Category: Genebanks

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Save seeds, Kenyan tells Japan

Wangari Maathai, tree-hugger and board member of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, has been in Japan seeking Japan’s leadership for the conservation of agricultural biodiversity, in advance of the Nagoya meeting of the parties to the Conference of Biological Diversity in October.

“If we don’t protect what we have, you never know what the scientists of tomorrow will need” to allow people to produce crops that could not grow before, she said, adding, “That is why these diversities are important.” She talked about her visit to a Kyoto temple where she learned the Japanese word “tomoiki,” which refers to the concept of coexistence with nature, and said it is “something the world needs to learn.” Maathai became widely known for adopting the Japanese word “mottainai” — loosely meaning “You should save it” — in trying to promote awareness of environmental protection among Japanese people.

Nice word, mottainai.

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Assuming genebanks

Most crop geneticists agree that enrichment of the cultivated gene pool will be necessary to meet the challenges that lie ahead. However, to fully capitalize on the extensive reservoir of favorable alleles within wild germplasm, many advances are still needed. These include increasing our understanding of the molecular basis for key traits, expanding the phenotyping and genotyping of germplasm collections, improving our molecular understanding of recombination in order to enhance rates of introgression of alien chromosome regions, and developing new breeding strategies that permit introgression of multiple traits. Recent progress has shown that each of these challenges is tractable and within reach if some of the basic problems limiting the application of new technologies can be tackled.

That’s from Breeding Technologies to Increase Crop Production in a Changing World, part of the recent Science special feature on food security. Sure, the challenges of use are tractable. But what if those germplasm collections are inadequate in their coverage, accessibility, management or funding? As ever, genebanks are pretty much taken for granted in these sorts of discussions.

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Competition for Svalbard?

A world class seed vault has been established on the Siachen Glacier to preserve India’s biological wealth for future generations, Dr. Ajay Parida, Executive Director, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation confirmed on Saturday.

The vault, which has a natural temperature between -20 and -40 celsius, will hold samples of rice, pulses, peas and beans and can be used for building food programmes across the nation.

This was at a meeting in which the Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food Lars Peder Brekk also participated. I wonder if Mr Brekk mentioned the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

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Nibbles: Farmers’ Rights, Seed Breeder, Genebanks, Pigeon Pea, Cheese

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Review calls for support of Kew genebank

The independent review of Kew Gardens commissioned by Defra is just out. It has some very nice things to say about the Millennium Seed Bank, and quite rightly so.

The work of the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) is particularly impressive, and the MSB has forged partnerships with more than 120 institutions in 54 countries. Kew has advised many of these partners on how to set up and run seed banks for themselves. This has included, for example, the delivery of germination protocols to a network of 38 national seed banks in sub-Saharan Africa; and the use of seeds from 500 species stored in the MSB for restoration and species recovery programmes worldwide.

Which leads to a recommendation that Defra should pull out its wallet.

The MSB’s operating costs over the past nine years have averaged £4.1 million per annum. They were funded until the end of 2009 by the Millennium Commission. The external funding stream that has been going to the MSB to assist in the running costs ceased from January 2010 and Kew will now either have to fund the MSB from its own resources; seek alternative sources of funding, particularly by building the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership; or downsize or even close the MSB. For the reasons set out in Chapter 2, the review team believes the MSB should be of very high priority for Kew, and it recommends that Kew should be given additional interim funding by Defra, which tapers down over three years, to enable Kew to gather the additional funding support that it needs. We recommend that £3 million be given for this purpose in 2010/11 and £1.5 million in 2011/12.

This is not a particularly good time to make a call on the public finances in Britain, but surely the Millennium Seed Bank is too big — and important — to fail. Defra will no doubt find the money. And so they should.