ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the historical development of PalmElit/Cirad/IRHO's comprehensive and extensive modified reciprocal recurrent selection (MRRS)-based breeding programs. It illustrates the salient features of AAR's and SUMBIO's breeding programs. The chapter illustrates SAIN's breeding program to exemplify how some Indonesian companies found entry into the oil palm breeding business. Socfin's first oil palm plantations were set up by Hallet in 1911 in Sungei Liput and Pulu Raja in Sumatra using seeds derived from the ornamental avenues of tobacco companies based in Deli Serdang area. After the publication of the inheritance of shell thickness by Beirnaert and Vanderweyen and with the available knowledge on allogamous plant breeding, IRHO organized between 1947 and 1955 an international exchange program between five different plantations. Height increment (HINC) is one of the major objective traits in IRHO/Cirad/PalmElit's breeding programs. Oil palm is a crop susceptible to a wide range of pests and diseases, some of them with dramatic results in several parts of the world.
