Overview

The goals of the project are to develop and disseminate highly desirable groundnut cultivars with resistance to groundnut rosette disease (GRD) and drought tolerance to groundnut growing countries of SSA and to educate farmers on the use of the resistant cultivars with appropriate cultural practices to develop a management program against GRD. GRD-resistant cultivars from the ongoing breeding program will be evaluated for their performance against a range of variants of GRD-inducing agents in a variety of ecological zones of Uganda. In situations where the resistant cultivars are not acceptable or not preferred, the goal is to breed GRD resistance into agronomically acceptable varieties. GRD-resistant cultivars previously released will also be used for breeding resistance into preferred varieties. Preferred cultivars with GRD resistance, and drought tolerance, will be disseminated throughout the region. The long-term goal is that GRD-resistant cultivars will eventually be available to all ecological zones of SSA and along with appropriate cultural practices will result in the development of a sustainable disease management program against GRD throughout SSA. The drought tolerance trait will be retained so the crop will be less susceptible to drought during the end of the growing season. This later trait also results in reduced aflatoxin contamination and, thusly, provides for higher quality and healthier groundnuts.