- Seaweed cultivation: potential and challenges of crop domestication at an unprecedented pace. I for one welcome our new algal overlords.
- Recent advances in understanding the genetic resources of sheep breeds locally-adapted to the UK uplands: opportunities they offer for sustainable productivity. Lower susceptibility to Maedi-Visna virus, for example.
- Back to the wilds: Tapping evolutionary adaptations for resilient crops through systematic hybridization with crop wild relatives. The promiscuity of plants will save us.
- Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis): a source of high-quality protein for food security and novel food products. All 49 varieties tested have full spectrum of essential amino acids.
- Predicting changes in the distribution and abundance of species under environmental change. Distributions are not enough, can adapt some methods to look at abundance too. Oh, and intraspecific diversity.
- Barnyard millet — a potential food and feed crop of future. Decline in cultivation could be reversed due to nutritional quality and adaptability, but it won’t be easy.
- Inclusion of Fermented Foods in Food Guides around the World. The benefits should be better known.
- Discovery and genetic analysis of non-bitter Tartary buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum Gaertn.) with trace-rutinosidase activity. Wow, a non-bitter buckwheat found in Nepal! Should now be possible to produce some better-tasting improved varieties. Yeah but you know how long that usually takes…
- Breeding of ‘Manten-Kirari’, a non-bitter and trace-rutinosidase variety of Tartary buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum Gaertn.). Well I feel foolish…
- Higher iron pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum L.) provides more absorbable iron that is limited by increased polyphenolic content. High Fe is not enough.
- Characteristics of Egg-related Traits in the Onagadori (Japanese Extremely Long Tail) Breed of Chickens. It’s a “Special National Natural Treasure” of Japan and no wonder.
- Exploitation of yield stability in barley. It’s not really feasible to measure it accurately, and therefore select for it, but when you do, it seems hybrids are better at it.
Let us safeguard our propagules under appropriate conditions!
As North Korea publishes its official list of new patriotic slogans, what we all want to know, of course, is whether the country’s agrobiodiversity receives the attention it deserves. Well, here is a selection of the more striking agriculturally-themed exhortations, culled from the full list of — count them — 310:
- Let us make our country overflow with rice by boosting cereals production!
- Actively introduce water-saving farming and other scientific farming methods!
- Let us work hard to secure water resources as an all-people campaign!
- Let us encourage organic farming on an extensive scale!
- Establish the food production cycle of crop cultivation and livestock farming, and fruit growing and livestock farming!
- Let us beat the world in fruit farming by making it scientific, modern and intensive!
- Make fruits cascade down and their sweet aroma fill the air on the sea of apple trees at the foot of Chol Pass!
- Grow vegetables extensively in greenhouses!
- Let us turn ours into a country of mushrooms by making mushroom cultivation scientific, intensive and industrialized!
- Let us carry through the great Generalissimos’ instructions on “grass for meat”!
- Let us expedite the construction of the large-scale livestock farming base in the Sepho area!
- Produce larger quantities of meat, eggs and milk holding high the banner of science-based livestock farming!
Very disappointing not to see the conservation of crop diversity in genebanks more forcefully encouraged.
Target 2.5 passes muster
By 2020 maintain genetic diversity of seeds, cultivated plants, farmed and domesticated animals and their related wild species, including through soundly managed and diversified seed and plant banks at national, regional and international levels, and ensure access to and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge as internationally agreed.
Sound familiar? Well, it is Target 2.5 of the draft Sustainable Development Goals, contributing to the goal to
End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
It’s not exactly as I would personally prefer to phrase it, but you know what it’s like, this language wasn’t just crafted by a committee, but by a committee of committees.
Anyway, despite whatever stylistic shortcomings the language of this particular target may have, it has just received a seal of approval by the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC) in their recent review of the SDGs as they currently stand. This is what the report has to say about 2.5 in particular:
Very sensible suggestions for improvement. For the record, I think the 2020 timeframe was chosen to gel with the Global Plant Strategy for Plant Conservation. Anyway, overall, the target is “well defined and based on the latest scientific evidence,” unlike 71% of the other 168. Phew.
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.
What does it cost to conserve crop diversity in Europe?
There’s a document on the NordGen website entitled Towards a European Plant Germplasm System — The third way 1 which advocates setting up a “European Plant Germplasm System” along the lines of the US National Plant Germplasm System. Written by Lothar Frese, Anna Palmé, Lorenz Bülow and Chris Kik — all from big European genebanks — the paper “builds on the results of the PGR Secure project funded under the EU Seventh Framework Programme.”
This is what the European system would look like:
What, no Svalbard? Even the NPGS uses that. Also, there are separate germplasm committees for each crop in the US, rather than one committee to rule them all. That makes more sense if the idea is to have input from the users, as in the US; but maybe that’s not it, as in the diagram the committee is not linked to the users. So what is it for? Anyway, how much would this all cost?
As a rule of thumb, the ex situ conservation including related research costs approximately 60 € / accession and year (personal communication of Dr. U. Lohwasser of 23 May, 2014 and Dr. P. Bretting of 22 May 2014). 1,725,315 accessions are kept in European genebanks resulting in an assumed total annual costs for ex situ conservation of 103,518,900 € per year for the whole of Europe. In view of the 34 billion € spent for agri-environmental measures within the EU-28 a budget of 100 million € / year is not unreasonable. The question rather is whether the stakeholder groups and policy makers feel that having a European Plant Germplasm System is worth this amount.
Well, let’s fact-check that. The operating budget for the NPGS is $44,600,000 per year, for 569,000 accessions, which is about $78 per accession, or about €70 at today’s exchange rate. That’s probably a conservative estimate, I’m reliably informed, as the NPGS gets a lot of in-kind support from the universities with which it cooperates — but it’s the right ballpark anyway. The international genebanks of the CGIAR get around $20 million a year to maintain and make available their ca. 700,000 accessions, which seems very cheap, but includes very little of those “related research costs.”
What we don’t know — or at least I don’t — is what European countries are actually spending on their genebanks at the moment. It seems maybe the authors don’t know either, because another of the 12 recommendations they make, besides establishing the system, is to inventory the money available. Here are all the recommendations, conveniently filleted out for you. Look at number 6:
1. We suggest the establishment of a European Plant Germplasm System.
2. Establish a legal basis for conservation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in the EU.
3. Establishment of a technical EU infrastructure for the organisation of conservation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture measures.
4. Establishment of an EU information infrastructure for conservation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.
5. Disentangle juridically and financially genebank tasks from plant breeding research and plant breeding tasks at the national level.
6. Inventory of financial means available to genebanks and estimation of financial means needed for a fully functioning European network of genetic resource collections (ex situ, in situ and on-farm).
7. Increase the visibility of plant genetic resources collections on the internet.
8. Develop a European platform for long-term crop specific pre-breeding programmes.
9. Clear uncertainties concerning Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) rules so that breeding companies can take economic decisions on a safe legal basis.
10. Research should be strengthened to better understand the amount and geographic distribution of genetic diversity present in priority crop gene pools.
11. The European agro-NGOs and their influence should be strengthened.
12. Establishment of a European Network of Private-Public-Partnership programmes for evaluation of plant genetic resources in Europe.
My own recommendation would be to start with that inventory of financial means. It would be nice to know how close to that €100 million we in fact are — and how much of it, if any, would need to be new money.