Advances and strategies for improving genetic gain in tea breeding programs.
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What if spending $15 per seedling could tell you—with 70% accuracy—whether that plant would become a high-yielding bush, years before you invested in field trials?
That’s not science fiction. It’s the reality of genomic selection, and it’s reshaping the economics of crop improvement worldwide. The question is: why isn’t tea keeping up?
Tea is a $50 billion global industry that sustains millions of smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa. It is part of the cultural and economic fabric of nations such as Kenya, India, and China.
Yet beneath that success lies a growing concern: the rate of genetic improvement in tea is far too slow to match the pace of environmental change.
At present, developing and releasing a new tea variety takes more than 16 years—from the first cross to farmers’ fields. Sixteen years in a rapidly changing climate is an eternity.