CGIAR upgrades global crop breeding policy to focus on nutrition analysis

In an effort to offset widespread malnutrition, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an organization dedicated to food security, is updating the focus of its global crop breeding programs to screen for essential nutrient levels.

Traditionally focused on increasing crop yield and improving agronomic performance, CGIAR is now incorporating essential nutritional traits into its breeding priorities, particularly in regions where malnutrition is prevalent.

To guide this new direction, CGIAR has developed Target Product Profiles (TPPs) for various crops and market segments. These profiles help identify critical micronutrients like zinc, iron, and provitamin A and determine if they should be “must-have” characteristics for new crop varieties.

To meet the practical demands of this strategic shift, CGIAR’s Breeding Resources has partnered with HarvestPlus to establish a global network of tools and standardized protocols for collecting consistent, high-quality data on nutritional traits.

The partnership’s initial focus is on providing X-ray fluorescence (XRF) services for screening levels of zinc, iron, and provitamin A.

This update demands fast, cost-effective, and high-throughput methods for analyzing nutritional traits, underscores Peter Coaldrake, interim director of CGIAR. “Without this capability, mainstreaming nutrition into pipelines risks becoming aspirational rather than practical.”

Coaldrake says CGIAR has also collaborated with the Better Diets and Nutrition Science Program to better understand where the program can have the most impact — “which crops, which regions, and which nutrients to prioritize.”

“To stay on track, we need clear performance indicators so we can monitor progress and deliver the biofortified crop varieties we are committed to,” he adds.

Rising CO2 and temperatures are degrading the nutritional quality of crops like rice and leafy greens, raising the risks of malnutrition and chronic disease.Scaling global nutrition analysis

Rajaguru Bohar, lab services manager for BR Global Shared Services, stresses that every new CGIAR service is driven by the needs of breeders. “Every product or service we provide is demand-driven, grounded in the needs of breeding pipelines.”

Unlike other complex lab techniques, XRF allows breeders to quickly and affordably screen thousands of grain samples, providing the high-throughput capacity essential for modern breeding.

Breeding Resources’ role is to harmonize these services across CGIAR centers and make them accessible to CGIAR and national programs while integrating them with digital tools, such as Bioflow, CGIAR Breeding Analytics Pipeline, and the Enterprise Breeding System.

This infrastructure will offer nutrition analysis to breeders “as seamlessly as genotyping or trial data,” allowing them to develop products that target improved diets.

Decades of biofortification expertise

Crop nutrition screening is increasingly relevant, as previous research indicates rising CO2 and temperatures are degrading the nutritional quality of crops like rice and leafy greens, raising the risks of malnutrition and chronic disease.

HarvestPlus contributes two decades of experience in screening and mainstreaming nutritional traits in nine crops. The organization pioneered the use of XRF in agriculture, adapting technology once used in the mining and cement industries to measure micronutrients in staple crops.

With labs in India, Rwanda, and Bangladesh, HarvestPlus can process up to 50,000 samples annually, providing the scale needed to embed nutrition across the entire CGIAR breeding portfolio.

“This launch connects crops and regions, helping us move responsibly from targeted breeding and biofortification toward making nutrition a core part of CGIAR and NARES programs, aligned with their TPPs and market segment priorities,” says Govindaraj, senior scientist at HarvestPlus.

With labs in India, Rwanda, and Bangladesh, HarvestPlus can analyze up to 50,000 crop samples annually.HarvestPlus also brings its global reach, established calibration networks, and policy engagement that has helped embed nutrition traits into varietal release systems in countries like India and Nigeria.

The new services are already available through the Breeding Resources’ Service Request Portal, CGIAR’s marketplace for shared services.

In other recent crop science advances, researchers in the UK are developing a new approach to food security by creating a “smart bacterium” that can reprogram crops’ responses to environmental stresses in real time. Nutrition Insight recently caught up with a lead scientist on the project to learn about the potential of this solution.

We previously spoke to Frank Jaksch, CEO of Ayana Bio, who detailed climate impacts on plant nutrition while explaining how industrial farming practices accelerate nutrient loss. He spotlights that plant cell cultivation can offer a scalable solution for consistent, nutrient-rich ingredients.