To coincide with the State of the World’s Plants Symposium, which starts today, Kew have just dropped a monumental report of the same name, complete with fancy website. Nice to see crop wild relatives get a decent amount of space (p. 21) in the section on useful plants. Oh, and the report and symposium come along with some good funding news for Kew.
Speaking of funding for crop wild relatives:
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) today announced a five-year partnership to provide funding to broaden the scope of The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This will significantly increase knowledge on the extinction risk of more than 28,000 species, including many that are key food sources for a significant portion of the global population.
…
IUCN experts have chosen to focus much of the newly funded research on the populations of plants and fish that billions of people depend on as a vital source of food. These will include species of wild rice and wheat that are crucial to food security because they are the source of genetic material used to increase the yield, fertility and resistance to disease of staple crops produced by farmers across the world.
Don’t see any of this happening even a few years back. Do you?
Prof Kathy Willis @kewgardens @KewScience putting #plants on the map #SOTWP pic.twitter.com/g45pTxZPfk
— David Cope (@DrDrCope) May 11, 2016
Problem is that the report (it’s a good one otherwise) does not mention crop landraces – up to now far more used and useful than CWRs in actual plant breeding and far more threatened with extiction. The target of CWRs for Climate Change is also a bit off target. Most USDA samples are requested for biotic reasons – resistance to pests and disease: twice as many as for abiotic (climate and soil problems).
The IUCN target is to be expected – they are always looking for reasons for yet more nature reserves and CWRs are an ideal excuse. Pity these nature reserves kick farmers off their land (and, of course, their landraces are then lost). IUCN will also go for rare and endangered species rather than the common, widespread (ecologically tolerant), even weedy, and far more useful CWR species that are in no way endangered.
There needs to be a rethink (and some feedback from actual use) on the ecology and distribution of individual CWR species. We may find that common = good and rare = rubbish.
And not all characters from CWRs are usable. The five decades of attempts to breed arcelin from wild relatives into common bean has not resulted in any released varieties (in any case, arcelin is a human toxin, like very may of the `genetic bottleneck’ characters that early farmers got rid of – after goodness knows how may human deaths from CWR toxins).