Category: Funding

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The cost-benefit of Australian genebanks

We’ve now received a copy of the 2007 report to the Steering Committee of Australia’s National Genetic Resource Centre entitled “Benefit-cost analysis of the proposed National Genetic Resources Centre,” as trailed in an earlier post. That’s the one that was said to posit a return on investment of 119:1 for the Australian pastures genebank. It makes for interesting reading, and we’ll try to summarize the main points here.

First, some clarifications, though. It in fact does not posit a return on investment (ROI) of 119:1 for the Australian pastures genebank. Sorry we gave that impression earlier. That is the ROI for the whole Australian National Genetic Resources Centre (NGRC), of which the pastures collection is just a part. Let me back up a bit. The Primary Industries Ministerial Council of Australia agreed in 2006 that the 5 existing, separate state-run genebanks (managing something like 180,000 accessions in total) should be amalgamated into a single (but actually two-node), national facility.

This was seen as an important pre-requisite for meeting Australia’s obligations under the International Treaty of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. As part of that process, The Allen Consulting Group was asked to consider the situation of no agricultural plant germplasm being conserved in Australia, work out how much the NGRC would be worth to Australia if that counterfactual were not in fact true, and compare that to the projected cost of setting up and running the NGRC.

The cost side of things was not that difficult to work out. It was estimated that the 2-node (crops and pastures) NGRC would cost about A$ 590,000 to set up, and A$ 3.5 million a year to run thereafter (compared to A$ 3.705 million a year for the 5-genebank system). Over 30 years, discounted at 6% real (whatever that means), that’s an outlay of A$ 51.7 million.

To get to the value of the system, it was necessary to make some assumptions:

  • Continued access to germplasm held in Australia would enable historic trends in the growth of farm productivity to continue.
  • Holding no germplasm in Australia would mean growth of productivity due to plant genetic enhancement would continue, but at a slower rate. Productivity gains due to other things would stay the same.
  • The share of productivity gains due to plant genetic enhancement varied from 5% (sheep farming) to 30% (field crops).
  • The share of productivity gains from plant genetic enhancement due to access to germplasm collections in Australia was 30%.

Put all that into your spreadsheet and you get a total of A$ 5 billion net present value to the productivity of Australian agriculture over the next 30 years. Add another A$ 1.2 billion in assorted benefits not associated with increased productivity (things like water quality, public health etc.), and you get A$ 6.2 billion (that’s an annuity benefit of A$ 364 million), which divided by the 30-year cost gives you that 119:1 ratio.

How confident are The Allen Consulting Group in their results? Well, they identified two key uncertainties: the annual discount rate and the share of genetic gain attributable to access to germplasm in Australia. Tweak the 6% and 30% values of these two things, respectively, and you get a range of productivity benefits over 30 years of A$ 1.2-14.7 billion around the canonical A$ 5 billion.

But when you think about it what the study actually did is work out the return to Australian agriculture of those 180,000 accessions being conserved, somewhere. The material could be held in places other than Australia, after all, and still be available under the International Treaty. Ah, but the study also figured that the cost of servicing demand by Australian breeders would be 20% higher if the average 14,000 yearly seed samples they requested had to come from genebanks outside the country, rather than the NGRC (because of stuff like quarantine etc.). So there were efficiency gains, which were factored into the benefits side of the equation.

So there you have it. Put another way, each accession maintained in the Australian systems will cost the Australian taxpayer A$ 21 a year over the next 30 years, and return A$ 194 a year to the Australian economy. I think: I get confused, but I think that’s right. That sounds pretty good, though I guess one should compare it with other sorts of investments the Australian government could make. Anyway, it seems the powers that be thought it was a bet worth making. And it’s not only Australians that should be grateful for that.

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Australia’s very valuable new pastures genebank

A video has just surfaced about the Australian Pastures Genebank, courtesy of the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), starring my mate Steve Hughes. Here are the headline numbers: 70K accessions, 2K species, collected over 60 years, ROI 119:1. Say what? Return on investment in a genebank of over 100 to 1? How come I’ve never come across this before? Well, it’s from a 2007 report to the Steering Committee of Australia’s National Genetic Resource Centre entitled “Benefit-cost analysis of the proposed National Genetic Resources Centre.” And I can’t find it online. But Steve has promised to send it. Stay tuned…

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Building a European Plant Germplasm System

A couple of days ago we blogged about a study by European genebankers which recommended the establishment of a “European Plant Germplasm System” (EPGS) along the lines of the US National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS). Let’s see how far the analogy can be pushed.

Some of the key features illustrated in the diagram of the “EPGS” provided in the paper, and reproduced in our post, are: active germplasm collections, a central seed storage laboratory, a system-wide information system and a plant germplasm committee. There are some interesting differences between the European and US versions of each of these. The constituent European germplasm collections, for example, would be the national collections, which tend to have a very wide range of species; whereas in the US some at least of the individual germplasm repositories are fairly focused on a crop or group of similar crops. That makes for efficiencies. Or would all the “small grains” in Europe end up in one national genebank, and all the apples in another, as in the US?

Another difference, as we discussed in the previous post, is the nature of that European plant germplasm committee. There is supposed to be only one of these in Europe, whereas in the US there is one per crop, to provide guidance and advice from germplasm users to the crop curator. That to me makes more sense.

As for information systems, Eurisco is not at the moment comparable to GRIN. The NPGS uses GRIN (GRIN-Global in the near future) to both manage workflows within the genebank and make some of the resulting data available for searching on the internet. Eurisco does only the latter at the moment (and, incidentally, like GRIN, serves its data up to Genesys). But then I expect the individual European genebanks are quite happy with their various data management systems and don’t necessarily need to share a single, standardized system. Or do they?

Perhaps the biggest difference, however, is with the central seed storage laboratory. There is at present no European Ft Collins at all to provide safety duplication of seed accessions. It would have to be built from scratch. Or perhaps one of the bigger national genebanks could suck in safety duplicates and morph into a regional genebank? But is a single central repository really necessary at all? What if, instead, you had different national genebanks taking regional responsibility for safety duplication of different crops? This would not be a new idea by any means, though I don’t think it’s ever been implemented anywhere in the world. Might it be an option in Europe?

Then there’s the stuff that’s not on the diagram. Take coordination mechanisms. The NPGS has biennial face-to-face meetings of all genebank curators, with teleconferences in the “off-years.” Plus there’s national–level coordination by the ARS Office of National Programs. The National Plant Germplasm Coordinating Committee coordinates and communicates information among federal, state and other funding entities. A related issue is administrative structure. NPGS genebanks are budgeted in a ARS Research Project, which is funded by an annual Congressional appropriation. This in turn contributes to ARS National Program 301 (Plant Genetic Resources, Genomes, and Genetic Improvement). Every five years, each National Program and its constituent Research Projects undergo external reviews. After that, each Research Project writes a new Project Plan for the next five years for review. What would European coordination and administration on crop genetic resources look like? Some is already provided by the European Cooperative Programme for Plant Genetic Resources (ECPGR), of course. Would ECPGR’s processes and structures — not to mention funding — be sufficient for a European Plant Germplasm System?

So. I guess the bottom line is that it’s easy to say that it would be nice to have a European version of the US National Plant Germplasm System. But then you start to drill down into what that would actually mean, and lots of options open up at each turn. And, at each turn, whether it makes sense to do it in Europe exactly like they do it in the US will, as they say, depend.