Chickpea Breeding and Crop Improvement in Ethiopia: Past, Present and the Future

This review paper reflects the retrospective and prospective of chickpea breeding in Ethiopia in time course of the last five decades. The full-fledged chickpea breeding in Ethiopia started in the 1970s, by just collection, characterization and evaluation among hundreds of local desi accessions for the key yield limiting challenges of the crop production. Among key challenges include soil wilt-root rot complex, inherent low productivity of accessions, ascochyta blight, pod borer, storage pest, terminal drought, and shriveled seed size. Nonetheless efforts combining the multiple objectives and disciples, and partners together have shade in the enhancement of more than tens of thousands of germplasms flows, inter and intra-accession breeding, vital trait of interest transfer between or among candidate lines. Marker assisted breeding and interspecific hybridization with Cicer spp (C. reticulatum and C. echinospermum) are being employed as tools in trait of interest introgression and/or germplasm pool enrichment for immediate future use. The breeding technical efficiency have also been in progress in handling complex of derived population to enhance probability of progressive genetic gain explained through super variety development from germplasm lines, that changed chickpea production and productivity landscape. Ethiopian chickpea has enjoyed by the Kabuli types joined since mid-1980s and accelerates over the desi types due to some peculiar traits (AB-resistance, taste, seed texture etc) liked by the market and consumers. Hence, in its age of breeding, 23 super performing varieties released in both types, yield have been quadrupled from 700kg/ha, seed size tripled from 11g/100seed, market volume and values improved significantly, income per unit area has more than tripled, area expansion almost doubled.