Category: Funding

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Professional Plant Breeders for Tomorrow

The International Centre for Plant Breeding Education and Research (ICPBER) at the University of Western Australia (UWA) provides advanced education and research in plant breeding to enhance the world’s future supply of plant-based food, fibre and industrial raw materials in an era of changing climates.

ICPBER has only recently started work (August 2008), so it may be too early to tell what strategic directions it will take, but I hope it will cover both conventional and biotech approaches, and live up to its name by addressing the needs of all regions and crops. Will it compete with, say, similar Africa-based initiatives? I suspect there’s enough room — enough need — for both. Anyway, good to see it link up with the Global Partnership Initiative for Plant Breeding Capacity Building (GIPB). That should minimize the chances of duplication of efforts.

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Gates speaks

The Annual Newsletter of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is online. Page 3 deals with agriculture. The emphasis is clear:

New seeds and other inputs like fertilizer allow a farmer to increase her farm’s output significantly, instead of just growing enough food to subsist.

A big reason [for the Green Revolution’s failure there] is that African countries have widely varying climate conditions, and there hasn’t been the same investment in creating the seeds that fit those conditions.

Since I grew up as a city boy and didn’t know anything about farming, I have been on a steep learning curve to understand things like fertilizer, drip irrigation, plant breeding, and which crops are best for which conditions.

Our optimism about technology is a fundamental part of the foundation’s approach. … Technology is also a personal passion of Melinda’s and mine. So we try to point scientific research toward the problems of the poor, like agriculture.

But as Tom Philpott over at Gristmill points out:

The document never considers the complex history of agriculture in Africa; nor does it mull the social and ecological effects of industrial-style agriculture in the West and India. Are we still so enamored of our food system that we feel compelled to export it to Africa?

A more robust vision for that continent’s food future is laid out by the United Nation’s Conference on Trade and Development and U.N. Environmental Program. Called “Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa” [PDF], the report emerged in 2008 with the support of more than a dozen civil-society organizations throughout Africa.

The report concludes that organic and near-organic agriculture is ideally suited for millions of marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa — and build food security and soil fertility in unison.

Making better use of agricultural biodiversity and other solutions that do not involve what the Gates’ think of as technology is, I think, an even more exciting challenge that just trying to duplicate the Green Revolution again for Africa. And if Africa’s “widely varying climate conditions” were the problem (to say nothing of widely varying soils), how exactly will new seeds and fertilizers address that problem?

Gates also makes much of climate change, whose “negative effects will fall almost entirely on the poor, even though they did not cause the problem”. Does he really think he can breed, from scratch, fast enough to keep up? Or would he do better to devote at least some resources to making more and better use of existing agrobiodiversity in ways that can deliver the improved stability and size of harvests he says he wants?

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Kenyan farmers reject technology solutions

Farmers are saying traditional crops were much better because they rarely ever lost everything even in the worst of droughts.

Well, well, well. That’s from a news piece in The Nation, explaining that many farmers are turning away from improved varieties of maize and beans because they don’t deliver a reliable harvest. Kenya does put a little money into its “orphan crops programme,” designed to rehabilitate traditional crops such as cassava, sorghum and millet; The Nation stops just short of calling for more research into these crops.

And that, in a microcosm, is the entire story of international investment in agricultural R&D. Not enough, on the wrong things, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Philip Pardey and his colleagues Julian Alston and Jennifer James have published a paper on Agricultural R&D Policy: A Tragedy of the International Commons that makes for pretty grim reading. They analyse the extent of the current failure to invest and the reasons for it, useful ammunition for anyone who needs to know these things. And they offer some possibilities for the future, which personally I found less than convincing.

The Nation noted that scientists need to move speedily, to prevent the current food crisis one day being remembered as a picnic. But not all scientists are the problem. They chase money, and they solve the problems the money asks them to solve. The money needs to sit up and pay attention.