More interesting thinking about the sites of variety yield trials from Glenn Hyman over at AGCommons. You’ll remember he posted a map a few weeks back of the distribution of such sites around Africa, categorized according to which crop evaluation network used them. This is part of a Gates Foundation-funded project to develop an online catalog of these places, including their environmental characterization, and eventually with links to the actual evaluation data they were used to obtain over the years. Glenn then posted about how knowledge of conditions at trial sites could be used to identify the best places for participatory/evolutionary breeding work. And now he’s linked to our recent analysis of interdependence among African countries for plant genetic resources under climate change and suggested that it would be interesting to figure out which sites represent future analogs for current climates: “[w]hat are the key sites for evaluating germplasm in view of climate change throughout Africa?” Is this the MacGuffin we need to get genebanks and breeders to talk to each other more?
Let Greenpeace pick up the bill
One of the most emotional campaigns that Greenpeace says it is undertaking in Mexico, led by the Argentine Gustavo Ampugnani, is the defense of diversity of native maize against the cultivation of transgenics. Another lie, then.
If indeed that is the purpose, the NGO should donate money to supporting the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) in Texcoco, led by Thomas Lunpkyn, which keeps in a giant refrigerated bunker germplasm of 194 species of American maize, of which 57 varieties are Mexican in a total of 27 thousand samples. The annual budget of the CIMMYT, the cradle of the Green Revolution led by Norman Borlaug, is not more than 23 million pesos. The yearly cost of Greenpeace propaganda against transgenic corn is greater than the budget of a center that has generated seed of such high yield and nutritional quality as the HV-313 maize and Salamanca wheat without using polluting pesticides.
Ok, sorry for the maladroit translation. You can read the original column by Mauricio Flores in “La Razon.” He recently visited CIMMYT, apparently, and was impressed with the genebank. Nice idea. Not sure about those numbers though.
UG99 pushes hot buttons
We’ve been keeping a weather-eye on the new strain of wheat stem rust called UG99 (it was isolated in Uganda in 1999) since very early in the history of this blog, trying to keep at least vaguely abreast of its spread and efforts to fight it. In truth, it has not been a very happy story, and if our coverage has dropped off just a bit, that may be because it can get tiresome crying wolf, no matter how much joy it might give us to be proved right.
Anyway, there’s been another outburst of interest, and while the news still isn’t good, it is fun to see how different people tell the story. First off, there’s The Hero :
Like the warrior Beowulf, subject of the Old English epic poem, [Norman] Borlaug slew a monster, saved his world and lived to a ripe old age. Like Beowulf, this old warrior of science has had to climb back into armour to battle the rise of a new monster. And once again, the world is looking to him for salvation.
Elizabeth Finkel, teller of that particular tale, certainly has a sense of drama. ((She’s also been busy lately.)) And she gives a very full account of the fight against wheat rusts in general. Across it all strides Borlaug, whom Finkel describes as “frail”. Any 95-year old is entitled to be frail, but my understanding is that he is in worse shape than that. How will the scientists and funders fare in his absence? I hope they redouble their efforts, in memoriam as it were.
Then there’s the army of soldier ants, selflessly toiling in defense of the greater good:
After several years of feverish work, scientists have identified a mere half-dozen genes that are immediately useful for protecting wheat from Ug99. Incorporating them into crops using conventional breeding techniques is a nine- to 12-year process that has only just begun. And that process will have to be repeated for each of the thousands of wheat varieties that is specially adapted to a particular region and climate.
Karen Kaplan’s story, in the LA Times, is as broad as Finkel’s, but paints a different picture. Borlaug doesn’t even get a name check. Instead, scientist after US scientist gets a brief moment to explain how complex and yet tedious the job is, how ill-prepared they were, how each depends on all the others, and how the rest of humanity depends on them. We need both stories, I think, scientist as individual hero and scientist as soldier ant, breakthrough and toil, and I hope readers get them.
Yet another narrative crops up, though. I’m not sure what to call it. Pot of Gold? Silver Lining? Unexpected Benefit?
Crop scientists have discovered a new threat to wheat crops within the United States, leading to a race to be the first to breed a resistant wheat plant, before there is trouble. Any outcome could have a big effect on related agriculture exchange traded funds (ETFs).
Setting aside all the guff about the threat being “new,” Tom Lydon, in Commodity Online, points his readers to two such exchange traded funds, noting that “fear that the fungus will cause widespread damage has caused short-term price spikes on world wheat markets”. In other words, there may be money to be made.
Why the current spate of interest? That’s hard to say. There have been meetings in Mexico and Syria, which account for the most recent spike in Google Trends. But nothing that I have noticed more recently than that. Just coincidence, perhaps. And in all the stories about how to deal with UG99, there’s one that has been conspicuous by its absence. Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket.
Faced with the cost of controlling disease in monoculture, two solutions emerged – to keep producing new varieties and new fungicides. But both of these solutions led to the Red Queen problem in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’: ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place’. Mixtures of appropriate varieties, however, can restrict disease and increase yield reliably, without need for fungicides.
Martin Wolfe is the name perhaps most associated with the renaissance of the idea that mixtures may be the way to cope with at least some diseases. That’s something else we’ve written about before, but as far as I know there have been no trials designed specifically to ask how wheat mixtures fare under UG99. Seems at least worth a try.
Cold comfort on climate change
We face a serious scientific gap in understanding crop substitution, current models assume that a maize farmer today will be a maize farmer tomorrow. In reality, many will need to select a different crop to what they have now.
Perhaps Marshall Burke and his team will now crank the machine and make some genetically nuanced predictions about how much change of crops — rather than varieties within a crop — might be needed. But that will require some pretty fundamental understanding of how and under what circumstances farmers adopt new (or old) crops and how best to facilitate that process. How much do the social anthropologists know about this?
Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance, which I’ve mentioned before, has many insights into the factors that resulted in the rapid uptake of maize in Africa. But can the factors that promoted maize be easily reversed to favour sorghum or pearl millet? I have no idea, but I doubt it. How many crop failures will it take before either farmers or their advisors are willing to try something new?
And in other climate change news, a series of policy briefs from the International Food Policy Research Institute sets out An Agenda for Negotiation in Copenhagen. Detailed proposals are in the briefs. Executive summary:
- Investments. There must be explicit inclusion of agriculture-related investments, especially as part of a Global Climate Change Fund.
- Incentives. There must be a deliberate focus on introducing incentives to reduce emissions and support technological change.
- Information. There must be a solid commitment to establishing comprehensive information and monitoring services in soil and land use management for verification purposes.
Stay tuned.
A Star is Born
Dr Masaru Iwanaga used to run the CIAT genebank and has been deputy director general of Bioversity International and director general of CIMMYT. He is now director of the National Institute of Crop Science in Tsukuba, Japan. He’s had a lifelong committment to the use of agricultural biodiversity. He was recently interviewed for Japanese TV, and a preview of the result is online. (You can also download the full 28 minute video but you have to install stuff.) Alas, it is, of course, entirely in Japanese, but it seems to me that everybody enjoyed the experience tremendously. Just wish I could follow what’s going on. Can anyone help with a translation?
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