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Salvatore Ceccarelli: Plant Breeder, Mentor, and Farmers' Friend

Stefania Grando

Ascoli Piceno, Italy

ABSTRACT

Salvatore Ceccarelli is a geneticist, plant breeder, innovator, mentor, and farmers' friend with over 50 years of dedicated work to agricultural research for development. His major contributions have been in the development of breeding methodologies for barley and other important crops for the livelihoods of resource poor farming community in marginal environments. After a career in academia in Italy, in 1980 Salvatore moved to ICARDA, based in Aleppo, Syria, initially as a forage breeder and later as a barley breeder and manager of the barley improvement program until he left the center over 30 years later. It was while at ICARDA that he developed and adopted a new breeding strategy, based on decentralized selection for specific adaptation, a drastic departure from the dominant philosophy in plant breeding based on wide adaptation. A further development of this strategy was the idea of PPB, initially implemented in Syria and later extended to other Middle East countries, North Africa, Horn of Africa, and more recently to Italy, accompanied by a continuous refinement in experimental techniques and statistical analysis. When Salvatore recognized the limitation of PPB to ensure a continuous flow of new material to farmers, he proposed the use of EPPB to adapt crops to their specific environment and to climate change, while providing diversity for farmers to manage. His breeding program distributed new barley material to farmers worldwide and to numerous research institutions for basic and applied research, and generated information and methodologies to establish breeding programs for difficult and stressful environments. He has published over 270 scientific articles and been invited to countless national and international events. He has collaborated with researchers and mentored breeders and technicians from around the world, helped establishing participatory breeding programs in several countries, supervised 25 MSc and PhD students, and conducted courses on participatory and evolutionary plant breeding in numerous countries. In 2017, he returned to Italy and continued to work as a consultant in national and international projects, which brings that decision-making process and seed ownership back in the hands of farmers. He is currently involved in projects in Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iran, Jordan, Nepal, Uganda, and Europe.

KEYWORDS: Decentralized breeding; participatory breeding; evolutionary breeding;

OUTLINE:

1. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH AND BACKGROUND
2. RESEARCH
3. THE MAN
4. THE MENTOR AND INSPIRER
5. THE INNOVATOR
6. THE SUPPORTER OF NATIONAL PROGRAMS
7. THE ADVOCATE OF FARMERS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LITERATURE CITED

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS OF SALVATORE CECCARELLI

ABBREVIATIONS

BLUP

best linear unbiased predictor

EP

evolutionary population

EPB

evolutionary plant breeding

EPPB

evolutionary participatory plant breeding

GEI

genotype x environment interactions

ICARDA

International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas

IFAD

International Fund for Agricultural Development

ILRI

International Livestock Research Institute

PPB

participatory plant breeding

I. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH AND BACKGROUND

Dr Salvatore Ceccarelli was born on September 7, 1941, in Fiume, today Rijeka in Croatia. At the outbreak of World War II, the family moved to central Italy, where he grew up with solid values of respect, personal responsibility, and accountability, and a strong commitment to perform to the best of his capabilities in the studies and all he was doing. He also developed a profound sense of curiosity and a desire to discover new things and come up with new ideas.

After graduating from high school with the highest grades, Salvatore decided to undertake agricultural studies and enrolled in the degree course in agricultural sciences at the University of Perugia. He studied a range of subjects related to agricultural sciences from soil physics and chemistry, to biochemistry, botany, agronomy, animal and crop husbandry, hydrology, and plant breeding. In 1964, he graduated in Agricultural Sciences with the dissertation "Morphological traits and nutritive value of Brachypodium pinnatum L."

From 1965 to 1967 he attended the Advanced Specialization Course on Applied Genetics at the Institute of Genetics of the University of Milan. The director of the Institute was Professor Claudio Barigozzi, an Italian biologist and geneticist who had promoted genetic research in Italy since the early 1960s. During this period, Salvatore's scientific preparation focused on genetics with particular attention to quantitative genetics, selection theory, mutation, cytogenetics, statistics, and advanced plant breeding. Salvatore refers often to this period as fundamental to setting the basis for his scientific formation and as very inspirational to developing his research, teaching, and mentoring approaches. In 1967, he obtained a PhD in Applied Genetics with a dissertation on "Biometrical analysis of natural populations of Trifolium pratense" (Ceccarelli 1968).

After serving in the military (at that time, service was unavoidable), Salvatore joined the Institute of Plant Breeding of the University of Perugia as assistant professor in plant breeding. To further strength his scientific knowledge, Salvatore spent a sabbatical year, from 1973 to 1974 at the Genetics Department of North Carolina State University in Professor Charles W. Stuber's laboratory.

In 1979, while attending a meeting of the Italian Society of Agricultural Genetics, he was introduced by Professor Scarascia Mugnozza to the International Agricultural Research Centers, and in 1980 he joined the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) as senior scientist in the Pasture and Forage Improvement Program. Salvatore requested a two-year study leave from the university, keeping open the possibility of asking for an extension, but when he decided to do so, he encountered difficulties, and by the end of 1982 he went back to the University of Perugia, Italy. The following year he became associate professor in Plant Genetic Resources, and then in 1986 professor in Agricultural Genetics,

Shortly after his return to Italy, Salvatore became member of a Committee of the International Cooperation of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in charge of advising how the funds in the CGIAR system should be invested. In that role, he was invited to ICARDA for a visit that would have marked a big change in his professional and personal life. Despite his career advancements at the University of Perugia, Salvatore was very enthusiastic about his experience at ICARDA and was convinced that his knowledge could serve not only as a basis for becoming an author specialized in the field but also to make a difference in the lives of the poor and marginalized.

After some negotiation, in 1984 Salvatore again joined ICARDA as a barley breeder, a position he held until he retired in 2006. His association with the center continued until 2015 as a consultant. This period has been certainly the most prolific of his scientific career, characterized by innovative research approaches, which included the use of what in the mid- to late-1980s was considered "unconventional" germplasm. Salvatore advocated the use of landraces and wild relatives in breeding barley for adaptation to stressful environments, when most of the breeding programs around the world would consider such material as "genetic garbage." He also helped to develop a decentralized breeding approach that later evolved in a participatory breeding and more recently in evolutionary breeding.

His breeding program not only produced new barley material for distribution worldwide but also, more notably, generated information and methodologies to establish breeding programs that were facing difficult and stressful environments (Figure 1.1). The barley breeding program at ICARDA provided germplasm to numerous research institutions for both basic and applied research (some examples are Baum et al. 2003, Russell et al. 2003, Grando et al. 2005, Fufa et al. 2007, Russell et al. 2011, Varshney et al. 2010, 2012). Several of Ceccarelli's papers from this period were a source of inspiration for a number of breeders in developing countries and have been used in breeding classes in US and European universities.

Ceccarelli received the 2000 CGIAR Chairman's Excellence in Science Award for Outstanding Scientific Article on a methodological study on participatory barley breeding; the 2014 Farmers' Friend award designed and promoted by the Girolomoni Cooperative to enhance the farmers activity in Italy and around the world; and the 2015 Bologna Sustainability and Food International Award.

In 2017, he returned to Italy and continued to work as a consultant to both national and international projects, promoting the development of breeding methodologies, such as evolutionary plant breeding, that will bring the decision-making process and seed ownership back in the hands of...