ABSTRACT

Participatory plant breeding (PPB) has an important role to play for food security and sustainable agriculture, helping to enable farmers’ access to and use of plant diversity to improve their livelihoods. PPB can be an important developmental tool, especially in centres of origin/diversity of crops and in farming systems that are heavily dependent on natural resources, vulnerable to climate change and/or characterized by rural poverty. This chapter asks: how to fund PPB in the coming decade? It discusses opportunities in the context of the Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda), and examines the international, bilateral and national funding mechanisms that provide financial support to PPB. These mechanisms support implementation of the Funding Strategy of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, where PPB has enjoyed a strong focus in the Strategy’s Benefit-sharing Fund. In the next few years, the PPB community will need to find ways for these mechanisms to enhance synergies, develop co-spending strategies and visualize impact and sharing lessons on upscaling and outscaling. Opportunities and challenges for the near future include integrating PPB in larger development programmes, mobilizing climate-change financing, and mainstreaming into national policy and budgets.