Chapter 9 - Chickpea

Abstract

Chickpea, the second most important pulse crop, delivers multiple benefits to farming systems—a lower footprint with reduced use of synthetic nitrogen and soil improvements, and enhanced livestock and human health due to its superior dietary quality with valuable proteins, minerals, vitamins, and fibers. However, if chickpea is to fully deliver these benefits, the crops need greater productivity and resilience to a changing climate. If realized, chickpea has much potential to contribute to the growing food demand of our global family and address the problem of undernourishment in developing countries of Asia and Africa. Tremendous progress has been made over the past decade on removing the bottleneck of narrow genetic diversity by broadening the genetic base of cultivated chickpeas through the incorporation of crop wild relatives and landraces. However, increases in chickpea productivity have been slow with average yields of about 1t/ha, stagnated or threatened by multiple biotic and abiotic stresses. To boost productivity and global production, improved cultivars have to be bred and developed with resistance to region-specific diseases and environmental stresses. Recent developments have capitalized on modern genomic tools and enabled implementing successful genomics-assisted breeding of improved cultivars adapted to biotic and abiotic stresses in various environments, and these can yield up to >2t/ha. This chapter provides an overview of chickpea’s nutritional profile, current production constraints, crop phenology, genetic improvement, genomic resources, cropping systems, seed systems as well as web-based resources for current and future chickpea improvement programs.