Sathguru-ABSP II Template

Greetings from ABSPII.

The partners of ABSPII have,over the years, crossed several milestones. One such recent milestone was the marvelous efforts at agronomical evaluation of the Fruit and Shoot Borer resistant eggplant by the public partners in India, Bangladesh and Philippines. Efforts such as this provide tremendous opportunity to learn from experience of various country partners and coordinate the efforts for adopting harmonized strategy and methods for product validation and efficacy studies. The combined efforts also help to build national capacity in product development, validation and delivery techniques. I am immensely thankful to all the ABSPII partners in taking forward this enormous team effort.

The need for augmenting the ability of the public institutions, more specifically the agriculture universities in multiplying and delivering high quality transgenic seeds for publicly bred varieties is increasingly felt. This will address the needs of resource constrained farmers. ABSPII has focused considerable attention in building this capacity, working closely with the public universities in different countries. There is enormous opportunity for non-profit entities to partner in this endeavor by encouraging them to engage in contract seed production and “not-for-profit” distribution. This will enhance the seed replacement ratio enormously and help the resource constrained farmers to source high quality seeds for successive seasons.

There is also need for adopting a sound system of monitoring crop performance (post release monitoring ) and the public partners’ engagement in delivery will strengthen this process significantly.

ABSPII will continue to harness the ability of the partners in accomplishing a sound system of reaching resource constrained farmers and enhancing the seed availability through a sound system of distribution. This will have significant potential to enhance the income levels of resource constrained farmers.