Fast-tracked climate-smart vegetables on course to reach one million farmers

New, climate-smart vegetable varieties developed through a partnership between the World Vegetable Center and the Asia-Pacific Seed Association (APSA) could soon reach 1 million smallholder farmers.

Now in its eighth year, the APSA-WorldVeg Vegetable Breeding Consortium brings together seed companies from 16 countries with crop breeders at WorldVeg. The partnership connects public research with the private seed industry, helping to fast-track the development and use of climate-smart varieties of cash crops like tomato, chili peppers, sweet peppers, tropical pumpkins, bitter gourd, and more recently, loofa and okra.

As climate change intensifies, breeding resilient vegetable varieties to outsmart pests and diseases higher temperatures and reduced water availability has become more urgent than ever. But these are often difficult or costly for seed companies to develop on their own. By pooling resources, data, and capacity across regions, Consortium members have been able to quickly test different WorldVeg improved seed in multiple environments, including heat, drought and infection hotspots. This has enabled them to identify important traits, which in turn has informed their breeding programs, leading to the rapid deployment of almost 200 improved varieties in farmers’ fields.

For an annual fee, the currently 58 Consortium members – predominantly in Taiwan, India, Japan and Thailand, but also from as far afield as Turkey, Brazil and South Africa – receive exclusive access to WorldVeg core breeding lines and hybrids two years before they are made more widely available. These include lines of tomato that are resistant to bacterial wilt, heat tolerant chili peppers, early maturing pumpkin, and varieties of multiple crops that resist the potentially devastating begomovirus. The two-year lead-in time gives seed companies a competitive advantage to test the seed and introduce it to their own breeding programs, prior to commercialization. As documented in the most recent Consortium report, members have requested and received almost 15,000 seed shipments from WorldVeg since the alliance launched in 2017.

The newly released figures – from a 2024 survey of members – show that Consortium-improved varieties currently equate to around 316,000 hectares of vegetables under production in Asia, benefiting around 830,000 smallholder vegetable farmers. Based on current trends, the Consortium expects to reach 1 million smallholder farmers by 2030.

The figures also show that Consortium membership increased by 30% in 2024, with 18 companies coming onboard for the first time. In addition, the number of Consortium-developed vegetable varieties on the market in Asia has more than quadrupled since 2017, to 193. Total seed sales of these varieties reached 83 metric tonnes in 2024 – a 40% increase in just two years.

“The APSA-WorldVeg Vegetable Breeding Consortium is bearing fruit for all involved,” said Marco Wopereis, Director General of WorldVeg. “When it comes to supporting smallholder farmers to respond to climate change, seed companies are our most important scaling partners. The likelihood that the Consortium will soon reach 1 million smallholders with improved, more resilient vegetable varieties is proof of just how powerful this alliance is in Asia.”

“At APSA, we say everything starts with a seed,” said Kunaporn Phuntunil, APSA’s Knowledge and Research Programs Manager. “These successes show what’s possible when innovation and collaboration take root together.”