Category: Breeding

Posted on

Back in Baku

I’ve been travelling so I missed the announcement a couple of days ago on their blog that our friends at CCAFS 1 have a new all-singing, all-dancing platform called the Adaptation and Mitigation Knowledge Network. 2 Which is annoying because the issue of changes in the suitability of the climate for potato cultivation came up in the discussions at the meeting I’m attending here in Baku. And I would quite happily have stolen something else from CCAFS for my presentation. 3 The conference is called “Diversity, characterization and utilization of plant genetic resources for enhanced resilience to climate change” and it was hosted by the Azerbaijan Genetic Resources Institute with support from a number of CGIAR Centres active in the region and FAO, which provided funding for the project of which the meeting is one of the activities.

There were researchers from pretty much all of the countries of the Central Asia and Caucasus (CAC) region, plus Turkey, Iran, Ukraine and Russia to boot. Many of the presentations brought home to me — and not for the first time — what a tremendously rich part of the world this is for agricultural biodiversity: wild asparagus with stems five meters long; grape varieties sporting bunches almost as long as your arm; strange interspecific wheat hybrids with branched spikes; medicinal plants for every ailment you can think of; wheat landraces phenomenally high in zinc and iron. And that’s just the lunch. Fortunately, the place is also rich in talented researchers busy studying their agrobiodiversity, conserving it, and using it for health, nutrition and food security.

Sure, they have problems. Where do they not? But there seems to be a real commitment to getting the job done, enthusiasm even. I was particularly struck by the relatively close linkages between genebanks and breeding programmes in many of the CAC countries. That you certainly don’t see everywhere. I wonder if it’s a legacy of the VIR system. They could do with more collaboration, coordination and sharing of responsibilities at the regional level, not to mention better integration with the rest of the world. But maybe this meeting will help. Anyway, all the presentations, abstracts and final recommendations will be online soon. I’ll post something when they’re up and you can make up your own minds.

Posted on

Nibbles: Swaziland, Traditional Knowledge, Climate change, Apples, Winged beans, Ambakkadan Cassava

Posted on

Seems like all that rice breeding was worth it after all

ACIAR has just published a huge study of the impact of IRRI’s rice breeding work in SE Asia. The press release has the key numbers:

  • “Southeast Asian rice farmers are harvesting an extra US$1.46 billion worth of rice a year as a result of rice breeding.”
  • “…IRRI’s research on improving rice varietal yield between 1985 and 2009 … [boosted] … rice yield by up to 13%.”
  • “…IRRI’s improved rice varieties increased farmers’ returns by US$127 a hectare in southern Vietnam, $76 a hectare in Indonesia, and $52 a hectare in the Philippines.”
  • “The annual impact of IRRI’s research in these three countries alone exceeded IRRI’s total budget since it was founded in 1960.”

But I guess the figure the Australians were really after is that in the final table:

A pretty decent return.

Good to see the pioneering work of IRRI (and others) in documenting pedigree information in a usable way recognized — and indeed made use of. And good to see the International Network for Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER) and its use of the International Treaty’s multilateral access and benefit sharing system highlighted in the study as a model for germplasm exchange and use. Of course one would have loved to see the genebank’s role in producing the impact also recognized, rather than sort of tacitly taken for granted as usual, but maybe the data can be used to bring that out more in a follow-up.

I see another couple of opportunities for further research, actually. There is little in the study about the genetic nature of the improved varieties that are having all this impact. To what extent can their pedigrees be traced back to crop wild relatives, say? And, indeed, how many different parent lines have been involved in their development, and how genetically different were they? That will surely to some extent determine how sustainable these impressive impacts are likely to be.

Posted on

Nibbles: IRRI impact, Peruvian food, Nutritional strategy, Ethnobiology, Street food forum, Mulefoot hogs, Polyculture, Cheeses, Asimina triloba, Protected areas

Posted on

Bringing together researchers and breeders

It all started with a bravura Annals of Botany blog post from Pat Heslop Harrison from a scientific conference in Assisi: “Italian Genetics Societies in Assisi: staple foods and orphan crops via epigenomics and systems biology.”

That got posted to Facebook, where I commented on it by extracting what I found a particularly trenchant sentence:

I failed to notice substantial contributions to discussions or presentations from breeders or seed organizations, the end users of so much of the research discussed.

There were more comments in other media, apparently, and Pat felt the need to follow up. He’s done that both on his blog and on Facebook. And what he says is, again, well worth reading in full. Here’s a taster:

Unfortunately the difficulty making links of researchers with the seed companies and breeders is found in almost all of Europe, perhaps with the exception of the Netherlands.

There are other exceptions around the world:

India is brilliant in doing these things, with farmers’ cooperatives, tissue culture/propagation companies, extension workers (running trials etc), always at the meetings and willing to show you their lines, approaches, and discuss applications of what you say (see, for example, my blog from last year). USA is different with the land-grant universities taking research all the way to finished varieties.

And Africa? Anyway, I’d really like to know that the breeders think, so I’ve sent the various links to GIPB. But I can see that centralizing this discussion may prove tricky. Share fair, anyone? Well, maybe.