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Many varieties of Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB) developed by national and international breeding programs (cassava, sweet potato, yam, cooking banana, potato) have serious problems of acceptability and adoption by the main actors in RTB value chains in Africa.

This five-year project (Oct 2017-2022) aims to identify essential quality traits for users and consumers across a wide range of basic food products (12 products) and to establish Varietal selection methods, integrating a high-throughput screening by spectral analysis of these quality traits to meet the expectations of users.

RTBfoods is funding by Bill & Melinda Gates Fondation (8.30 millions US $) for a total budget of 13.88 millions US $ and is coordinated by Dominique Dufour (CIRAD Montpellier, UMR QUALISUD). It involves many partners in 13 different countries:

BIOVERSITY (Belgium, France), BOWEN U (Nigeria), CARBAP (Cameroon), CNRA (Ivory Coast), CIAT (Colombia), CIP (Peru, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya), CIRAD (France, Benin, Colombia), IITA (Nigeria; Cameroon, Ouganda), INRA (France), JHI (Scotland), NACCRI (Ouganda), NARL (Ouganda), NRCRI (Nigeria).

These multidisciplinary research teams of social scientists and food technologists, in chemometrics, plant breeding, genetics and disclosure will work together to achieve this goal. This RTBfoods project is coordinated by CIRAD (Dominique Dufour, UMR QUALISUD). INRA intervenes both for the production and development of new yam varieties (Guadeloupe) and for the understanding of textural evolutions during cooking and grinding processes, and in particular the role of pectins and polyphenols (Avignon).

Integrating complex quality traits into breeding schemes should lead to better varietal adoption rates while lowering breeding costs and improving the standard of living for producers and users of RTB in subtropical Africa.