CIMMYT and Cornell University-led initiative aims to strengthen disease resistance in wheat across South Asia and East Africa through global research, breeding and field-testing collaboration

CIMMYT and Cornell University have launched the Global Wheat Health Alliance (GWHA), a multinational research partnership designed to strengthen disease resistance in wheat and protect global food supplies from rapidly evolving fungal threats.

The alliance, established under the broader Disease-Resistant Wheat Hybrids Initiative known as HyBread, will connect gene discovery, field testing and pre-emptive breeding efforts to accelerate the development of wheat varieties and hybrids with stronger resistance to major crop diseases.

The initiative comes amid rising concern over fungal pathogens including stem rust, yellow rust, wheat blast and Fusarium head blight, which researchers say are increasingly threatening wheat production in South Asia and East Africa — regions that collectively account for nearly one quarter of the world’s wheat-growing area and produce around 170 million tonnes annually.

Wheat remains the world’s second most widely cultivated crop, grown across more than 220 million hectares globally and serving as a dietary staple for billions of people.

Researchers warned that fast-evolving pathogens are undermining improved wheat varieties and breeding populations, putting decades of agricultural progress at risk and heightening concerns around long-term food security.

The Global Wheat Health Alliance is designed to move disease resistance technologies more rapidly from laboratories into breeding pipelines and ultimately into farmers’ fields.

Under the programme, field-testing sites in Kenya, Mexico, Bolivia, Bangladesh and Ethiopia will evaluate thousands of wheat lines under high disease pressure, while research institutions contribute resistance genes, gene-editing mutants and molecular markers to accelerate selection and breeding.

Over the next three years, the alliance plans to generate large-scale disease phenotyping data, develop wheat lines with stacked resistance against multiple major diseases and train at least 100 scientists in disease evaluation and resistance breeding techniques.

Within the broader HyBread initiative, GWHA is expected to provide the disease-resistance foundation required for the successful development and commercial deployment of hybrid wheat varieties.

The alliance brings together a global network of agricultural research institutions with complementary expertise.

CIMMYT will lead disease screening, wheat breeding and global germplasm distribution efforts, while the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, housed at Cornell University, will oversee scientific coordination, capacity building and research collaboration.

The John Innes Centre and the University of Maryland will contribute expertise in gene discovery, mapping and gene-editing technologies.

National agricultural research institutions participating in the programme include the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization, the Bangladesh Wheat and Maize Research Institute and Bolivia’s Instituto Nacional de Innovación Agropecuaria Y Forestal.

The initiative builds on more than 15 years of international collaboration under the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, which played a central role in combating Ug99, a highly virulent strain of stem rust that once raised fears of widespread crop losses across Africa and other wheat-growing regions.

The earlier programme also helped limit damage during severe rust outbreaks in Ethiopia in 2013 and 2021 and accelerated the deployment of resistant wheat varieties across vulnerable farming regions.

“The stakes are too high, and the window too narrow, for anything less than a fully coordinated global effort,” said Maricelis Acevedo, Research Professor at Cornell University’s School of Integrative Plant Science and Director for Science of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative.

“Wheat diseases do not stop at national borders, and neither can the effort to protect wheat. The GWHA brings together the world’s best science with the communities who need it most. We are not just discovering resistance genes — we are building the networks, expertise and institutional capacity needed to protect wheat for generations,” Acevedo said.

Dr Pawan Kumar Singh, Principal Scientist and Head of Wheat Pathology at CIMMYT, said accelerating disease resistance breeding has become critical as pathogens evolve more rapidly.

“The pathogens are evolving faster than ever, and varieties must evolve ahead of them,” Singh said.

“The GWHA gives us the framework to move resistance genes from the laboratory bench to the breeding pipeline to the farmer’s field in record time. By linking CIMMYT’s global breeding engine with the extraordinary gene discovery work happening at our advanced research partners, we can stay ahead of the threat,” he added.

Flavio Breseghello, who leads the broader HyBread initiative, said hybrid wheat could significantly improve productivity for smallholder farmers across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa but warned that yield gains would only be sustainable if combined with durable disease resistance.

“Every hybrid we develop must perform under the stem rust pressure of the Ethiopian highlands, the blast threat expanding across South Asia, and the Fusarium head blight risk that compromises both yield and food safety,” Breseghello said.

“By integrating the GWHA’s resistance pipeline directly into our hybrid breeding programme, we ensure that breakthrough yield gains and durable disease protection are delivered together to the farmers who need them most,” he added.

The GWHA workstream under HyBread has received $2.7 million in funding support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.