Bangor research (funded by the Department for International Development) demonstrated that adoption of a better-cross strategy, where rice-breeders more carefully select parental lines before crossing, improves efficiency in rice breeding. It resulted in the improved rice variety (Sunaulo-Sugandha), which provides food security and household incomes to Nepalese smallholder farmers of over GBP1,000,000 per year. Bangor’s research-success also led to a paradigm shift in the International Rice Research Institute, which adopted Bangor’s better-cross strategy in 2014 in a key project ‘Transforming Rice Breeding’. This increased efficiency of IRRI’s innovation-transfer to rice farmers globally, with a minimum estimated return of GBP36,770,000 per year in 2020.