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News on the Desert Research Center genebank

Ismail Abdel Galil (left), founder of the looted Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank, has told SciDev.net that he is hopeful that the EDGB will be able to recover some of the genebank’s material that was duplicated at the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew. Galil confirmed that most of the material was not duplicated, not even at the National Gene Bank in Giza, which was not looted.

SciDev.net’s report, more than three weeks after the news broke, here, adds some information to sketchy details we had before. The looting of the Desert Research Center in Cairo was carried out by “mobs,” while “Bedouin groups in the Sinai region, angered by the Mubarak government’s policies towards them, went on the rampage” and attacked the EGDB. According to Hazem Badr, SciDev.net’s reporter,

DRC chairman Ibrahim M. Nasr … estimated the losses at the facilities in Cairo and North Sinai at around US$1.3 million. That figure does not include the desert plant gene bank, some of which has been irretrievably lost.

Galil, who founded the desert genebank in 1996, had been honoured by Bioversity International as one of the Guardians of Diversity in the Mediterranean at a celebration in Rome in May 2009. 1 Unfortunately the genebank’s “efficient operations and state of the art technology,” cited in the award, were no match for looters.

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More diverse wheats for the future

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Council, one of the UK science-funding agencies, has announced a GBP7 million grant “to increase the diversity of traits available in wheat via a comprehensive pre-breeding programme”. They’re going to be plumbing “ancient sources of wheat germplasm” and creating lines and markers that will allow breeders to breed performance traits into elite lines. All the data and seed lines will be stored centrally and made freely available as part of a coordinated global effort. One of the partners in the project is the University of Nottingham, which issued its own press release, which gives a bit more detail. For example, one of Nottingham’s tasks will be to transfer genetic material from wild relatives of wheat, because “due to modern breeding practises there is not sufficient genetic variation in modern wheat varieties to obtain the increases in yield required”. Another task will be to breed for “Nutrient use efficiency … the amount of grain yield that plants produce for each kilo of nutrient available to the plant”.

Which reminds me, wasn’t it the University of Nottingham’s Professor Donald Grierson who promised, back in the early 1980s, that nitrogen-fixing wheat was just over the horizon? Seems like it still is.

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How to move agriculture forward

From the Department of Deafening Reports: 2
IFPRI wraps up its conference on Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health with an “initial draft synthesis of its conclusions,” described by IFPRI DG Shenggen Fan as a “living document, subject to further debate”. So what are you waiting for? Get on over there and subject it to further debate.

Not to be outdone, the World Bank has released Agriculture and development: a brief review of the literature, a Policy Research Working Paper. Here’s the Abstract:

After 20 years of neglect by international donors, agriculture is now again in the headlines because higher food prices are increasing food insecurity and poverty. In the coming years it will be essential to increase food productivity and production in developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and with smallholders. This however requires finding viable solutions to a number of complex technical, institutional and policy issues including land markets, research on seeds and inputs; agricultural extension; credit; rural infrastructure; storage; connection to markets; rural nonfarm employment and food price stabilization. This paper reviews what the economic literature has to say on these topics. It discusses in turn the role played by agriculture in the development process and the interactions between agriculture and other economic sectors; the determinants of the Green Revolution and discuss the foundations of agricultural growth; issues of income diversification by farmers; approaches to rural development; and finally issues of international trade policy and food security which are at the root of the crisis in agricultural commodity volatility in the past few years.