Category: Breeding

Posted on

Green Revolution 2.0

We’ve blogged before about reaction to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. A significant portion of the $150 million earmarked for the Alliance will go into improving crop varieties, using both conventional breeding and biotechnological approaches. Two more takes on the whole thing came out today. Here, the great Ethiopian plant genetic resources conservationist Melaku Worede talks about what went wrong with the first Green Revolution, and what he fears will happen in Africa if the same thing is tried there. While here you can read about how high-placed politicians in Mozambique say the country is “striving toward a green revolution to improve and diversify agriculture and increase food production” and are putting their money where their mouths are.

P.S. Incidentally, the BBC World Service has a new series called “Feeding the World,” and the first programme is about the Green Revolution. You can download a podcast here.

Posted on

Child malnutrition in Uganda

Some clues in a newspaper article that is unfortunately not online led me to a East African Journal of Medicine paper on levels of malnutrition in a Ugandan village. The researchers found that “young children in Kabarole district suffer from severe chronic malnutrition rates, but rates and feeding patterns are not different in AIDS affected versus non AIDS affected homes.” This last finding may be because children also benefit from the attempts of care-givers to improve the nutrition of AIDS sufferers in the family. Here’s a key recommendation:

Poverty plays a key role in this situation, but there are cost-effective interventions locally available to reduce chronic malnutrition in children. It may require shifting food production to more nutritious foods and foods that are new for this area such as orange fleshed sweet potatoes with higher energy density and protein rich beans.

Sounds like a place where CIP’s VITAA Project could do some good.

Posted on

Leafy vegetables get cash

The diversity of leafy vegetables is being explored in a European-funded project that aims to make better use of existing germplasm. The project, worth 1.2 million euros, covers lettuce, spinach, chicory and “minor leafy vegetables” such as rocket and lamb’s lettuce. Almost 40% of the budget will be spent on characterizing and regenerating the roughly 12,000 accessions of the target leafy vegetables in European genebanks. A further 28% will go to evaluating the diversity and how it might be used to improve production. On that score, it is interesting that three of the 14 project participants are what one might call Agricultural biodiversity advocates: Arche Noah, Pro Specie Rara and Henry Doubleday Research Association. So I’m wondering whether any of the diversity that emerges from these investigations of genebank accessions will actually be registered on the EU Catalogue and of interest to those organisations’ members.

Posted on

Biodiversity still valuable for medicines

Nature is still supplying more than two-thirds of all “new chemical entities” that end up approved as drugs, according to the third in a long-term series of studies by David Newman and Gordon Cragg. Their scientific study of drugs introduced between 1981 and mid 2006 is online here. The study also reveals that 2004 saw the lowest number of new drugs introduced since 1981. According to New Scientist magazine, which reports on the study:

“The dip was due in part to the international Convention on Biodiversity rules covering exploitation of natural resources, says Danna Leaman of the World Conservation Union’s medicinal plant specialist group. She says that the Convention, signed in 1992, has increased the bureaucracy and cost of getting people into the field to collect plants for drug discovery.”

The scientists and reporters conclude that diversity is a vital and extremely valuable resource in the search for blockbuster drugs. And so it is.

My real problem with this whole approach is that it fails to disentangle agricultural biodiversity, and as a result countries think that their agricultural diversity is going to produce the same pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. But while drug companies may discover their billion-dollar blockbusters in plants (and occasionally animals) they don’t harvest them directly. They mimic and alter the drugs and find ways to make them under their control. Agriculture is not like that. Genetic resources find their way into new varieties and breeds, which are then commercialized. But the amounts involved are nothing like those in the pharmaceutical world, and yet that’s the backdrop against which people discuss agricultural bio-piracy. Here’s hoping that the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture does indeed ease access and share benefits, as it is intended to do, and that the flow of genetic material starts up again in earnest.

While we’re on the subject of lumping all biodiversity together, another academic study has produced a biodiversity map of the world. While a press release and a report or two mention ecosystem services, they don’t tell us to what extent the scientists examined either agricultural species or the genetic diversity within those species. And I have not yet been able to get to the scientific study to find out.

Posted on

Enola bean update

Coincidentally, it seems, our favorite IPR-blogger Kathryn recently decided to take a look at the status of the famous Enola bean case. And lo! Just a week ago the US Patent and Trademark Office rejected yet again Larry Proctor’s patent claim on these beans.

Which won’t mean anything to anyone who has not been following the story. But no matter. Kathryn provides and excellent summary that will bring you up to speed, and resources to pursue things further. What I find most intriguing is her summary of the value of biodiversity, as demonstrated by the case:

One final point is that it seems fairly evident that Proctor’s accessing of the beans was contrary to the CBD – although there could be some debate as to whether he was accessing genetic resources or accessing biological resources. What impact have his actions had on the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity? I don’t have any specific information on this but I can offer some theories.

Certainly, Proctor’s work points to the value of biodiversity. As his selective breeding of the beans went on, he found that “the roots ran deeper than other bean plants; the pods were more hardy, more resistant to moisture.” But his attempts to keep the value of the biodiversity to himself could be counter-productive to protecting biodiversity. With no benefits returning to Mexico, the incentives for the country and its farmers to protect biodiversity are diminished. Indeed, by economically harming Mexican farmers by trying to prevent the importation of yellow beans to the US, Proctor could be harming biodiversity if the farmers are forced to turn to more environmentally-harmful ways of earning a living. On the other hand, if the farming of yellow beans for export became very lucrative, this could also harm biodiversity if fields are devoted to monocultures of yellow beans with other varieties abandoned.