandez, bean breeders at INTA, are evaluating common beans for tolerance to high temperatures by working collaboratively with growers in Costa Rica. In 2015, an El Niño year, farmers reported wilting flowers and poorly filled bean pods that dramatically reduced yields. Between human-caused climate change and the natural El Niño cycle – which also increases temperatures, causes severe weather events and is expected to begin again in 2023 – farmers need heat-tolerant bean varieties. Solano and Hernandez started with 60 lines believed to be adapted to high temperatures and conducted breeding trials with six of them in Quepos, Costa Rica. Four of the lines performed well and will undergo further study, in anticipation of release of new bean varieties.

Source: cornell.edu

Photo Credit: istock-mailson-pignata