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If it is broke, fix it

Is more always better? Of course not. The Western Farm Press 1 had an intriguing headline a couple of days ago: “Genebanks increase in importance, number 1,700 worldwide”. The bulk of the article wasn’t really about the number of genebanks, but rather about the Crop Genebank Knowledge Base put together by the System-wide Genetic Resources Programme of the CGIAR. 2 The one thing that Western Farm Press did do was to conflate an increased number of genebanks with their increased importance. I found this particularly odd given a recent piece by Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which argued forcefully that 1700 genebanks was almost certainly about 1694 too many. Here’s a taste:

In the early 1970s, the grand old men and women associated with the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources suggested that the world needed 6-7 international genebanks to conserve crop diversity and supply the needs of plant breeders and researchers. This, presumably, was in addition to a few good genebanks already operating. Today, FAO’s registry of genebanks lists 1700 facilities! Were the experts off by a factor of 250? Or do we have a bubble?

It is tempting to equate more genebanks with more and better conservation. But in the case of genebanks, the establishment of more and more facilities has not automatically translated into expanded conservation because (a.) many of those facilities were stocked with samples already being stored elsewhere, and/ or (b.) professional and financial capacity were insufficient to ensure effective conservation over time.

The motivations for establishing so many facilities were certainly positive. Scientists and administrators realized crop diversity was endangered and wanted to save it. But, as political interest heightened, saving something important evolved into shielding it from others. Sharing between farmers, scientists and countries – the very act that lay at the heart of the establishment of the banks – morphed into a negative.

Today, the tiny “network” of genebanks to which the early experts referred provides the overwhelming majority of samples distributed to farmers and breeders. Very little escapes from other collections. Dozens of “important” genebanks have not conveyed samples even to domestic researchers, much less foreign ones in recent years.

Of course I tried to ask the Western Farm Press whether they really thought that the number of genebanks was a measure of their importance, rather than, as Fowler suggests, evidence that people are not taking them seriously. Unfortunately, the WFP website is badly broken, asking me to verify a word that doesn’t appear in at least three browsers on two different platforms. Honestly. Ho hum.

Frankly, it’d be nice if WFP mended its site, although it isn’t exactly a matter of life and death. It’d be much nicer if the global genebank community (for that is what it is, as Fowler reminds us) cleaned up its own act and moved towards the rationally organized system that future food security requires, which is a matter of life and death.

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Maize mystery solved

ResearchBlogging.org Joost van Heerwarden and co-workers 3 have solved a problem in our understanding of maize domestication. Previous work had shown that maize originated from Balsas teosinte, Zea mays subspecies parviglumis, a wild species that occurs in low and mid-elevation regions of south-west Mexico 4. This made the Rio Balsas area, where parviglumis occurs, the most likely area of maize domestication. This was corroborated by Piperno et al.‘s 5 discovery of 8,700 years old maize remains in that area; the oldest evidence of maize unearthed to date.

The problem was that the maize land races genetically most similar to parviglumis are not found there. They occur in the Mexican highlands. And that’s awkward, particularly because highland maize has a rather different set of ecological adaptations than lowland maize.

Van Heerwaarden et al. say this is a paradox caused by the role of another wild species: Zea mays subspecies mexicana. This species occurs in the highlands, and it is inter-fertile with cultivated maize. The tricky thing is that because the two wild species, parviglumis and mexicana, both referred to as teosinte, are closely related, more closely to each other than to their cultivated cousin, geneflow from mexicana makes the genes of highland maize look more like those of parviglumis!

This means that you cannot directly identify the most ancestral maize populations from genetic similarity with their putative ancestor. Instead, Van Heerwaarden et al. estimated ancestral gene frequencies from cultivated maize populations, without direct reference to the wild species. And, Bingo! Western lowland populations are indeed more ancestral than the highland populations. Maize did originate in the lowlands, and from there it spread to the highlands and to other parts of the Americas.

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More on participatory breeding

Speaking of different approaches to breeding, one of the speakers at last year’s tri-societies meeting in Long Beach, California, sent me a link to the session on Participatory Plant Breeding for Food Security and Conservation of Agrobiodiversity. 6 This is very cool technology; given a reasonable internet connection you can hear the talks — and watch the slides, if you’re so minded — of six of the speakers. I listened to the first talk, by Cal Qualset, and the quality is excellent. I must try to find time for the others over the next few days.

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Different approaches to breeding and drought-resistant maize

Bestriding the world on the shoulders of giants, as we do, can cause dizzying glimpses of the obvious. Allowing farmers to participate in studies to improve their farming, for example, is a central tenet of research in poorer countries. Elsewhere, it seems to be less common and less visible, which may be why we sit up and take notice when we do see it, for example among Europe’s brassica growers.

Now, from the US, come similar stories. First off, there’s Syngenta’s drought-resistant maize which — get this! — is not genetically engineered. 7 Syngenta says these varieties suffer no production penalty when there is no drought. That’s really important to farmers who might not suffer a drought, but want to be prepared just in case, and whose preparation consists of one or a few highly-tailored varieties rather than a diversity of varieties. And it is really hard to achieve.

What does drought-resistant corn have to do with participatory research? (Leaving aside the question whether Syngenta’s approach might be a better idea than a pure GM approach for poorer countries.) Just that Mat Kinase recently drew attention to something called the US Testing Network (USTN), launched in Iowa in 2009 to “develop and introduce new non-GMO corn hybrids in the market, while improving the quality and quantity of non-GMO corn hybrids available”. As Mat notes:

I couldn’t care less about avoiding transgenes, but I love the idea of small companies, public sector scientists and enthusiastic individuals working together to improve germplasm for niche markets too small for the big seed companies to serve.

That is indeed a good idea. I wonder, would Syngenta be willing to offer USTN some drought-resistant lines without engineered pest resistance and herbicide tolerance, for use in further breeding efforts to serve niche markets? I doubt that there would be any risk of those markets cannibalizing sales of Syngenta’s products.

And there’s a tantalizing tidbit in the full report on USTN that Mat linked to:

Walter Goldstein of the Michael Fields Institute, Margaret Smith at Cornell University, and Major Goodman at North Carolina State have conducted research on a trait from popcorn, GaS, which blocks incoming pollen. This trait holds promise to block cross pollination from GM corn.

Even from these lofty heights, I had not been aware of this approach, the reverse of Terminator technology, to protect plants from inadvertent cross pollination. Early reports suggest it may not be plain sailing; even so, the fact that farmers and researchers are working together to solve a problem specific to those farmers is surely welcome.

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Climate change weirdness

Catching up is easy when other people too have been taking things easy. I missed this account of the possibly misplaced importance of maize in African life when it first appeared at the Climate Change Media Partnership in the wake of the Cancun meeting, but luckily a scraper site only got around to it yesterday. What is so interesting about this insistence that maize be Africa’s main staple is how ahistorical it is. Corn and Capitalism, Arturo Warman’s wonderful social history of maize, teases out the many factors that made maize Africa’s darling, often in the space of a couple of generations or less. But as Mclay Kanyangarara, climate change advisor for the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, apparently told the side event at Cancun:

“[W]e have always had an option. … Maize is an introduced crop and the small grains have always been our traditional indigenous crops, which are better suited to our climate.”

Why, then, is it proving so hard to break maize’s stranglehold, a scant 500 years later?

And in other climate-change news, a cold winter comes as something of a surprise to the globe-trotting locavore in Guatemala. And another missed post that lives again thanks to a scraper offers first hand experience of climate change in Ethiopia.

“I remember misty mornings, with the sky full of clouds. Even ten years ago there would be regular rainfall six months of the year. This year we had only two and a half. We’ve had to reduce what we grow. No more peppers or vegetables – now it’s just the basics like corn and sorghum.”

Corn, again! The post goes on anecdotally to distinguish past weather patterns — an occasional bad year among the good — from today’s unremittingly bad years. It also talks a bit about how farmers are trying to diversify, for example by growing grass pea (Lathyrus sativus) instead of normal peas (Pisum sativum), noting that grass pea can cause paralysis.

“It’s a big worry for me,” says Lekea, a 50-year-old mother of nine children. “But the alternative is for us to go hungry.”

Another alternative would be for Lekea and other farmers in the area to trial some of the low-neurotoxin Lathyrus varieties that have been under development at ICARDA and elsewhere since the late 1990s. Maybe someone suggested that at the big “climate hearing” that Lekea was scheduled to address. Or maybe nobody in Ethiopia — including Oxfam’s blogger — knew anything about these varieties. That seems unlikely, given that Ethiopia has the varieties, which continue to be improved. So what’s the story?

There always are alternatives. Even to maize.