IN Brief:
- COLiBRI brings together 17 organisations from Europe’s crop-breeding research and commercial sectors.
- The project will develop a research roadmap, implementation strategy, and framework for future cooperation.
- Priorities include climate resilience, biodiversity, food security, skills, infrastructure, and access to breeding technology.
The Julius Kühn Institute has hosted the launch of COLiBRI, a Horizon Europe project that will develop a coordinated research and innovation roadmap for crop breeding across the continent.
Seventeen organisations from research, plant breeding, seed production, academia, and technology have joined the programme, which began with a meeting in Berlin on 8 and 9 July. The project is scheduled to run until November 2028.
COLiBRI will map existing breeding research, infrastructure, funding, skills, and technical gaps before producing a European roadmap and implementation strategy. A framework for a future pan-European plant-breeding network and funding mechanism will also be developed.
The programme will cover climate resilience, crop diversity, biodiversity, food and nutritional security, high-value crops, bulk commodities, data, and access to advanced breeding technologies. Its work is intended to connect public research priorities with the requirements of breeders, farmers, processors, and the wider bioeconomy.
Crop breeding shapes industrial performance long after seed leaves the breeding programme. Protein content, kernel hardness, starch structure, oil composition, enzyme activity, colour, flavour, moisture tolerance, and contaminant susceptibility all influence how crops behave during storage and processing.
Varieties selected mainly for field yield can perform differently in milling, malting, baking, fermentation, extraction, or fractionation. Manufacturers need raw materials that remain within specification despite variable weather and changing growing conditions.
Climate pressure reaches factory specifications
Heat, drought, flooding, altered growing seasons, and changing pest pressure are already affecting crop yield and composition. Factory controls can compensate for some variation, but they cannot fully correct raw material that arrives with unsuitable protein quality, damaged starch, excessive moisture, or increased contamination.
Breeding programmes must therefore combine agricultural resilience with processing functionality. A drought-tolerant variety may still require acceptable baking, malting, crushing, or extraction performance, while stronger disease resistance cannot come at the cost of flavour, nutritional quality, or storage stability.
Closer exchange between breeders and processors could bring industrial data into variety development earlier. Millers, maltsters, oilseed crushers, starch producers, ingredient companies, and food manufacturers hold detailed information on how crops behave after harvest, yet those results are not always integrated into breeding priorities.
Digital phenotyping, genomic selection, sensor systems, automation, gene editing, and large-scale data analysis can shorten selection cycles and allow breeders to examine more complex combinations of traits. Access remains uneven, particularly between major commercial groups, smaller breeders, and public institutes.
Shared standards and trial networks would make it easier to compare performance across countries and climates. Without compatible data, results from one programme may be difficult to combine with another even when both address the same crop and trait.
The wider effort to increase European production of protein crops and oilseeds will depend partly on varieties that deliver reliable yield and processing quality. Additional hectares provide limited security if the harvested crop does not meet the specifications required by feed, food, and ingredient processors.
Research coordination meets regulatory uncertainty
Breeding technology is developing faster than parts of the regulatory framework governing commercial use. European policy on new genomic techniques will determine which methods can be deployed, how resulting varieties are assessed, and whether smaller organisations can absorb the compliance costs.
COLiBRI cannot settle those political questions, although its research can strengthen the technical evidence available to regulators. Clear information will be needed on the type of genetic change, environmental performance, traceability, detection, and the distinction between different breeding methods.
Skills present another constraint because modern breeding requires genetics, plant pathology, agronomy, data science, automation, bioinformatics, and field-trial expertise. Competition for those capabilities extends across pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, software, and other research-intensive industries.
Infrastructure also requires long-term investment. Controlled environments, field-trial networks, sequencing facilities, phenotyping platforms, data systems, and seed collections cannot be created quickly when a new threat or climatic pressure emerges.
Commercial results will take years to reach farms and processing plants because variety development is followed by trials, registration, seed multiplication, adoption, and changes to purchasing specifications. Decisions made through the project will therefore influence the raw-material base available during the next decade rather than the next harvest.
COLiBRI’s first test will be whether its roadmap is detailed enough to influence funding and cooperation across national boundaries. The longer-term measure will be a broader range of crops that remain practical to grow and predictable to process as European production conditions become more volatile.
