A press release from AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, gives details of cassava brown streak disease and a recent confab of breeders to tackle it. Cassava is the second most important source of calories for people in Africa, and the spread of the disease has been very worrying. The breeders say that they have resistant varieties, with more in the pipeline, but that stringent rules on the release of new varieties are hampering their efforts to get these to farmers. This sounds like an unintended consequence of rules designed to ensure high quality seed is available to those who can afford it; isn’t there some sort of mechanism for bypassing the rules in an emergency?
The breeders also say they are going to use a “new” idea called farmer participatory selection: give farmers the resistant material and let them choose the ones that best suffice all their needs.
“This farmer-participatory approach to plant breeding is a genuine and fairly recent breakthrough in crop breeding,” said George Bigirwa of AGRA. “Only a decade ago, such methods were considered by many to be ‘less scientific’ than selecting for maximum yields in trials grown on isolated research stations using high applications of fertilizers and chemical pesticides.”
At the meeting, cassava breeders from eight countries reported on the farmer participatory breeding work of their national research institutions. In many cases, the reports represented the first time that the breeders were testing their own locally-bred varieties, rather than varieties developed by others at distant research stations.
Now that does sound like progress.