2nd International Wheat Congress (2022)

September 12–15, 2022, the 2nd International Wheat Congress was successfully convened in Beijing in a hybrid format (online and onsite), providing a platform for global exchange and collaboration. 952 wheat researchers and industry representatives from 67 countries participated. The congress was co-hosted by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and CGIAR, and co-organized by the Crop Science Society of China (CSSC), ICS-CAAS, and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).

Under the theme “Future Wheat: Resilience and Sustainability,” discussions spanned six focal areas—diversity, evolution and germplasm resources; genome architecture of the Triticeae and functional genomics; breeding and new technologies; crop management under climate change; biotic and abiotic stress resistance and physiology; and processing quality, nutrition and human health. The scientific program comprised 16 plenary and invited sessions, 18 thematic sessions, 16 early-career forum sessions, 254 posters, and 474 abstracts, sharing the latest advances in international wheat research and proposing future directions for research, technology, and application. The congress called for establishing a global mechanism for the sharing and exchange of crop germplasm resources, advancing multi-environment, precision phenotyping for crops such as wheat, elucidating the molecular bases of key traits, and enabling a new green revolution in the discovery and application of gene resources.

The successful convening of the congress strengthens exchange and cooperation between China’s wheat research and industry communities and their international counterparts, enhances the international collaboration and innovation capacity of China’s wheat-research teams, and promotes technological progress and the overall development of the wheat industry.