Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Different approaches to breeding and drought-resistant maize

Bestriding the world on the shoulders of giants, as we do, can cause dizzying glimpses of the obvious. Allowing farmers to participate in studies to improve their farming, for example, is a central tenet of research in poorer countries. Elsewhere, it seems to be less common and less visible, which may be why we sit up and take notice when we do see it, for example among Europe’s brassica growers.

Now, from the US, come similar stories. First off, there’s Syngenta’s drought-resistant maize which — get this! — is not genetically engineered. 1 Syngenta says these varieties suffer no production penalty when there is no drought. That’s really important to farmers who might not suffer a drought, but want to be prepared just in case, and whose preparation consists of one or a few highly-tailored varieties rather than a diversity of varieties. And it is really hard to achieve.

What does drought-resistant corn have to do with participatory research? (Leaving aside the question whether Syngenta’s approach might be a better idea than a pure GM approach for poorer countries.) Just that Mat Kinase recently drew attention to something called the US Testing Network (USTN), launched in Iowa in 2009 to “develop and introduce new non-GMO corn hybrids in the market, while improving the quality and quantity of non-GMO corn hybrids available”. As Mat notes:

I couldn’t care less about avoiding transgenes, but I love the idea of small companies, public sector scientists and enthusiastic individuals working together to improve germplasm for niche markets too small for the big seed companies to serve.

That is indeed a good idea. I wonder, would Syngenta be willing to offer USTN some drought-resistant lines without engineered pest resistance and herbicide tolerance, for use in further breeding efforts to serve niche markets? I doubt that there would be any risk of those markets cannibalizing sales of Syngenta’s products.

And there’s a tantalizing tidbit in the full report on USTN that Mat linked to:

Walter Goldstein of the Michael Fields Institute, Margaret Smith at Cornell University, and Major Goodman at North Carolina State have conducted research on a trait from popcorn, GaS, which blocks incoming pollen. This trait holds promise to block cross pollination from GM corn.

Even from these lofty heights, I had not been aware of this approach, the reverse of Terminator technology, to protect plants from inadvertent cross pollination. Early reports suggest it may not be plain sailing; even so, the fact that farmers and researchers are working together to solve a problem specific to those farmers is surely welcome.

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Nibbles: Women, Old Crops, New Crops, Forests, Pavlovsk

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Climate change weirdness

Catching up is easy when other people too have been taking things easy. I missed this account of the possibly misplaced importance of maize in African life when it first appeared at the Climate Change Media Partnership in the wake of the Cancun meeting, but luckily a scraper site only got around to it yesterday. What is so interesting about this insistence that maize be Africa’s main staple is how ahistorical it is. Corn and Capitalism, Arturo Warman’s wonderful social history of maize, teases out the many factors that made maize Africa’s darling, often in the space of a couple of generations or less. But as Mclay Kanyangarara, climate change advisor for the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, apparently told the side event at Cancun:

“[W]e have always had an option. … Maize is an introduced crop and the small grains have always been our traditional indigenous crops, which are better suited to our climate.”

Why, then, is it proving so hard to break maize’s stranglehold, a scant 500 years later?

And in other climate-change news, a cold winter comes as something of a surprise to the globe-trotting locavore in Guatemala. And another missed post that lives again thanks to a scraper offers first hand experience of climate change in Ethiopia.

“I remember misty mornings, with the sky full of clouds. Even ten years ago there would be regular rainfall six months of the year. This year we had only two and a half. We’ve had to reduce what we grow. No more peppers or vegetables – now it’s just the basics like corn and sorghum.”

Corn, again! The post goes on anecdotally to distinguish past weather patterns — an occasional bad year among the good — from today’s unremittingly bad years. It also talks a bit about how farmers are trying to diversify, for example by growing grass pea (Lathyrus sativus) instead of normal peas (Pisum sativum), noting that grass pea can cause paralysis.

“It’s a big worry for me,” says Lekea, a 50-year-old mother of nine children. “But the alternative is for us to go hungry.”

Another alternative would be for Lekea and other farmers in the area to trial some of the low-neurotoxin Lathyrus varieties that have been under development at ICARDA and elsewhere since the late 1990s. Maybe someone suggested that at the big “climate hearing” that Lekea was scheduled to address. Or maybe nobody in Ethiopia — including Oxfam’s blogger — knew anything about these varieties. That seems unlikely, given that Ethiopia has the varieties, which continue to be improved. So what’s the story?

There always are alternatives. Even to maize.