Blight decimated the chickpea crop in the Punjab village of Kot Sarang a decade or so ago. Farmers were reluctant to plant it again.

But breeders from Pakistan’s National Agricultural Research Center found types of chickpea in the National Genebank of Pakistan that had some resistance to the blight. The breeders planted those chickpeas in Kot Sarang and sure enough they had some blight tolerance. So, the farmers are now growing chickpeas again.

I joined those breeders and staff from the National Genebank to pay those farmers a visit and see their chickpeas. Chickpeas are a winter crop in Pakistan but the farmers of Kot Sarang had already sown their chickpeas and they had germinated already. They showed us two fields of chickpeas which would be used to produce seed, which they could then distribute via their community seedbank to farmers in other communities who were keen to get back to growing chickpeas.