Those who follow these things will probably have noticed a certain frisson in the press over a paper in Nature Plants on setting conservation priorities for crop wild relatives. Lead authors are Nora Castañeda and Colin Khoury of CIAT, both of whom have featured here before. Good to see Nora celebrating the occasion on Twitter. She really deserves that beer.
Our paper on conservation of CropWildRelatives is published #cwrgap cheers @AgroBioDiverse https://t.co/W7B0VgG0mg pic.twitter.com/OXS25FvrnI
— Nora Castañeda (@np_castaneda) March 21, 2016
Well, I think it’s a beer.
Anyway, I won’t go into the details of the findings here. As I say, it’s all over the news (well, relatively speaking), and you can always explore the results for yourself on the project’s website. But I did want to strike a historical note.
This whole thing started when a small group of us decided it would be kinda fun to apply fancy spatial analysis methods to data from herbaria and genebanks on the distribution of wild Phaseolus species in the Americas. Just to see if it could be done. And whether the results would make any sense.
Well, it could, and they sort of did. And many years, a major international project, two PhDs and a lot of blood, sweat and tears later, we have a global analysis across dozens of genepools and hundreds of species. It was totally worth it, but there should be easier, faster and less expensive ways to get this kind of thing done.
You are right, it’s a beer but with lemon, salt, Worcestershire sauce and chili powder.
An excellent demonstration of the number and distribution of CWRs. There is a downside – the `Barley Yellow Dwarf resistance gene’ episode. This gene was discovered in Ethiopian samples: it is of high value to cereal breeders in the USA (and to cereal production globally); the samples were removed from Ethiopia before any formal ABS mechanisms were in place; Ethiopia then went into lockdown of sample movement out of Ethiopia – still apparent for everything.
Countries will look at the paper with its excellent distribution maps of CWRs and say: “Hey, if CWRs are so important – why can’t we cash in on ours?” (Sorghum, Oryza, Glycine in Australia; Manihot in Brazil and lots more). With the failures of the `multilateral’ Seed Treaty and continued problems of ABS under the CBD there could be another few decades of lockdown.
It would be useful to know just what CWR collecting missions have been fielded over the past 10 years and how many samples obtained for international use and from which countries.
Nora: That beer looks horrible.
Between 1995 and 2000, and with Swiss financial support, IRRI led a project to collect and conserve cultivated and wild rices from countries and regions where collecting had been limited, for one reason or another, for many years. The International Rice Genebank Collection grew by about 25%. This all took place in the immediate aftermath of the coming into force of the CBD. We had few problems getting access to Oryza germplasm. I wonder what the situation is like now? I’m not up to date.
Mile: Thanks for the information. IRRI did a lot better than CIP that claims nothing collected after 1992.
I’m also not up to date – but I am getting confused over my first attempts to find out. The CWR Project (run from Kew?) makes no mention of a Crop Trust funded wild bean collection in Costa Rica Dec. 2015 – Jan. 2016. Wires seem to be getting crossed. It would be nice to get a full list of past, present, and future collecting missions and where the funding is going. All we have now for CWRs are gap analyses, meetings, lists of species, training sessions and the like (and pre-breeding: goodness knows how much funding will be needed for this – at least ten times the collecting budget). And I suspect that all the funding for CWRs is at the expense of landraces, which are probably far more threatened: it is all a bit opaque.
Dave, there’s a database listing past collecting missions, mainly by CGIAR centers. Not aware of where information about present or planned missions are recorded — or even if they are.
I wasn’t aware of this database, nor how the data were compiled or what included. What I can say is that many – all? – of the missions sponsored through IRRI between 1995 and 2000 (with support from the SDC: see) do not appear to be included. For example, I took a close look at Laos, a country in which >13,000 cultivated rice samples were collected. Apart from one or two sites, there’s nothing of the many collecting trips made by Appa Rao and Lao colleagues. I assume this will be the case for all the other missions in Asia, Africa and Costa Rica.
My mistake – I should have read the preamble more carefully. It says ‘Bioversity International sponsored missions’ – I guess that means IBPGR and IPGRI. But in terms of overall missions, the database is incomplete – for reasons I now appreciate.
Michael – As with Mike Jackson that was new to me and very useful: Thanks
You guys should read the blog more.
It is great this paper is out. Very important work.
What are the perspectives of others on Dave’s comment?
If international seed movements of CWR are becoming more difficult, to what extent it is a viable and useful strategy to promote pre-breeding with CWR in the countries where they occur?