Overview: transitioning wheat research to serve the future needs of the developing world

Abstract

For millennia wheat has provided daily sustenance for a large proportion of the world's population. It is produced in a wide range of climatic environments and geographic regions. During 2004-2006, the global annual harvested area of "bread wheat" and "durum wheat" averaged 217 million ha, producing 621 million tons of grain with a value of approximately US$ 150 billion. About 116 million ha of wheat was grown in developing countries, producing 308 million tons of grain (FAO 2007) with a value of approximately US$ 75 billion. Wheat fulfills a wide range of demands from different end-users, including staple food for a large proportion of the world's poor farmers and consumers. The similarity between average yields in developed and developing regions is deceptive: in developed countries around 90% of the wheat area is rainfed, while in developing countries more than half of the wheat area is irrigated, especially in the large producers India and China. In addition, there are large differences in productivity3 among countries within the two groups of countries, and even among countries applying similar agronomic practices. For instance, among major rainfed producers (over one million ha), the average national yield ranges from about 0.9 t ha-1 in Kazakhstan to 2.6 t ha-1 in Canada and up to 7.9 t ha-1 in the United Kingdom. Similarly, there are contrasts among irrigated producers, for example, India has an average yield of 2.6 t ha-1 compared with 6.5 t ha-1 in Egypt. Thus, there is clearly considerable scope for increasing productivity in many countries.