Category: Breeding

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Crop wild relative helps Kew reach 10% milestone

Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank has reached its target of collecting 10% of the world’s wild plants, with seeds of a pink banana among its latest entries.

Congratulations, and happy birthday Kew! Interestingly, the wild banana in question, Musa itinerans, is also found in a genebank in Thailand, apparently as a breeder’s line, so it may well be useful in crop improvement.

LATER: Ok, this is why I talk ((Way too much, I know, but this is sapping my will to live, it really is.)) about genebank database hell. Musa itinerans is in the Musa Germplasm Information System, fourteen accessions of it, ((Select wild and itinerans.)) conserved in vitro at the International Transit Centre, and in China and the Philippines. But it seems it is not in SINGER, for some reason, which is where I first looked for it. And neither of these two sources seem to have made it to WIEWS.

LATER STILL: And 3 specimens in botanic gardens. GBIF disappointing, only a couple of MoBo sheets. Literature suggests it might be a source of cold resistance, and maybe disease resistance too.

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Too hot to fight

A short piece in the latest Economist describes a paper in Climate Change on the historical correlation between temperature and war. Up to about 1740-1750 colder years were also more warlike years, at least in Europe (the authors quote a paper that suggests there’s a similar correlation for China). This correlation is never particularly strong, though it is occasionally statistically significant, but then it breaks down entirely and shoots up into very slightly positive (though non-significant) territory.
graph

Dr Tol and Dr Wagner suggest that in the more remote past the effects of cold weather on harvests led to supply shortages, and that these increased the likelihood of people fighting over food and the land needed to produce it. They argue that the reason the relationship between warfare and cold vanishes in the mid-18th century is that this is the moment when the industrial revolution began. Both agriculture and transport improved rapidly at this time. Systematic plant breeding, the introduction of new crops and new forms of crop rotation, and better irrigation increased the food supply. Improvements in roads and the large-scale construction of canals allowed food to be transported from areas of plenty to areas of scarcity.

Does this have implications for the future? Presumably, it implies that we need not worry about war breaking out in Europe due to climate change. Not so fast.

Just because cold, rather than heat, caused problems in Europe during the millennium that Dr Tol and Dr Wagner examined does not mean rising temperatures pose no threat. The lesson, rather, is that the way to minimise the likelihood of climate-induced conflict in the future is to continue the process of crop improvement (for example, by taking advantage of the potential of genetic engineering) so that heat- and drought-tolerant varieties are available; to make farmers aware of these new crops and encourage their use; and to promote free trade and non-agricultural economic development. That way people will have no cause to fight, and tyrants no excuse to stir them up.

There is no correlation in this dataset between precipitation and war, but that’s the one I’d be watching.

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A reply to IIED

Andre Heitz trained as an agronomist at the Ecole nationale supérieure agronomique de Montpellier, France and spent most of his career in intellectual property with several international organisations, with a particular focus on plants and seeds. He left the following as a comment to a recent post here which followed up an earlier one on an IIED press release which came out just ahead of the World Seed Conference, and has kindly agreed to our suggestion to elevate it to post status.

I recently discovered this blog, and will be an assiduous reader, and more.

The bottom line here is that an entity supposed to, or pretending to, work for development has shot against an international conference whose purpose was to promote improved access by farmers to quality seed and thereby improve their livelihoods. It has done so using the tricks that are standard tools for the many non-governmental organisations, private businesses incorporated as non-profit organisations and academics who profess, in the final analysis, that the future lies in the past.

In this particular instance there was scaremongering based on the reference to GURTs. Yet the IIED cannot ignore that there are no GURT varieties on the market and that they are the subject of a moratorium under the CBD. Furthermore, if the IIED had a minimum of understanding of agriculture and agricultural socio-economics, they would not ignore that GURT varieties are unlikely to be taken up by poor farmers (as a matter of fact, a GURT variety must incorporate an enormous improvement over ‘conventional’ varieties for the GURT system to be profitable for the breeding and seed industry and acceptable to farmers; and even then, it will have to compete with non-GURT varieties showing the same improvement).

There was also a deliberate lie with the “Western governments and the seed industry want to upgrade the UPOV Convention”, for there is no plan to tinker with the Convention.

Continue reading “A reply to IIED”

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Celebrating rice

Have we already blogged these interviews with rice people? Check out, for example, Peter Jennings, IRRI’s first breeder, on the genesis of IR8, among other things.

It’s IRRI’s 50th anniversary next year, don’t forget. I guess the celebrations kick off with the 6th International Rice Genetics Symposium in Manila in November. And reach a climax at the 3rd International Rice Congress (IRC 2010) next November in Hanoi. Wonder if any spanners will materialize.