Taking these challenges into account will notably mean creating and disseminating new food crop varieties, such as rice, sorghum, sweet potato, taro and cassava, and creating new clonal varieties of forest species, particularly eucalyptus.

The development of high-throughput molecular biology and of integrative biology is helping to increase knowledge of how genetic diversity is structured, and of the physiological and genetic bases of the agronomic and quality traits that are of importance for improving these food crops. In tandem with participatory selection approaches, medium and high-throughput phenotyping tools help to guide breeding programmes in improving their efficiency.

In this context, the major scientific and technical challenge of the GIV team is to incorporate all this knowledge into schemes to create new varieties, in order to speed up genetic gains, and into schemes for their dissemination, in order to optimize the impact of those varieties in the target territories.