Breeding and Productivity in Ending Hunger and Achieving Food Security and Nutrition

Breeding is the art of altering the original traits of plants or animals to produce desired characteristics to advance the quantity and/or quality of products for humans and animals’ benefits (Fehr 1987; Sleper and Poehlman 1995; Bernardo 2010). The US national association of plant breeders (https://www.plantbreeding.org/content/what-is-plant-breeding) define “plant breeding” as the science driven creative process of developing new plant varieties that include cultivar development, crop improvement, and seed improvement. Kor Oldenbroek and van der Waaij (2014) and Nature (https://www.nature.com/subjects/animal-breeding) define Animal Breeding as a process involving the selective mating of domestic animals with desirable genetic traits, to maintain or enhance these traits, with the intention to improve desirable (and heritable) qualities in the next generations. In plant and animals, breeding requires biological assessment in relevant target environments and knowledge of genes and genomes. Progress is assessed based on gain under selection, which is a function of genetic variation, selection intensity, and time (Xu et al. 2017).