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Figure 1. 

Transform cassava breeding through inbred-parent-based hybrid breeding. Currently, there are five products in global cassava production: 1) cassava with high dry matter yield; 2) cassava with good cooking quality for human consumption; 3) cassava with high beta-carotene for human consumption; 4) cassava with specialty starch, e.g., waxy starch and small granule starch; 5) cassava with good processing quality for granulated and paste products for human consumption. Using conventional recurrent selection with heterozygous parents, to meet the unique needs of each product, breeding programs need to manage separate breeding populations to select the essential desired traits (left panel). The right panel shows the product development model using inbred-parent-based hybrid breeding. Instead of evaluating separated large populations for different products, breeders will manage one foundation breeding population, coupled with several separate line conversion pipelines to reformulate hybrids to address the unique needs of other products. Moreover, compared with the five full-time equivalent (FTEs) to manage five separate populations, the new product development model only needs 3.5 FTEs, with 1.5 FTEs for the foundation population and 0.5 FTEs for each line conversion pipeline. DM, dry matter; BC, Beta-carotene; CQ, cooking quality; WX, waxy starch; SG, small granule starch; PQ, processing quality; CBB, cassava bacterial blight; CMD, cassava mosaic disease; CBSD, cassava brown streak disease.