Commitment N° 2: To innovate to produce more and better

Nowadays, yields observed throughout the world are extremely heterogeneous. They can vary from 1 to 10, or even 15, for all crops. Such underachievement in production can be put down to a lack of access to production resources and losses before and after harvesting. Alongside crucial agricultural policies, plant improvement remains the main solution, combined with the evolution of growing techniques. Breeders are faced with a great many challenges, but they now have numerous tools at their disposal too. Over the past twenty years, the range of tools available to breeders has considerably grown, so that now they can accelerate breeding generations, better characterize genetic resources, better understand the resistance of plants to diseases and insects, and better understand their behavior when confronted with a hydric deficit or a lack of nitrogen. And we must not forget genotyping, which can give efficient indications on the most interesting plants to be kept, or indeed transgenesis which can also be used to broaden genetic variability.

• The stakes for society: Meet the growing evolution of mankind's needs
• To create high-performance seeds, better adapted to different climates and soils
• To organize traced chains to ensure the authenticity of our products
• To integrate the criteria of nutrition and health into product development
• Sowers of the world : Florence