Breeding of Spice and Plantation Crops

The title looks attractive but the breeding programmes cannot be carried out as our vegetable crops or other field crops due to various problems associated with genetic analysis, variety/hybrid development, inbred development in plantation crops. This book made an attempt to compile all such basic information for important spice and plantation crops. It consists of 21 chapters including question bank, of which 14 chapters meant for specific crops and rest 6 chapters for basic information such as history of breeding, centres of origin, hybridization, clonal selection, polyploidy breeding and molecular breeding for spice and plantation crops. This book covered with detailed issues like importance of breeding, botany of the crop, genetic resources of the crop, genetics of the crop, inheritance pattern of the important economic traits of the crop, breeding objectives, breeding methods v i z selection, hybridization etc and various varieties or hybrids achieved in each of the spice and plantation crops. The specific crops are coconut, arecanut, cashew, coffee, tea, betel vine, oil palm, cocoa, black pepper, cardamom, zinger, turmeric, coriander, nutmeg and cinnamon.