Melhoramento participativo na seleção de cultivares de soja para a agricultura familiar em Moçambique

Abstract

The African continent contributes less than 2% of global soybean production. The low production is a consequence of factors such as the use of cultivars with low yields (non-improved), the use of non-certified seeds, associated with inadequate cultural practices for crop management, as well as the absence of improvement programs with clear and defined objectives. In Africa, most of the time, the new cultivars are little used, as they are developed outside the edaphoclimatic and socio-economic conditions of the producers. In Mozambique, demand for soybeans exceeds production, which is strongly driven by the poultry industry and cooking oil extraction. However, there are only 11 recommended soybean cultivars in the country. PPB is a process whereby breeders, producers and other stakeholders are actively involved in the breeding program, with opportunities to make joint decisions throughout the process. Thus, the objective was to select soybean cultivars adapted to family farming in Mozambique, using participatory breeding. The experiments were established in the provinces of Zambézia and Tete in the 2021/2022 season. Two approaches were considered, research improvement and participatory improvement in the latter, producers selected cultivars visually based on a questionnaire. Analyzes of variance for the evaluated characteristics were performed using the statistical software "R" version 4.1. It was found that: when selecting a cultivar, producers pay more attention to characteristics such as productivity, diseases, grain size and plant size, and breeders pay more attention to productivity, cycle and biomass. The TGX2014 16FM cultivar selected by the producers has an acceptance percentage of around 15%. The coincidence index between the two approaches was -29.41%, showing that there is coincidence between the approaches, however, the negative sign indicates the difference in ranking in each method. The coincidence resulted in the selection of about 6 cultivars namely: TGX 2014 16FM, SC Signal, TGX 2002 35FM, O253, SC SEMEKI and SC Saga.