Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

Week of Sept. 11, 2004; Vol. 166, No. 11 , p. 170
The Ultimate Crop Insurance
A new treaty strives to save 10,000 years of plant breeding
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040911/bob10.asp
>From Science News, Vol. 166, No. 11, Sept. 11, 2004, p. 170.

In late summer 2002, looters threatened war-engulfed Afghanistan's 
agricultural heritage. Unknown pillagers dumped stocks of carefully labeled 
seeds as they ransacked buildings in Ghazni and Jalalabad, where the material 
had been hidden for safekeeping. All the looters wanted, apparently, were the 
plastic and glass jars in which the seeds were stored. The scattered seeds 
weren't the starter for next year's crops but the genetic backup for the 
agrarian nation's agriculture. The catalogued seeds of various strains of 
wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils, almonds, pomegranates, and melons would 
have been deployed to create new seed supplies if drought, insects, or some 
other disaster had wiped out the region's production of crop seeds. They also 
represented the raw material for creating future lines of crops.

Botanists had recorded where each seed type had come from and information 
about the climate and geography of its place of origin. However, seeds for 
cold-tolerant wheat didn't look any different from those for a cold-sensitive 
but disease-tolerant plant. Removed from their labeled jars, these and all 
the other seeds lost their archival value.

"It's like having a library of books with no titles on them," notes Geoffrey 
Hawtin, the former director general of the International Plant Genetic 
Resources Institute in Rome.

Seed repositories, such as those in Afghanistan, sometimes called gene banks, 
are often casualties of war, says Ruth Raymond of that institute. "Cambodia, 
Rwanda, Somalia, Iraq—we know of at least 50 or 60 examples of where it's 
happened," she says. Bank holdings often offer looters the makings for dinner 
or free seed for a small crop. In most cases, these events haven't turned 
into long-term disasters because gene banks in other countries house backup 
stores. That's true for Afghanistan and the other war-struck countries. When 
hostilities subside, a country can begin rebuilding its gene bank with seeds 
from half a world away.

Offering such relief to an embattled country is just one of the missions of 
gene banks, which together form an informal international system. The banks 
also preserve the genes that have helped plant species thrive in harsh 
climates, survive diseases, or provide particular flavors or other appealing 
traits.

Crop diversity constitutes agriculture's "global wealth—the set of genes that 
have been developed by farmers over 10,000 years," explains Clive Stannard of 
the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

Unfortunately, the successes of large agribusiness companies are adding to 
the need for a strong seed-repository system and worldwide crop diversity.

A small number of popular, high-yielding crop varieties bred by these 
companies have increasingly edged out landraces, the varieties adapted to 
localized conditions during millennia of farming. If not archived in a 
secure, internationally sanctioned gene-banking system, these ancient 
varieties could disappear, taking with them as-yet-undiscovered genes for 
important traits.

A decade ago, a United Nations treaty on species conservation had the 
unintended effect of erecting roadblocks to gene banking and breeding. But on 
June 29, a new International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and 
Agriculture went into effect. Supporters hope it will break down those 
obstacles and bolster the gene-banking system, and help preserve the genetic 
heritage of crops.

To the rescue

In December 1993, the Convention on Biological Diversity entered into force, 
signed and ratified by most nations. The convention dramatically changed how 
governments, corporations, farmers, and even tribal chiefs in countries such 
as Brazil viewed the agricultural and wild plants growing around them.

Gone were the days when bioprospectors from industrial nations could drop 
into a jungle, pluck any intriguing plant and ship it home for analysis, and 
then extract a substance for use as a high-value, patentable drug. With the 
new treaty, companies would have to work with locals and share profits (SN: 
5/29/04, p. 344: Available to subscribers at 
http://sciencenews.org/articles/20040529/bob8.asp).

The treaty established the principle that a nation holds sovereign rights to 
the genetic resources of any plant within its borders (SN: 6/20/92, p. 407). 
But agricultural policymakers quickly recognized that this seemingly 
straightforward attempt to protect countries from exploitation was at odds 
with both the nature of agriculture and the conservation of cultivated 
resources.

It's not easy to determine who deserves sovereignty over plant genes. 
Throughout history, people have been trading edible plants, so most farmed 
crops have murky national origins.

In the wake of the 1993 biodiversity treaty, many nations expressed a new 
reluctance to continue sharing banked seeds freely, lest they forfeit their 
legal rights to a plant's genetic resources.

Suketoshi Taba encountered this change in attitude when he tried to head off 
an apparent crisis affecting seed corn in gene banks throughout Latin 
America. Taba heads maize genetic resources at the International Maize and 
Wheat Improvement Center, which is known worldwide by its acronym in Spanish, 
CIMMYT. It's located near Mexico City.

Budgets for maintaining gene banks had been compromised by a regional 
economic downturn in the early 1990s. Many seeds were not being sufficiently 
dried before storage, and refrigeration units in the storage facilities often 
lost power or broke down. The proportion of banked maize seeds able to 
germinate at any given time should exceed 85 percent, he says, but had fallen 
well below 50 percent.

To rescue seeds from banks in Cuba and 12 other Latin American nations, Taba 
offered to have the imperiled seed stores replanted locally and the 
next-generation seeds shared between the various nations' banks and CIMMYT. 
The countries initially balked, arguing that these seed stocks, though 
imperiled, were their property. In the end, botanists prevailed over 
politicians, and Taba saved 10,000 sets of seeds at a cost of only slightly 
more than $1 million.

The 1993 treaty, which essentially nationalized genetic resources, created 
other potential obstacles to improving crop seeds. It encouraged countries to 
require a seed company or laboratory to work out an international contract 
every time it imported seed. The cost of legal review, DNA analysis of each 
batch and supervision by treaty-enforcement officials would be staggering. 
"You would just close down plant breeding as a science," Raymond says.

On the menu

By the mid-1990s, a groundswell developed among nations for a remedy to the 
Convention on Biological Diversity. In late 2001, after 7 years of debate, 
negotiators from about 120 countries finally settled on the outline of the 
new crop biodiversity treaty.

The new treaty promotes the collection and banking of seeds, the sharing of 
seeds among countries that pledge to honor the treaty, and an international 
survey of genetic resources currently existing in gene banks and farmers' 
fields around the globe (SN: 7/17/04, p. 45: Available to subscribers at 
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040717/note10.asp). The treaty also 
promises to improve crops for farmers, especially those living in harsh 
environments.

DIVERSE VIEWS. Seed fairs, such as this one in Kenya, award prizes to farmers 
bringing in the most crop varieties—some show up with as many as 50 different 
types. Such competitions encourage genetic diversity and crops that continue 
to evolve with local conditions.
Mulvany/ITDG

During their wrangling, negotiators imposed limits on what plants would be 
covered by the new treaty. Just 35 food crops and 29 plants for livestock 
forage made the list. Although reasons for a type of plant not making the new 
treaty's list vary, politics often proved a major factor, says Patrick 
Mulvany of ITDG, an international sustainable-development foundation in 
Rugby, England.

If a company breeds a new plant variety from foreign seeds of one of the 64 
plants included, the treaty permits that company to commercialize the crop. 
However, a share of any profit must be contributed to a treaty fund for 
programs in developing countries to promote sustainable farming or 
conservation of genetic diversity in crops.

When the treaty qualified to go into force earlier this year, 40 nations had 
ratified it. Since then, 15 more nations have joined the group, and more are 
poised to do so.

The United States remains a major holdout among industrial nations. It was 
among the negotiators of the latest treaty, but the Senate hasn't taken up 
the treaty. A leading reservation, U.S. officials say, is concern over 
preserving commercial rights to a share of the profit for seeds passed 
between countries. Still to be worked out are the size of those royalties, 
whether they should be paid when seed is first imported or when a crop is 
marketed, how long a seed developer must pay royalties, and whether royalties 
should vary by crop.

Still, says Peter Bretting of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service in 
Beltsville, Md., "the U.S. government is certainly conceptually supportive of 
the treaty."

The Convention on Biodiversity continues to govern the commercial 
exploitation of plants not listed under the new treaty. These include some 
important food crops, such as soybeans, peanuts, onions, and grapes. In these 
cases, countries negotiate individual commercial agreements without any 
contribution to an international program.

Bankers' blues

The new treaty's biggest current initiative is creating the Global Crop 
Diversity Trust, which will be an autonomous agency that coordinates the 
1,500-or-so gene banks scattered throughout more than 100 nations. Among the 
largest are the 11 international facilities affiliated with the Consultative 
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Together, they store 
some 600,000 genetically distinct seed samples.

All CGIAR members will "sign agreements with the treaty, by which they will 
put their entire collections under its policy guidance," Stannard says, The 
United States has its own system of more than 20 gene banks. They hold some 
450,000 samples of roughly 10,000 plant species. Seeds maintained in these 
facilities at temperatures above freezing might require replanting every 5 to 
10 years to stay viable.

The nation's biggest gene bank, located in Fort Collins, Colo., holds 
duplicates of seeds kept in all the other U.S. facilities and stores most of 
them at –18°C to –55°C. At these temperatures, metabolic processes slow and 
the aging of seeds is delayed, so seeds stay viable for 50 to 100 years, 
explains Bretting.

Unfortunately, Raymond notes, most of the world's seed repositories aren't as 
well maintained or financed as the U.S. facilities are. Seed maintenance is 
"not sexy," she laments, so most governments neglect it. "How excited can you 
get about funding refrigeration?" she asks.

Yet, says Raymond, gene banks are an "essential insurance program to 
guarantee that genes will remain safe and accessible for future crop 
improvement." This is becoming increasingly important, she notes, as 
biological diversity wanes throughout the world.

Diminishing diversity

In the 1950s, Chinese farmers grew about 10,000 varieties of wheat. Two 
decades later, Raymond notes, the number had fallen to 1,000. India 
experienced a similar loss of rice diversity over the past 3 decades, she 
says. And throughout the Andes, the cradle of tomatoes, wild-tomato species 
have become so imperiled that "before too long, the only real examples of 
tomato diversity will be in a gene bank," she says.

Raymond cites U.N. estimates that one in 12 flowering plants—including crop 
types such as wild potatoes—will go extinct within 2 decades.

Commercial plant breeding has also been winnowing plant diversity, observes 
Marilyn Warburton, a molecular geneticist at CIMMYT.

Commercial growers prefer uniformity in crops for the sake of mechanized 
harvesting, so breeders have focused on developing high-yielding crops that 
will grow the same size across a field; respond consistently to weather, 
climate, and nourishment; resist blights; and mature within a tight window of 
time during harvest season.

Warburton has confirmed great genetic variability in landraces of wheat 
planted in developing countries before the agricultural movement that came to 
be known as the green revolution. Her DNA analyses show that in their efforts 
to achieve the high yields, CIMMYT and other green revolution breeders 
"reduced diversity in traits sampled throughout the genome."

Warburton notes that wheat yields have lately leveled off in many developed 
countries, despite intense breeding efforts to raise them. This has fostered 
speculation, she says, that commercial breeders might have "run out of 
genetic variation."

WHEAT'S WORTH. These newly synthesized lines of bread wheat have restored the 
traditional crop's lost genetic diversity.
CIMMYT

Her CIMMYT colleagues, however, have developed what they call synthetic bread 
wheats, which demonstrate that genetic crop diversity can be restored or even 
amplified. Over a 15-year period, Abdul Mujeeb-Kazi and his team crossed 
banked seeds that represented the original wild parents of durum wheat and 
then crossed their progeny with another wild wheat. This effectively 
duplicated the natural events that originally gave rise to bread wheat some 
10,000 years ago.

CIMMYT scientists have since repeated the process to produce additional 
synthetic bread-wheat lines.

Warburton's analyses of these lines' DNA now show that genetically, "they are 
about as diverse as the original landraces of wheat." However, she notes, the 
new wheats give up to 50 percent higher yields than the original green 
revolution lines and yields similar to the best commercial yields today. An 
added benefit: The new wheats are extremely resistant to environmental 
stresses, such as pests, drought, and salty soils.

Plant triage

Healthy, well-stocked gene banks make such a success possible. Unfortunately, 
Raymond observes, those in the United States and the CGIAR system aren't 
typical. Most banks are ill funded and have outmoded equipment. A few amount 
to little more than a stash of seeds in a bureaucrat's refrigerator.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is inventorying gene banks to identify those 
in need of rescue. Nations, foundations, and individuals are being asked to 
donate funds to upgrade facilities that are in dire straits, especially banks 
with important collections. Once these gene banks gain solid footing, they 
may qualify for annual funds from a new endowment being set up under the 
trust.

Raymond has been charged with spearheading a campaign to raise an additional 
$260 million to establish that endowment, which should eventually permit 
annual disbursements to gene banks totaling some $12 million for boring 
budget items such as payments for electricity and new refrigerators.

"What we're requesting is chicken feed," she says. However, she adds, even 
this small endowment could yield big dividends in developing countries. "And 
it's for such a great cause," she argues ardently. "I mean, we're talking 
about the [agricultural] security of the world."