Durum wheat is an important food crop in the world and an endemic species of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In the highlands of Ethiopia and the oases of the Sahara this crop has been cultivated for thousands of years. Today, smallholder farmers still grow it on marginal lands to assure production for their own consumption. However, durum wheat is no longer just a staple crop for food security but has become a major cash crop. In fact, the pasta, burghul and couscous industry currently purchase durum grain at prices 10 to 20% higher than that of bread wheat. Africa as a whole imports over €4 billion per year of durum grain to provide the raw material for its food industry. Hence, African farmers could obtain a substantial share of this large market by turning their production to this crop. Here, the achievements of the durum breeding program of Ethiopia are revised to reveal a steep acceleration in variety release and adoption over the last decade. Furthermore, the variety release for Mauritania and Senegal is described to show how modern breeding methods could be used to deliver grain yields above 3 t ha⁻¹ in seasons of just 92 days of length and in daytime temperatures always above 32 °C. This review describes the potential of releasing durum wheat varieties adapted to all growing conditions of SSA, from the oases of the Sahara to the highlands of Ethiopia. This indicates that the new breeding technologies offer great promise for expanding the area of durum wheat production in SSA but that this achievement remains primarily dependent on the market ability to purchase these grains at a higher price to stimulate farmer adoption. The critical importance of connecting all actors along the semolina value chain is presented in the example of Oromia, Ethiopia and that success story is then used to prompt a wider discussion on the potential of durum wheat as a crop for poverty reduction in Africa.

Droughts will increase in frequency, intensity, duration, and spread under climate change. Drought affects numerous sectors in society and the natural environment, including short-term reduced crop production, social conflict over water allocation, severe outmigration, and eventual famine. Early action can prevent escalation of impacts, requiring drought early warning systems (DEWSs) that give current assessments and sufficient notice for active risk management. While most droughts are relatively slow in onset, often resulting in late responses, flash droughts are becoming more frequent, and their sudden onset poses challenging demands on DEWSs for timely communication. We examine several DEWSs at global, regional, and national scales, with a special emphasis on agri-food systems. Many of these have been successful, such as some of the responses to 2015–2017 droughts in Africa and Latin America. Successful examples show that early involvement of stakeholders, from DEWS development to implementation, is crucial. In addition, regional and global cooperation can cross-fertilize with new ideas, reduce reaction time, and raise efficiency. Broadening partnerships also includes recruiting citizen science and including seemingly subjective indigenous knowledge that can improve monitoring, data collection, and uptake of response measures. More precise and more useful DEWSs in agri-food systems will prove even more cost-effective in averting the need for emergency responses, improving global food security.

Hybrid‐enabled line profiling (HELP) is a new integrated breeding strategy for self‐fertilizing crops that combines existing and recently identified elements, resulting in a strategy that synergistically exceeds existing breeding concepts. Heterosis in selfing crops is often driven by additive and additive × additive gene action, the molecular basis of which is increasingly being revealed. Unlike nonadditive heterosis, additive forms can be relatively easily fixed in homozygous lines, meaning that their seed can simply be resown to express the same “heterosis.” Crossing diverse, complementary “selfing” parents to create the desired trait or allele line profile requires strict male sterility of the female; this can now be achieved relatively easily through present and emerging chemical, environmental, or genetic techniques. Fairly small amounts of hybrid seed are needed, with no need to scale up seed production, as it is not the hybrid that will be commercialized. After multilocation testing, homozygous lines from only the most superior hybrids, driven mainly by additive effects and additive × additive gene action, are rapidly derived using techniques such as doubled haploids. Multilocation testing and molecular confirmation of target line profiles then identify superior lines for release to farmers. The HELP strategy integrates modern high‐throughput versions of existing and new concepts and methodologies into a breeding system strategy that focuses on the most superior crosses, <10% of all crosses. This focus results in significant increases in efficiency and can reverse the edible yield plateauing seen or feared in some of our major selfing food crops.

Climate change creates challenges for wild species, but plants have survived and adapted to similar changes in their evolutionary past. Most plants were originally outcrossing, one theoretical genetic reason being that self-fertilization does not create novel recombinants that allow adaptation. Thus selfing seems an evolutionary “dead end”. Nevertheless, self-fertilizing plants make up 14% of seed plant species. We offer a new interpretation of a response by self-fertilizing wild species to extreme existential threats, which creates novel recombinant progeny. This proposed mechanism goes beyond reproductive assurance, the usual explanation of selfing. Extreme stress, such as excessive heat within a specific window, first makes plants male-sterile, while female organs remain functional and can receive wind-borne pollen from any of the few nearby stress-tolerant individuals. Thus stress-induced male sterility enables and/or enhances outcrossing in selfing plants. Although in practice this proposed mechanism requires very special circumstances and operates only in certain species with conducive floral traits, we posit that over evolutionary time even such rare events can make a significant lasting impact on a species’ survival in changing conditions. This proposed mechanism, which we call Diversity Assurance, allows a population subject to severe stress to sample preferentially those genes that underpin tolerance to that specific stress. These genes are then recombined in subsequent generations, along with the male-sterility-under-stress trait of the female parent. This contributes in part to explain the effective evolution and hence persistence of self-fertilizing species. Diversity Assurance, we propose, is an adaptive mechanism that has been selected under extreme stress, underpinned by a simple loss-of-function of the male reproductive system. It may be triggered not only by heat, but also by other stressors. This proposed mechanism helps to explain why even highly self-fertilizing plant species remain able to respond to environmental changes through triggered outcrossing.