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.
Faced with pessimistic predictions of the impact of climate change, it’s too easy to throw your hands up in the air and cry “there’s nothing to be done”. Or, as a few people still do, to throw your hands up in the air and cry “there’s no need to do anything”. But if they turn to the latest issue of Global Environmental Change, policy-makers, plant breeders and genebank managers should be able to throw their hands in the air with a cry of joy: “This is what we need to do.”
Percentage overlap between historical and 2025 (left), 2050 (middle), and 2075 (right) simulated growing season average temperature over African maize area. Dark blue colors represent 100% overlap between past and future climates, dark red colors represent 0% overlap.
The authors of Shifts in African crop climates by 2050, and the implications for crop improvement and genetic resources conservation are Marshall Burke and David Lobell of the Program on Food Security and the Environment, at Stanford University, and our own Luigi Guarino, wearing his Global Crop Diversity Trust hat. ((Burke, M., Lobell, D., & Guarino, L. (2009). Shifts in African crop climates by 2050, and the implications for crop improvement and genetic resources conservation Global Environmental Change DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.04.003. And though the article is beyond a paywall, which is why I am quoting extensively, I’m sure one of the authors would be able to send you a reprint.))
The approach is quite straightforward. First, they ask how crop climates will change across Africa. This involves taking historical data for a particular place and comparing the climate there to the predictions of a whole bunch of climate change models. They then ask how quickly the predicted changes will push local climate outside the limits of recent local experience. In addition, they looked at different climates across the continent, asking whether future climates are currently present somewhere in the country, or elsewhere on the continent. The goal is
[T]o identify both future problem regions with no analogs on the continent in today’s climate, and countries whose current crop areas appear likely analogs to many future climates, with the latter case representing promising areas for genetic resource collection and preservation.
They do so for the three primary rain-fed crops of sub-Saharan Africa: maize, sorghum and pearl millet, which provide roughly a third of the calories consumed, and almost two-thirds in some countries.
The big predicted change of all the models is in temperature, which gets hotter almost everywhere, with much less agreement among the models of how much rainfall will change. Skipping over just how fast climates are changing (“rapidly”) and keeping in mind the large time lags involved in breeding crops suited to changed climates, Burke et al. warn that their results “suggest a pressing need to develop breeding programs that anticipate these rapidly warming growing environments.”
So there’s one thing people can do, now.
Where will the raw material for those breeding programmes come from? Genebanks, natch. Alas,
African cereals are often poorly represented in international genebanks, and national genebanks on the continent are frequently resource-constrained and not always representative of the crop genetic diversity in the country.
Burke, Lobell and Guarino look at the spatial distribution of climate analogues and calculate “self-overlap,” overlap of the extremes of projected climate with today’s climate within the country. ((Actually, with the average of the past 10 years of observed climate, long enough to average out extremes but short enough to capture the current climate.)) There’s a nifty graph of the overlap for each of the three crops in all the countries, but the take home message is that despite the lack of overlap in some places, there’s still enough variation that a country might be a good source of variability for its own needs. On the other hand, future temperature regimes are likely to be so hot that even those countries that have large self-overlaps will likely have to look outside their own borders for varieties that will thrive in their expected climates.
Many countries with low self-overlap nevertheless have five or more countries that overlap 75% with their new climates.
For these countries, breeding efforts to cope with warming could greatly benefit from accessing genetic resources beyond their own borders.
Something else to do, now.
There are, however, also countries, most of them in the Sahel, that have low self-overlap and fewer than 5 analogs in other countries. They’re already the hottest climates in Africa, and likely to become hotter, so it ought not to be a surprise that their options are going to be limited.
Unfortunately, primary centers of maize diversity outside Africa, such as in Mexico, enjoy much cooler climates than much of Africa. If breeding efforts cannot sustain yield for maize for these hottest climates in the face of warming temperatures, switches to potentially more heat- and drought-tolerant crops, such as sorghum and millet could be necessary.
Then there are the happy countries whose current climates contain analogues to many future novel climates. Their genetic diversity will be valuable for future breeding efforts. Are they safe?
Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Mozambique … are particularly poorly represented in national and international genebanks. The top ten analog countries for maize — those which overlap most with anticipated novel climates on the continent — each have fewer than 150 landrace accessions in major genebanks. These countries appear as particularly high priorities for urgent collection and conservation of maize genetic resources. … The results for sorghum and millet show qualitatively similar patterns as the results for maize.
There’s a lot more meat in the paper, which repays close reading. It really does contain evidence-based policy advice, on how best to make use of a limited pot of cash by setting the right priorities and establishing the right kinds of cooperative efforts.
Colleagues at FAO and Bioversity International have a paper out in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis entitled “Food composition is fundamental to the cross-cutting initiative on biodiversity for food and nutrition.” The cross-cutting initiative in question is that on biodiversity for food and nutrition which the CBD asked FAO to lead, in collaboration with Bioversity. And by the “food composition” of the title the authors mean databases which document the nutritional value of foods not just at the level of species, as currently, but of the different varieties and cultivars within species. These will in a way be a central pillar of the initiative. We’ve talked here before about the extensive variation that can exist among varieties in nutritional composition, for glycaemic index, say. And we’ve repeatedly highlighted the work of Lois Englberger and her Pohnpei colleagues in this field, for example. So it is good to hear that food composition tables and databases will be improved to allow the inclusion of infra-specific data. Populating the databases will be something else, of course. The data will need to come from existing genetic resources databases, which currently do not as a rule contain much in the way of this kind of information and are not necessarily equipped to handle it. So this initiative will involve a marriage between two database communities, that of nutritionists and that of genebanks. A difficult trick to pull off. Necessary, and long overdue, but difficult. Stay tuned.
Elizabeth Finkel reports for Science from the 3rd meeting of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in Tunis last week. Here’s the bottom line:
In a remarkable and unexpected climax as the meeting drew to a close, the treaty governing body agreed to raise $116 million for a biodiversity fund that would support traditional farmers. That helped avert a crisis of confidence in the treaty, says Bhatti, who calls the meeting “a real turning point.” Worede, more circumspect, describes the biodiversity fund as a “little progress.” However, he says, “Anything voluntary is like the dew on a leaf: It can fall down at any time. The contributions should be binding.” ((Scientists Seek Easier Access to Seed Banks.))
