Ah, but only confusingly, and to downplay their current usefulness:
Wild relatives of crops could be better suited to harsher climes, but efforts to collect and breed such crops are just beginning.
The rest of the article tells you why Africa needs GMOs.
Like most news articles this one seems to get a lot of the key facts either plain wrong, or wrong enough that I don’t like them…
First they say that 2 new varieties of maize are coming to Africa, like it’s a given… I was under the impression that WEMA was about developing drought resistant crops in Africa, rather than bringing ready made external crops to Africa (if that was the case it wouldn’t be a 10-15 year process at all, we’d be done by Wednesday shurely).
GM being ‘faster’ than breeding also strikes me as somewhat bizarre in this instance – it was my impression that the initial goal of WEMA was to get a drought resistant maize through conventional breeding and to utilize the GM tech once it has been proven to work in whatever germplasm is going to be used – in this case providing an extra, different mode of action for drought tolerance (I may be off here in the projects aims I guess… but to me this makes more sense).
Also it’s rather sad to see that bacterial and maize genomes being separated by millenia is put forward as an idea that there is a vast difference. A difference of millenia is kinda like saying we diverged from our ancestor with chimpanzees ‘weeks’ ago – both are technically true, but both equally tend towards vastly underestimating the difference and awesomeness of the split. /rant off
Who has been telling the NYT that work on wild relatives is only just beginning? Collectors and plant breeders have been working on wild relatives since at least the 1930s (potato, wheat, tomato and lots more): we can’t airbrush all this work away.
And what about the farmer thousands of years ago who recognized and multiplied the first bread wheat with the D genome from Aegilops tauschii?