Opportunities and challenges for improving a Colombian public research program in plant breeding and plant genetic resources lead by Agrosavia

Agrosavia (Corporación Colombiana de Investigación Agropecuaria) is the Colombian state institution in charge of the agricultural research at the national level, including plant breeding. Since 2014, Agrosavia started to increase its research staff and has reset the leadership of public research to solve the needs of the agricultural sector population, focusing on small producers. However, the current team working on plant breeding and plant genetic resources are facing some challenges associated with generation gaps and the lack of a collaborative working plan for the next years. To identify the opportunities and actions in this research area, we surveyed all the 52 researchers working in Agrosavia in this area in 2017. We analyzed the opinions of researchers to detect the strengths and weaknesses of the program using a sentiment score. We also examined the networking to test both how consolidated the group is and if among top leaders are gender parity and also have a higher academic degree. Results showed that there is a mixed community of old and new researchers with clear gender bias in the proportion of male-female. Within the network, the interactions are weak, with several subgroups where the top-ten of both central leaders and the most influencer are frequently males with mostly an M.Sc. degree but with significant experience in the area. Researchers have an interest in 31 crops. From them, 26 are in the national germplasm bank, but this bank is not the primary source for their breeding programs. The top-five of plants with increasing interest are corn, cocoa tree, golden berries, oil palm, and sugarcane. Researchers also want to establish collaborations with 54 different institutions, where the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, which is the top public university in the country, is on the head. Researchers also perceived weaknesses in the marker-assisted selection, experimental design, and participatory plant breeding, but those criticisms have a positive sentiment score average of 1.55 (0.3 SE) across 31 texts analyzed. Based on all results, we identified five critical strategic principles to improve the plant-breeding research program. They include a gender diversity policy to hire new researchers strategically to reduce the gender gap and strength the generational shift. Better collaboration between the national germplasm bank and plant breeding research. A coordinate plan where the studies focus on food security crops that the government supports independently of market trends. And finally, adequate spaces for the project’s design and training programs. Hence, we recommend the creation of a consultant group to implement these policies progressively in the next years.

Finally, section (2) had an open question asking for comments or suggestions to improve the PB&PGR 145 group in the future. Because we got 31 different answers, we made a corpus text mining analysis that 146 included a sentiment analysis and a word cloud. The first step was to translate the 31 texts from Spanish to 147 English using the free software DEEPL (https://www.deepl.com/translator) and reviewed by hand securing 148 the automatic translation was the closest possible to the original meaning. Then, we cleaned the corpus 149 under the R-function GSUB and the R-package TM 0.7-7 to remove punctuations, numbers, empty spaces, 150 stopwords, and a list of words associated with the workplace and research area (i.e., AGROSAVIA, plant 151 breeding, plant genetic resources, etc.). Finally, using the R-package STRINGR 1.4.0, we broke each text into 152 its characters to compare them with a positive and a negative list of words [10,11]. Both the positive and 153 negative words identified weight one. Thus, we generated a sentiment score for each text subtracting the 154 number of negative words from the number of positive words count. If the score was positive, the opinion 155 has a positive sentiment. But, if the score was negative, the sense of the text is negative. We calculated the 156 average and the standard error of the sentiment score across the 31 opinions. Moreover, we generated a 157 word cloud based on the 30 most frequent words across the corpus under the R-package WORDCLOUD 2. research interest (i.e., more researchers interested in future projects than currently working on them), three 222 species with equal importance between past and future research plans and nine species with decreased 223 interest (i.e., few researchers interested in future projects than currently working on them) (Fig. 2).

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Although the National Germplasm bank conserves 26 of the 31 species from the list, the survey showed 225 that this germplasm bank, also administered by AGROSAVIA, is not the primary focus of pre-breeding and 226 breeding programs. The 37% (N=19) of the researchers have never used the germplasm bank, and 40% 227 (N=21) have used once or twice in the last ten years ( The top-ten of influencer researchers are more diverse (i.e., a broader range of years of experience in the 270 area, and three external researchers in the authorities list). However, similar to the degree score, they are 271 mostly men (i.e., N=8 in both groups) typically with an M.Sc degree (i.e., eigh and six for hubs and 272 authorities, respectively). Spite of females are a minority as influencers; a female researcher got the top 273 score in both hubs and authorities top-ten researchers ( Fig. 8C and 8D investigative journey has allowed them to expand the number of colleagues with whom they interact.

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Despite this, the research community is not well consolidated yet. Direct collaboration is scarce, and 327 therefore, it was evident the existence of loosely connected clusters with rare collaborations outside of these 328 subgroups. (Fig. 8). Although AGROSAVIA needs to focus on these key actors (nodes) as the best way to 329 communicate and transfer innovation within the entire PB&PGR network, the main obstacle is that these 330 identified leaders are close to their retirement age in the next four years.

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The network analysis also showed that AGROSAVIA researchers maintain strong links with many external 333 researchers not included in the survey. This result suggests that those foreign actors are influential 334 consultants for the design of a breeding program strategy. Therefore, the collaborative agreements that 335 AGROSAVIA is constructing with several institutions inside and outside the country must encourage the 336 formulation of projects that allow them to maintain and strengthen these known external collaborations.

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Finally, this analysis allowed us to identify productive isolated groups of young researchers that are in the 338 periphery of the network, but that in the future should be in the center of the system, leading projects.

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The data collected in this study strongly support the urgency to construct a gender diversity policy 341 combined with a generation shift program in the PB&PGR area. Currently, AGROSAVIA is a flourishing 342 national institution for agronomic research. Therefore, it is essential that within a gender diversity policy, encourage more interactions among older researchers, characterized by their leadership and commitment, interests for current and future research: 1) tropical fruits for international markets and 2) food sovereignty 368 and food security (Fig. 2). However, results also show that there is not a direct relationship between