Ok, here goes with those answers I promised last night, or some of them anyway.
What’s so new about climate change? After all, breeders have been preparing for, and reacting to, environmental changes of various kinds since their beginning as a profession. Well, for one thing the speed of the changes, and the fact that this time there is fairly solid scientific information about long-term trends. One of the things Cal Qualset recommended is that there should be a sort of worldwide network of testing sites relevant to the anticipated environments of the most threatened countries.
He also talked about evolutionary-participatory plant breeding, a newish name for an old idea going back to Harlan and Allard. This topic was taken up by Salvatore Ceccarelli of ICARDA and others later in the day. Salvatore asked why, in this year of biodiversity, we are talking about varietal uniformity as if it were the only option. He’s set out an alternative vision here with us before.
It revolves around making large mixed populations available to farmers, getting them to plant them in lots of contrasting places, and letting natural and artificial selection do the rest. He’s been doing that in Iran and other places with a mixture of 1600 F2 barley lines deriving from some 300 parents. He thinks he can get improvements in yield stability and stress tolerance over time, but almost certainly not quality. He calls this a way to get a “local solution to a global problem.” The question that was asked, however, was how long this would take. Cal Qualset let slip almost as an aside that his group is seeing very little change in Turkish wheat landraces since the 1930s, and that the variation within landraces wasn’t as much as they had expected. He’s working on a project to introgress smut resistance into these landraces.
And speaking of farmer participation in evaluation and breeding, Cal Qualset also mentioned in his keynote that he was able to see 2% yield improvement per year in the maize Chalqueno landrace by designing and helping farmers implement, in their own fields, a mass selection scheme.
More later.
Any idea what the “physiological basis” is, for the 2% yield improvement in maize?
Were there any ideas about how to change market demand towards more drought-resistant crops?
Market demand for drought resistance is an interesting concept. Clearly the market can “demand” things like equitable treatment of farming and adherence to different sets of rules. Could we see a “More crop per drop” label any time soon? Personally, I think not. But I’d be happy to be proved wrong.
I thought more about setting up value chains around sorghum and millet, like Nigerian Guinness beer (made from sorghum).
But including water consumption in an eco-label isn´t a bad idea at all!
No, and no. Alas.
The maize mass selection approach would soon hit a barrier, I suspect. I have become suspicious of the cornucopian selection stories.
We can perhaps mention the phenotyping networks for drought tolerance of the Generation Challenge Programme as one ongoing initiative re. ‘worldwide network of testing sites relevant to the anticipated environments of the most threatened countries’ ?
Yes, we can indeed perhaps mention them. And if I had been awake, I might have.