Category: Breeding

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The Green Evolution that preceded the Green Revolution

ResearchBlogging.org The standard litany against the Green Revolution is that it failed to banish hunger because the technologies it ushered in were no use to small peasant farmers. Farmers with access to cash and good land did well, but poorer farmers on marginal land got nothing out of the revolution, and if they did somehow buy into it (subsidies, handouts) they were worse off afterwards. That’s not to deny that the Green Revolution increased yields, especially of wheat and rice. Just to say that it did nothing for most smallholders.

A wonderful paper by Jonathan Harwood, in Agricultural History, demonstrates that this wasn’t always so. ((Harwood, J. (2009). Peasant Friendly Plant Breeding and the Early Years of the Green Revolution in Mexico Agricultural History, 83 (3), 384-410 DOI: 10.3098/ah.2009.83.3.384)) In the early days of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program, starting in the 1940s, the target was “resource-poor farmers who could not afford to purchase new seed annually”. The MAP’s advisors put improving cultivation practices at the top of their list, with better varieties second. And the improved varieties were to come from “introduction, selection or breeding”.

Accordingly, the MAP initially devoted considerable effort to testing existing Mexican varieties of maize to identify the best one for each locality. Simply by redistributing these to the most suitable locality, one advisor recommended, the quality of maize cultivation could be improved quickly without having to wait years for the development of new varieties. This approach was richly rewarded when it was discovered that yield in some regions could be increased by 20 to 30 percent by introducing a variety native to another region.

The MAP was pragmatic and focussed on farmer needs in other ways too. Breeding was based on synthetic varieties rather than F1 hybrids, which could take a decade or more to deliver. The first of these improved varieties yielded about 30% more than the benchmark variety.

So what changed? Harwood identifies an overall shift in the relationship between the MAP and its host government in Mexico, in particular over the role of extension. At first, the Rockefeller Foundation’s advisors were convinced that extension was the most important activity for them. As Harwood writes:

This initial emphasis upon extension is significant because it reflected the advisors’ concern to reach small farmers. Large farmers, in Mexico as elsewhere, were much better placed to look after themselves. Unlike their smaller brethren, they could afford to take risks with new methods and had the capital to invest in them; many were thus keen to cooperate with the MAP by offering land for field trials and adopting new varieties. But to disseminate the requisite knowledge to small farmers required a functional extension service, which Mexico did not yet have. The existing service … was totally unsatisfactory. Since its staff had no means of transportation, they never came into direct contact with farmers and were thus reduced to distributing leaflets and answering letters. Given low levels of literacy among peasants, this was not a viable way of reaching the vast majority of farmers. Nor was the MAP ever likely to have either the resources or the manpower to take on such a huge job itself.

The Mexican Government, despite advice to improve extension, preferred to support large landowners rather than peasant farmers. And it was, of course, the large landowners (and business in general), who supported the Mexican government. The strange part is that while the MAP publicly said its goal was to alleviate poverty, in private its officers had additional motivations. Harwood quotes a 1951 Rockefeller Foundation note:

Communism makes attractive promises to underfed peoples; democracy must not only promise as much, but must deliver more. … [U]nderprivileged people attribute their present plight to the domination of the capitalist colonial system. … In this struggle for the minds of men the side that best helps satisfy man’s primary needs for food, clothing and shelter is likely to win. … Appropriate action now may help [people of developing nations] to attain by evolution the improvements, including those in agriculture, which otherwise may have to come by revolution.

And so the plant breeders formented their own revolution, instead of continuing to help peasant farmers evolve. MAP staff began to concentrate on problems they could solve, rather than problems that needed solving. The Mexican government wanted exports, to fund industrialization. MAP scientists turned their attention to wheat, and in just ten years Mexico’s output of wheat had trebled and by 1958 the country was indeed exporting wheat.

Are there lessons here for today? Extension continues to be neglected by countries and donors alike, and many breeders do their best to improve yields while remaining outside the economic and political arenas where the battles to end hunger must be fought. Complex problems require complex solutions. It would be nice to think that rather than new Green Revolutions, today’s moving spirits might eventually return to their roots and seek Green Evolutions again.

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The Viking in the wheat field on the radio

Alerted by a colleague I listened to a little bit of a long radio programme featuring Susan Dworkin, author of The Viking in the Wheat Field, and assorted luminaries. The Viking in question was Sir Bent Skovmand, a plant breeder extraordinaire, and what I heard of the programme indicated that there is still profound ignorance out there about plant breeding, about agriculture, about genebanks, about GMOs, about the Global Crop Diversity Trust, about just about everything.

Of course, I have no idea what to do about any of that (other than to keep plugging away). I did like one metaphor that Per Pinstrup Anderson, former director general of IFPRI used when asked about the “problem of hunger”. Imagine yourself in a room of seventy people, he said. Ten of those won’t have enough to eat today. That’s pretty good. To which I’d add that another 10 are obese or overweight. And 20 suffer the hidden hunger of missing micronutrients.

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Seed systems and survival

Two recent documents address seed systems in sub-Saharan Africa. One, from the Drylands Coordination Group in Norway looks at the relevance of the informal seed sector to farmers in southern Tigray, Ethiopia, using the famine of 1984 as a boundary across which to compare results. It’s a complex story that would repay study by someone expert in the subject matter, but this is striking:

Five cultivars of sorghum, one cultivar of tef and four cultivars of maize have been lost and others are on the verge of being lost from the farming system of the area. Early maturing sorghum cultivars from the informal seed are gaining upper hand and have already replaced the old but late maturing types.

It is tempting to see those changes as a response to changing weather patterns, and the study recommends research to make older varieties “as productive as they used to be”.

In Zambia, Danielle Nierenberg reports on her blog, the aid charity CARE is fostering a business-like approach to increasing the production of staple crops.

One way they’re doing this is by creating a network of agro-dealers who can sell inputs to their neighbors as well as educate them about how to use hybrid seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs. At the same time, “we are mindful” of the benefits of local varieties of seeds, says Harry Ngoma, Agriculture Advisor for the Consortium for Food Security, Agriculture and Nutrition, AIDS, Resiliency and Markets (C-FAARM).

Right on, Harry! Sounds very like the approach being promoted by AGRA in its pursuit of an African green revolution. And CARE is also promoting indigenous crops such as sorghum to complement Zambia’s appetite for maize. But is there a danger that this network of agro-dealers will be promoting the inputs that make them the most profit? There must be a way of tying rewards for advice to the practical outcome of following that advice.

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Reviewing the use and usefulness of cereal landraces

From Eliseu Bettencourt, one of the authors of the paper concerned.

The paper “Cereal landraces for sustainable agriculture. A review” was recently made available on-line at Agronomy for Sustainable Development, though behind a paywall. The paper version will be published soon.

The paper is co-authored by eighteen authors pulling together diverse backgrounds and expertises.

The review addresses the current status and prospects for cereals landraces in the context of sustainable agriculture, discussing the place of landraces in the origin of modern cereal crops and breeding of elite cereal cultivars, the importance of on-farm and ex situ diversity conservation; how modern genotyping approaches can help both conservation and exploitation; the importance of different phenotyping approaches; and whether legal issues associated with landrace marketing and utilisation need addressing.

The paper also deals with the current status and potential for the improved deployment and exploitation of landraces, and incorporation of their positive qualities into new cultivars or populations for more sustainable agricultural production. In particular, their potential as sources of novel disease and abiotic stress resistance genes or combination of genes if deployed appropriately, of phytonutrients accompanied with optimal micronutrient concentrations which can help alleviate aging-related and chronic diseases, and of nutrient use efficiency traits.

The paper is structured in 12 chapters, namely: Introduction; History of cereal landraces; Diversity and germplasm collections; Genebanks and conservation of cereal landraces; Genotyping and phenotyping; Nutrient uptake and utilisation; Nutrition and quality; Biotic and abiotic stress resistance and tolerance; Breeding: conversion of landraces into modern cultivars; Participatory breeding; Legal issues; Conclusions. The paper also counts with an extensive list of bibliographic sources.

The main findings of the paper can be summarised as: A lot of recent research effort has gone into collecting, organising, studying and analysing cereal landraces with a primary goal being to incorporate their positive qualities in new cultivars or populations for a more sustainable agricultural production, particularly in response to recent climate changes.

A major part of this valuable landrace diversity is conserved in the world’s genebanks network and should be exploited systematically for traits such as quality and specific adaptations to stress environments. However, the available genetic variation in adaptive responses to soil and climatic conditions conserved in landraces is little understood, and even less used. More uniform and user-friendly documentation about collection and characterisation of landraces, either morphologically or with molecular tools, is needed to access this variation more effectively. Genebanks should aim at adopting a common concept of landraces and plan special inventories for them. The level of diversity should be monitored during their conservation so that the original level of variation is maintained. More studies are needed in order to investigate if their long-term maintenance by farmers resulted in increasing genetic variation.

New high-throughput genotyping platforms and phenotyping data in common databases will enable powerful association genetic approaches to be used for improvement and direct deployment of landrace resources.

The renewed focus on cereal landraces for breeding purposes is also a response to some negative consequences of modern agriculture and conventional breeding, such as the liberal use of high inputs, the loss of genetic diversity and the stagnation of yields in less favourable areas.

Further enhancement of productivity and stability is achieved through practicing “non-stop selection” within landraces across the marginal production environments, to exploit the constantly released by the genome useful adaptive variation.

The review highlights the value of landraces as resources for the future sustainability of cereal crop production, the methods to enhance their genetic makeup and avoid seed degradation and emphasises the level of co-ordination and resourcing needed to realise the great potential of cereal landraces.

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Hot potato in Europe

From André Heitz.

Approval of genetically modified varieties in Europe is governed by a strange rule: a qualified majority of member States in Council is required for either approving or rejecting a GMV, and if a qualified majority does not obtain, the decision is entrusted to the European Commission. For the last twelve years — a period of time in which GMVs rose from some 30 to some 134 million hectares worldwide — member States have always managed to create the stalemate that threw the hot potato onto a shy Commission preoccupied by its standing rather than effectiveness.

Things may have changed on 2 March 2010, when the Commission — ending a process that started in January 2003 — approved BASF’s Amflora potato for cultivation for industrial use (it is a starch potato composed almost exclusively of amylopectin) and authorised the use of its by-products as feed. At the same time, it authorised the placing on the market of three GM maize products (MON863xMON810, MON863xNK603, MON863xMON810xNK603) for food and feed uses, but not for cultivation.

Not unexpectedly, these decisions provoked the ire of “environmental groups” and some member States. In the Amflora case, the controversy centres on the presence of an antibiotic resistance marker gene.

Whether those decisions are a positive signal for GMVs in Europe is quite uncertain, however.

Firstly, the cultivation authorisation for Amflora is subject to restrictions to prevent the mixing of the GM potato with conventional or organic potatoes. Sounds reasonable, but the measures are nothing but good crop husbandry and industrial practices, moreover in the context of a crop that will be grown exclusively under contract with a limited number of processors. The upshot is that this potato is still treated like a delinquent requiring close scrutiny. Ironically, if we exclude the ARM nptII gene (now present elsewhere on millions of hectares) and the changed proportion of amylopectin and amylose, Amflora is no different from conventional starch potatoes.

Secondly, it is understood that member States will be free to refuse the cultivation of Amflora (at present, member States can only derogate to the principle of a single market under strict conditions). The Commission will also produce a “proposal by the summer setting out how a Community authorisation system, based on science, can be combined with freedom for Member States to decide whether or not they wish to cultivate GM crops on their territory”.

Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner, John Dalli stated: “Responsible innovation will be my guiding principle when dealing with innovative technologies. After an extensive and thorough review of the five pending GM files, it became clear to me that there were no new scientific issues that merited further assessment. All scientific issues, particularly those concerning safety, had been fully addressed. Any delay would have simply been unjustified. By taking these decisions, the European Commission fulfils its role in a responsible manner.” There is every reason to expect that national governments — and why not also regional and local authorities — will not decide on the same basis when confronted with irrational arguments and electoral pressure.

For more, both with further links: