USAID Climate Resilient Beans

Welcome to the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Climate Resilient Beans, a USAID project led by Dr. Jonathan Lynch. The project mission is to integrate phenomics, genomics, and accelerated breeding programs to produce more resilient, productive bean varieties for smallholder farmers.

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) is an essential crop in developing regions of the world, yet yields are increasingly reduced by abiotic stresses, such as drought, heat, and low soil fertility. In the past, breeding for stress-tolerant beans depended on costly, ineffective yield trials. Now, scientific advances present opportunities to accelerate these important breeding efforts. This project seeks to integrate cross-disciplinary research, from targeted trait selection and marker-assisted breeding to dissemination technologies, to develop and release new locally adapted bean varieties with greater tolerance to drought and heat stress, for rural communities in Eastern and Southern Africa, Central American, and the Caribbean.