AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, has announced buckets of cash for two universities to train plant breeders. Students in Ghana and South Africa will learn about locally important crops. From the press release:
“A PhD student training in Europe might look for valuable DNA sequences in wheat. An African scientist whose country has no wheat production and no DNA labs will not be equipped to face the challenges of developing local food crops when they go home,†said Prof. Eric Danquah, director of WACCI at the University of Ghana, Legon.
Most of the crops important to Africa—such as cassava, sorghum, millet, plantain, and cowpea—the so-called “orphan crops,†are of little importance to researchers and educators in the developed world. As a result, there is a serious shortage of breeders of these crops. For example, there are under a dozen millet breeders in all of Africa. Yet millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa depend on millet as an important part of their diet. Conversely, most of the more than US$35 billion invested by private firms in agricultural research is concentrated in North America and Europe, on a handful of commercially important crops.
I think this is excellent news. I wonder, though, how much these students will learn about the importance of diversity, within and among the crops. AGRA and its sponsors have had a distressing tendency to think in terms of single silver bullets, and that — unlike 120 PhD plant breeders of orphan crops, in not what Africa needs at all.
Plant genetic resources are like all things of value. There’s supply and there’s demand. Supply comes from farmers, via genebanks. Demand comes from farmers too, via breeders and others. Training scores of new breeders will surely increase demand, and that’s great. But I worry about the supply side. Where is the concomitant surge in training of germplasm collectors, genebank curators, documentation specialists etc going to come from?