Revised Market Segmentation for Spring Wheat—Achieving Alignment Between ICARDA and CIMMYT

By Agnes Gitonga and Wuletaw Tadesse

The initial seed product market segmentation exercise, led by the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding (EiB) platform, aimed to aid the design of center-specific pipeline investment cases. Therefore, each CGIAR center presented its set of seed product market segments (SPMSs) for every region in which it had active breeding efforts. This resulted in duplication of segments in the initial version of the SPMS Database because of more than one center working on the same crop in the same subregion. The CGIAR initiative on Market Intelligence has been working with centers targeting the same crop in a particular subregion to have a common “crop view” (as opposed to ‘center view”). The benefits of having a crop view include:

• Objective crop prioritization at a subregion level based on accurate market view as a result of acreage alignment, which resolves challenges caused by duplication
• Alignment of target product profiles (TPPs), thus addressing farmer, consumer, and processor needs in each prioritized market segment within a subregion
• Clarity on SPMSs being served as well as those that have been overlooked

Recent experiences with spring wheat provide an illustration of how to achieve a crop view of segmentation. In this case, there was duplication of market segments with each subregion—one set provided by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) and one by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). The market segment sets from both centers tended to reflect current breeding pipelines more than farmers’ requirements in terms of where and how the crop is grown and what this crop is used for. This led to similar market segments with different names based on different approaches to how certain criteria were applied, e.g., production environment. It was therefore important to have a uniform approach to application of the eight market segmentation criteria (see Market Intelligence Brief #1).

The CGIAR Initiative on Market Intelligence, together with ICARDA and CIMMYT, worked to resolve this issue. Below are the common spring wheat market segments identified for the target subregions.