Chickpea

Chickpea is an important pulse crop, cultivated on about 18Mha worldwide, and is both a critical diet component for large populations of semiarid tropical climate and one of the most beneficial crops for farming systems’ sustainable productivity. Chickpea originates from a fairly narrow centre of origin, that is, the middle East Anatolia, although it enjoys large variation in its wild ancestors. As a cultigen, it has adapted to extremely varied cropping systems, either as a winter crop in tropical environments to a spring crop in more temperate climates, requiring in each case adaptive traits such as photoperiod sensitivity, or tolerance to cold, or Aeschochyta blight. In this chapter, we outline opportunities to meet the main challenges of chickpea adaptation to stresses, including heat, drought, and salinity, to improve agronomic management, to develop new plant types towards harvest mechanisation, and to increase quality standards to cater for the renewed interest on nutrition.