Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Public funding for extension services and agricultural research that improves productivity and yield had to increase rather than relying upon genetically modified organisms.
From the head of UNDP? What kind of a crazy mixed-up world are we living in?
“With more than 12 years of experience working with camelina, exclusive access to the majority of the world’s camelina germplasm, and a wealth of intellectual property around the genetic modification of the crop, we have chosen to focus our company’s efforts on camelina’s use as a sustainable, next generation biofuel.”
Well, I’m convinced.
Most crop geneticists agree that enrichment of the cultivated gene pool will be necessary to meet the challenges that lie ahead. However, to fully capitalize on the extensive reservoir of favorable alleles within wild germplasm, many advances are still needed. These include increasing our understanding of the molecular basis for key traits, expanding the phenotyping and genotyping of germplasm collections, improving our molecular understanding of recombination in order to enhance rates of introgression of alien chromosome regions, and developing new breeding strategies that permit introgression of multiple traits. Recent progress has shown that each of these challenges is tractable and within reach if some of the basic problems limiting the application of new technologies can be tackled.
That’s from Breeding Technologies to Increase Crop Production in a Changing World, part of the recent Science special feature on food security. Sure, the challenges of use are tractable. But what if those germplasm collections are inadequate in their coverage, accessibility, management or funding? As ever, genebanks are pretty much taken for granted in these sorts of discussions.
So, let’s recap. Rebuilding Haitian agriculture will need agroforestry, permaculture, biotech bananas, high-end rum, and specialty coffees. No, that’s unduly flippant. The diversity of ideas is actually rather encouraging.