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Seems like all that rice breeding was worth it after all

ACIAR has just published a huge study of the impact of IRRI’s rice breeding work in SE Asia. The press release has the key numbers:

  • “Southeast Asian rice farmers are harvesting an extra US$1.46 billion worth of rice a year as a result of rice breeding.”
  • “…IRRI’s research on improving rice varietal yield between 1985 and 2009 … [boosted] … rice yield by up to 13%.”
  • “…IRRI’s improved rice varieties increased farmers’ returns by US$127 a hectare in southern Vietnam, $76 a hectare in Indonesia, and $52 a hectare in the Philippines.”
  • “The annual impact of IRRI’s research in these three countries alone exceeded IRRI’s total budget since it was founded in 1960.”

But I guess the figure the Australians were really after is that in the final table:

A pretty decent return.

Good to see the pioneering work of IRRI (and others) in documenting pedigree information in a usable way recognized — and indeed made use of. And good to see the International Network for Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER) and its use of the International Treaty’s multilateral access and benefit sharing system highlighted in the study as a model for germplasm exchange and use. Of course one would have loved to see the genebank’s role in producing the impact also recognized, rather than sort of tacitly taken for granted as usual, but maybe the data can be used to bring that out more in a follow-up.

I see another couple of opportunities for further research, actually. There is little in the study about the genetic nature of the improved varieties that are having all this impact. To what extent can their pedigrees be traced back to crop wild relatives, say? And, indeed, how many different parent lines have been involved in their development, and how genetically different were they? That will surely to some extent determine how sustainable these impressive impacts are likely to be.

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To corridor or not to corridor

Exhibit A

The fact that distribution change occurs predominantly through spatially restricted, local population processes suggests that the development of ecological networks may be an effective conservation strategy for plant species in the UK (Lawton et al. 2010). An ecological network comprises sites which collectively contain the diversity and area of habitat needed to support species and which have ecological connections between them. The UK is largely made up of semi-natural habitats shaped by human land use, and so consequently, much of the UK’s wildlife is restricted to small fragmented areas of high habitat quality. These can rarely be restored to large unbroken areas of natural habitat. However, making connections between them through wildlife corridors and smaller ‘stepping stone’ sites is a much more feasible option, which would improve species ability to track environmental change through short-range colonisation (Hilty, Lidicker & Merenlender 2006).

Exhibit B

…constraints imposed by climatic variability, limited dispersal and low persistence may mean that even habitat corridors through high-quality habitat may not in themselves make range shifts possible. Additionally, corridors for species that show high uncertainty between climate paths under different GCMs are less likely to be effective.

These are from papers in Journal of Ecology and Ecology Letters published within days of each other, though admittedly one dealing with plant species in Britain the other with amphibians in the USA. So what’s a poor boy to do? Stop thinking there’s one solution for everything, I suppose. And get everything into ex situ just in case.

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Featured: Linkages

Pat Heslop-Harrison can’t take it any more:

what are the problems? why is uptake of improved varieties slow? how are you coping with urbanization? who wants to be a farmer today?

Got the answer? An answer? Comment here.

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Overlooking agricultural biodiversity again

I’m afraid I’m going to be a nay-sayer again. Here’s a quote from an otherwise very worthy piece on the Gates Foundation website trying to link what’s happening at the G20 and in the CGIAR reform process and other high-level stuff with the needs of “35 year old Oumou, who lives in Sadore village in Niger, struggling to feed her 5 children due to unpredictable harvests from her husband’s millet farm.” 1

…Oumou’s group could plant hardy Apple of the Sahel (10 times the vitamin C of ordinary apples and rich in calcium, iron, and phosphorus) and Moringa trees (whose leaves contain 4 times the vitamin A in carrots, 4 times the calcium and double the protein in milk, and 3 times the potassium in bananas).

I don’t have much of a problem with the use of a vernacular name for Ziziphus in such a piece. You might ask why use Moringa then, but that seems to have become widely accepted as the common name for Moringa oleifera. What I do have a little problem with is comparing its vitamin C content with apples, a crop that is of no relevance to the Sahel. But that’s a rhetorical flourish on the part of the writer, I guess. Apple of the Sahel vs ordinary apple. Geddit? Let’s let that pass.

I personally think “10 times the vitamin C of ordinary apples” is borderline misleading, even if it were a useful comparison, though that is excusable too. Quick googling gave a range of 44-133 mg/100g pulp for a few “ber” varieties and 7-40 mg/100g pulp for a few apple varieties. So the range of ratios is about 1-20, so let’s call it 10 on average. Fine. But who cares about averages? In a piece about how research can help the Sahelian smallholder, why not grasp with both hands the opportunity of at least pointing out that Oumou could be helped to identify the most nutritious varieties? Dropping the agrobiodiversity ball — no, that’s not it: not even recognizing it as a ball — is what I find it hard to forgive.

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Bringing together researchers and breeders

It all started with a bravura Annals of Botany blog post from Pat Heslop Harrison from a scientific conference in Assisi: “Italian Genetics Societies in Assisi: staple foods and orphan crops via epigenomics and systems biology.”

That got posted to Facebook, where I commented on it by extracting what I found a particularly trenchant sentence:

I failed to notice substantial contributions to discussions or presentations from breeders or seed organizations, the end users of so much of the research discussed.

There were more comments in other media, apparently, and Pat felt the need to follow up. He’s done that both on his blog and on Facebook. And what he says is, again, well worth reading in full. Here’s a taster:

Unfortunately the difficulty making links of researchers with the seed companies and breeders is found in almost all of Europe, perhaps with the exception of the Netherlands.

There are other exceptions around the world:

India is brilliant in doing these things, with farmers’ cooperatives, tissue culture/propagation companies, extension workers (running trials etc), always at the meetings and willing to show you their lines, approaches, and discuss applications of what you say (see, for example, my blog from last year). USA is different with the land-grant universities taking research all the way to finished varieties.

And Africa? Anyway, I’d really like to know that the breeders think, so I’ve sent the various links to GIPB. But I can see that centralizing this discussion may prove tricky. Share fair, anyone? Well, maybe.