PLANT BREEDING NEWS
EDITION 136 20 FEBRUARY 2003
An Electronic Newsletter of Applied Plant Breeding Sponsored by FAO and Cornell University Clair H. Hershey, Editor
CONTENTS
1. EDITOR'S NOTES
2. MEETINGS, COURSES AND WORKSHOPS
3. OPINION
* Plant breeders a "dying breed"?
4. PUBLICATIONS
* Genes for Africa: Genetically Modified Crops in the Developing World
* Village Based Participatory Breeding in the Mountain Slopes of Yemen
* Farmer-Led Participatory Maize Breeding in Middle Hills of Nepal
* Scaling up Participatory Plant Breeding: Sustainable Seed Delivery Systems for Meeting Farmers' Needs for Diversity and Varietal Change over Time
* Metodologías Participativas para el Mejoramiento Genético del Frijol Común
* Proyecto de Mejoramiento Participativo de Papa en Bolivia
5. NEWS, ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESEARCH NOTES
* UN Declaration On the International Year of Rice 2004
* FAO Project on Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
* New Insights on the Double Helix
* Options for Accessing Technologies
* Just How Far are Bananas from Extinction?
* FAO Calls for Greater Diversity in Bananas
* Climate a Crucial Factor in Crop Yields
* ARS Develops New Salt-Tolerant Plants
* Drought-resistant GM Crops: A Promising Future
* Philippines Starts 'Super Rice' Program
* Canada's Testing Rules Hinder Plant Breeders
* Chinese public 'cautious over GM food'
* Norman Borlaug Speaks Out on GM Crops
* CIMMYT's Position on the Issue of Transgenes in Mexican Landraces
* Patenting Policies Must be Tailored for the Poor
6. ON THE WEB
* Cassava Biotechnology Network
* FAO Electronic Conference on GMOs and Gene Flow
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1. EDITOR'S NOTES Plant Breeding News is an electronic forum for the exchange of information and ideas about applied plant breeding and related fields. It is published every four to six weeks throughout the year.
The newsletter is managed by the editor and an advisory group consisting of Elcio Guimaraes (elcio.guimaraes@fao.org), Margaret Smith (mes25@cornell.edu), and Anne Marie Thro (athro@reeusda.gov). The editor will advise subscribers approximately two weeks ahead of each edition, in order to set deadlines for contributions.
Content consists principally of contributions from subscribers, and as such may vary considerably from one edition to another. Contributions may be in such areas as: technical communications on key plant breeding issues; announcements of meetings, courses and electronic conferences; book announcements and reviews; web sites of special relevance to plant breeding; announcements of funding opportunities; requests to other readers for information and collaboration; and feature articles or discussion issues brought by subscribers.
Subscribers are encouraged to take an active part in making the newsletter a useful communications tool. Your contributions are the core of the newsletter and suggestions on format and content are always welcome by the editor, at pbn-l@mailserv.fao.org. We would especially like to see a broad participation from developing country programs and from those working on species outside the major food crops.
Messages with attached files are not distributed on PBN-L for two important reasons. The first is that computer viruses and worms can be distributed in this manner. The second reason is that attached files cause problems for some e-mail systems.
PLEASE NOTE: Every month many newsletters are returned because they are undeliverable, for any one of a number of reasons. We try to keep the mailing list up to date, and also to avoid deleting addresses that are only temporarily undeliverable. If you miss a newsletter, write to me at chh23@cornell.edu and I will re-send it.
To subscribe to PBN-L: Send an e-mail message to mailserv@mailserv.fao.org. Leave the subject line blank and write SUBSCRIBE PBN-L (Important: use ALL CAPS). To unsubscribe: Send an e-mail message as above with the message UNSUBSCRIBE PBN-L. Lists of potential new subscribers are welcome. The editor will contact these persons; no one will be subscribed without their explicit permission.
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2. MEETINGS, COURSES AND WORKSHOPS
* (NEW) 8 - 11 March 2003: ESF-Workshop; New science for increasing biosafety of GM plants. Federal Biological Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry, Braunschweig, Germany. Email: J.Schiemann@BBA.DE , http://www.bba.de
* 16-19 March 2003: Conference on Plant-made Pharmaceuticals. Québec, Canada. http://www.cpmp2003.org/pages/en/home/home.html
* 24-28 March 2003: Advanced Research and Procedures in Biosafety and Risk Assessment for the Environmental Release of GMOs. Florence, Italy. http://www.icgeb.trieste.it/TRAINING/CRS03/BSF_Florence.htm
* (NEW) 27-28 March 2003. Biowork IV. Melhoramento de Plantas na Era da Genômica. Viçosa, Minas Gerais. http://www.ufv.br/eventos/bio4/
* (NEW) 4-6 April 2003: Conference on Biodiversity, Biotechnology and the Protection of Traditional Knowledge, Washington University School of Law, St. Louis, Missouri; April 4-6, 2003. Topics for discussion are: 1) the protection of biodiversity; 2) the protection and regulation of agricultural and plant biotechnology; and 3) the international intellectual property implications of both of the foregoing, particularly as they relate to the protection of traditional medicinal and agricultural knowledge. http://law.wustl.edu/centeris/upcomingevents/biodivsp02.html
* 5-8 May 2003: The 5th Congress on Artichokes, Tudela (Navarra Spain). http://www.itga.com/congreso/indice.htm
* 18-22 May 2003: Molecular Breeding of Forage and Turf. Dallas, TX, USA. http://www.register-for.com/mbft/
* 22-24 May 2003: The Third Taro Symposium. Nadi, Fiji Islands. http://www.spc.int/tarogen/index.htm
* 26-30 May 2003: Introduction to Biosafety and Risk Assessment for the Environmental Release of GMOs: Theoretical Approach and Scientific Background. Trieste, Italy. http://www.icgeb.org/~bsafesrv/bsfn0211.htm
* (NEW) 28-31 May 2003: "From the Green Revolution to the Gene Revolution" Congress will be held in Bologna, Italy. Speakers include Norman Borlaug, Ron Phillips and Ingo Potrykus. www.avenuemedia.it/linkCONG/Green-Gene.html
* 23-25 June 2003: Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology, Sacramento, California, USA. http://www.fas.usda.gov/icd/stconf/conf_main.htm
* 29 June 3 July 2003: Public Goods and Public Policy for Agricultural Biotechnology. Ravello, Italy. http://www.economia.uniroma2.it/conferenze/icabr2003
* 6-11 July 2003: XIX International Congress of Genetics. Melbourne, Australia. http://www.geneticscongress2003.com/newsletter/newsletter-02.htm
Note: Travel grants available to Genetics Congress The International Genetics Federation of Australia and some Australian organizers are financing some travel grants for scientists from developing countries to enable them to attend the 19th International Congress of Genetics in Melbourne on July 6-11, 2003. The grants are being awarded on a competitive basis. For more information visit http://www.geneticscongress2003.com/index.php
* 14-25 July 2003: PRA/PLA Workshop. Reading, UK. Contact: Pascal SANGINGA [P.Sanginga@cgiar.org]
* 17-22 August 2003: Arnel R Hallauer International Symposium on Plant Breeding, Camino Real Mexico, Mexico City. Contact: j.demeyer@cgiar.org. http://www.cimmyt.org/Research/Maize/symposium/symposium_arnel.htm
* 25-29 August 2003: EUCARPIA XXI International Symposium: Classical vs. Molecular Breeding of Ornamentals. Freising-Weihenstephan (Germany) Info: Prof. Dr. Gert Forkmann, TU München, Zierpflanzenbau, Am Hochanger 4, 85350 Freising, Germany. Phone: (49)8161713416, Fax: (49)8161713886, email: forkmann@lzw.agrar.tu-muenchen.de
* (NEW) 26 Sept.-1 Oct. 2004:The 4th International Crop Science Congress (4ICSC), "New Directions for a Diverse Planet," Queensland, Australia. To join the Congress e-newsletter for updates and announcements, visit: www.cropscience2004.com
*(NEW) 7-10 October 2003: ITAFE'03 - International Congress on Information Technology in Agriculture, Food and Environment. Izmir, TURKEY. First announcement and call for papers. Email : itafe@ziraat.ege.edu.tr or itafe@agr.ege.edu.tr. http://itafe.ege.edu.tr
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3. OPINION
The Future of Plant Breeding
Nature 421, 568 - 570 (2003)
Normally, at this time of year, agricultural scientists from around the world would be converging on the headquarters of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known as CIMMYT, in Texcoco, near Mexico City. They would then travel together to a desert field station near Ciudad Obregón in northwestern Mexico to study the current crop of experimental wheat cultivars, planted at the beginning of winter.
But not this year. For the first time in half a century, the research centre that helped to sow the seeds of the 'green revolution' of the 1960s and '70s has been forced to skip a cycle of wheat breeding trials, because of a lack of money. More than half of CIMMYT's fields in Obregón lie fallow, and the trainee plant breeders are staying at home.
CIMMYT is not alone. All over the world, conventional plant breeding has fallen on hard times, and is seen as the unfashionable older cousin of genetic engineering. "Plant breeding is getting dumped along the wayside for not being sexy enough," claims Greg Traxler, an agricultural economist at Auburn University in Alabama. Government funding of plant-breeding research has all but dried up in the United States and Europe, and the World Bank and donor nations have recently slashed their support for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the international research consortium of which CIMMYT is a part.
Meanwhile, a steady push by companies to claim exclusive commercial rights to new plant varieties has progressively tied the hands of publicly funded efforts at crop improvement. If this trend isn't halted, some experts claim, tomorrow's supercrops may end up like many of today's medicines: priced out of the reach of much of the developing world's growing population. "We are headed down the same path that public-sector vaccine and drug research went down a couple of decades ago," says Gary Toenniessen, director of food security at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York.
Sowing success Classical breeders improve crops simply by crossing plants with desired traits, and selecting the best offspring over multiple generations. Sometimes they use chemical mutagens to disrupt crop genomes, in the hope that some of the resulting mutants will have useful new traits. Crosses may be as simple as letting two plants grow together, or they may require pollination by hand. And for crops such as wheat, one parent must first be emasculated to prevent self-pollination. In some ways, breeding is like accelerated, targeted evolution, and as long as test crops and seed banks are maintained, the possibilities can never be fully exhausted.
These methods, applied intensively at CIMMYT and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) near Manila in the Philippines, provided the impetus for the green revolution. Breeders produced dwarf varieties of wheat, maize and rice that were less likely to fall over in wind and rain, and which could carry larger seeds. Thanks to these varieties, farmers could use more fertilizer without risking losing their crops, and grain harvests in some areas have doubled or even trebled over the past three decades.
Central to CIMMYT's success in wheat was the practice of 'shuttle breeding', in which two seasons of plant selection could be completed in one year. Grain would be rushed from the fields in Ciudad Obregón after the harvest in April for summer planting in Toluca, near Mexico City.
This year's cancellation of the Obregón end of the shuttle was part of a 10% reduction in CIMMYT's programmes in the face of budget cuts, says the centre's director general, Masa Iwanaga. This was a result of the reduction in support for the CGIAR, which supports CIMMYT, IRRI and 14 other agricultural research centres around the world.
Whereas the CGIAR's funding crisis has come to a head in the past couple of years, exacerbated by the global economic downturn, the world's academic plant-breeding labs have suffered steady attrition over a far longer period. Molecular genetics and transgenic technologies hold great promise for crop improvement, and have consumed a growing portion of the limited funding pie. University administrators have reinforced this trend, tending to replace retiring plant breeders with molecular geneticists who are more likely to produce high-profile journal articles.
Changes in the intellectual-property environment have also taken their toll. From the late 1960s onwards, developed nations introduced a legal framework of plant breeders' rights, giving new varieties and cultivars patent-like protection. The goal was to stimulate innovation in corporate labs, but the reforms also meant that public-sector breeders were no longer free to tinker with plants grown from commercial seed. "Plant-variety protection was the death knell for public breeding programmes," says Michael Gale, head of comparative genetics at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, Britain's leading public plant-science research institute.
Root of the problem The figures reinforce Gale's view: until the 1960s, breeding for crop improvement was largely a public endeavour, but a survey of US plant scientists in the mid-1990s found more than twice as many breeders in the commercial sector than at universities and government agencies combined1. And although breeders' skills are still alive in the private sector, they are now working to subtly different ends. For seed companies and agribiotech firms, the top priority has been developing crops that can maximize profits from the intensive agricultural practices that are widely used in the developed world. Sadly, there is less money to be made in seeding a second green revolution for the world's poor.
In recent years, of course, the big news in the commercial and public sectors has been transgenic technology, rather than conventional breeding. Genetically modified (GM) crops that are resistant to the effects of broad-spectrum herbicides or that carry genes for insecticidal toxins have been widely planted across North America but simultaneously shunned by European consumers, who are deeply suspicious of the technology. The welter of media coverage has obscured recent achievements in classical breeding, and although breeders generally view transgenics as a valuable tool, they stress that conventional breeding is far from obsolete.
In fact, for many GM crops, there is a comparable conventionally bred variety. The seed company Pioneer Hi-Bred, based in Des Moines, Iowa, for instance, produces a conventional, herbicide-resistant oilseed rape, or canola, that has similar advantages for weed control as its GM counterparts. And whereas the GM 'golden rice'2, engineered to contain a gene that boosts the production of vitamin A by people who eat its grain, has attracted much publicity, conventional breeding is also being deployed to improve the nutritional value of this staple crop. IRRI has produced a cultivar of rice called IR68144 that bears grain rich in iron3, and so could be used to combat anaemia. Even for crops such as the banana, which is unable to reproduce sexually without specialist human intervention, conventional breeding may still have a role to play (see "Bananas in the fertility clinic").
What's more, the GM crops developed so far generally involve only the addition of a single gene. Looking to the future, it's unclear whether complex traits, which are thought to involve multiple genes, will be amenable to manipulation through genetic engineering. "In the long term, you need heat tolerance, salt tolerance, greater yield and so on," says Paul Gepts, a crop geneticist at the University of California, Davis. "Some say you can do it with genetic engineering, but we just don't know how those systems work and how those genes interact." By contrast, practical experience has shown that conventional breeding can be used to improve a suite of subtle traits simultaneously.
All of this makes Donald Duvick, who was head of research at Pioneer Hi-Bred until his retirement in 1990, concerned about the future of crop improvement should the agribiotech giants lose their enthusiasm for transgenics. "I worry that the results will be so far in the future that industry will say 'we can't wait that long'," he says. If so, the depleted public-sector effort in plant breeding may be ill-equipped to take up the slack.
There are already hints that some companies are pulling back from long-term investments in high-tech crop improvement. Only last month, the Swiss-based multinational Syngenta closed its Torrey Mesa Research Institute near San Diego, which was a major force in crop genomics. And both Syngenta and its US rival DuPont, which owns Pioneer Hi-Bred, have recently withdrawn funding from the John Innes Centre. "The industry is in turmoil," says Gale.
Against this sombre background, can anything be done to safeguard future progress in crop improvement by reviving the science of plant breeding in the public sector? There is no easy answer, but some experts suggest that the future lies in boosting the power of conventional breeding by marrying it to genomic and other molecular-genetic techniques, while making a concerted effort to break with the proprietary approach to intellectual property that is currently blighting the field.
One beacon of hope comes from a consortium of researchers at 12 institutions headed by Jorge Dubcovsky, a wheat molecular geneticist at the University of California, Davis. Its primary tool is 'marker assisted selection' (MAS). This technique, enthusiasts claim, could offer to plant breeding what the jet engine has brought to air travel. Traditionally, breeders have relied on visible traits to select improved varieties. For pest resistance, for example, that means examining mature plants in the field over successive generations to see which survive best in the face of attack by pests, before carrying out new crosses. MAS, however, relies on identifying marker DNA sequences that are inherited alongside a desired trait during the first few generations. Thereafter, plants that carry the trait can be picked out quickly by looking for the marker sequences, allowing multiple rounds of breeding to be run in quick succession.
Superior breeding MASwheat, as the consortium is known, aims to select for 23 separate traits in wheat, conferring resistance to fungi, viruses and insect pests. Its members also hope to breed the grain to produce bread and pasta of superior quality. Notably, the consortium is making all of its marker sequences and research protocols freely available. "If you go to our website, you have all the tools to do this anywhere in the world," Dubcovsky says.
For wheat, this admirably open approach was relatively easy to adopt, because it is one of the few crops to remain largely in public hands. Because wheat is self-pollinating, many farmers simply plant a portion of their harvest each year, safe in the knowledge that it will retain its desirable characteristics. Not surprisingly, this has restricted the interest of commercial seed producers, who don't see a robust market for their products.
Elsewhere, however, intellectual property is creating a heavy burden, with universities and other institutions facing barriers to the free exchange of seed, and restricted access to cutting-edge molecular technologies. "I wish it would all go away," says Kent McKenzie, director of the California Rice Experiment Station, which develops new varieties of the crop in its test fields at Biggs, north of Sacramento.
Extending the MASwheat consortium's approach to other crops may require public institutions to band together to end the practice of granting exclusive licences to individual companies each time they develop a powerful technology for crop improvement. To this end, Toenniessen has been meeting with representatives of ten 'land grant' universities which form the backbone of agricultural research in the United States to hammer out a plan. "If those in the public sector worked collectively, they could solve their problems," says Toenniessen. He hopes to pioneer the approach in speciality crops such as peanuts, broccoli, lettuce and tomatoes, in which the seed and agribiotech industry does not have strong commercial interests.
Richard Jefferson would go further. His Center for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture (CAMBIA) in Canberra, Australia, is trying to put cutting-edge technology for crop improvement directly in the hands of developing-world scientists and farmers, rather than leaving them to depend on the continued health of labs in rich countries. "The money is drying up and that is not going to change," he says. "We need to rethink the way crop improvement is done."
In part, Jefferson says, this will involve the transfer of transgenic technologies. But extending access to molecular-genetic enhancements to conventional breeding methods will also be crucial. Researchers at CAMBIA, for instance, have developed a DNA microarray that will boost MAS. In many crops, it is difficult to search for specific genetic markers, because very little of their DNA has actually been sequenced. But by immobilizing fragments of DNA from a variety of cultivars on a microarray and then seeing which of them bind to DNA sampled from individual plants, it is possible to look for the presence of genetic markers in these plants in the absence of any sequence information4.
This technology has already been adopted by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia, for cassava improvement. "It is extremely useful," says Joe Tohme, the centre's director of biotechnology. By making such techniques freely available, and allowing scientists anywhere in the world to tinker with and improve them at will, Jefferson hopes to speed progress. Essentially, he wants to create a crop-improvement counterpart to the 'open-source' software movement that has managed to flourish alongside the proprietary approach of giants such as Microsoft, which keep their programs' codes under wraps.
'Open-source molecular agronomy' is certainly a sexier label than conventional plant breeding. But will it have sufficient cachet to reverse the current decline in public-sector crop improvement? The food supply for future generations in the developing world could hinge on the answer.
References 1.Frey, K. J. National Plant Breeding Study (Iowa Agric. Home Econ. Exp. Station, Ames, Iowa, 1996). 2.Ye, X. et al. Science 287, 303-305 (2000).|Article|PubMed| 3.Glahn, R. P., Chen, S. Q., Welch, R. M. & Gregorio, G. B. J. Agric. Food Chem. 50, 3586-3591 (2002).|Article|PubMed| 4.Jaccoud, D., Peng, K., Feinstein, D. & Kilian, A. Nucl. Acids Res. 29, 25e (2001).|Article| 5.Remy, S., Francois, I., Cammue, B., Swennen, R. & Sági, L. Acta Horticult. 461, 361-365 (1998). CIMMYT http://www.cimmyt.cgiar.org IRRI http://www.irri.org MASwheat http://maswheat.ucdavis.edu CAMBIA http://www.cambia.org
JONATHAN KNIGHT Jonathan Knight writes for Nature from San Francisco.
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4. PUBLICATIONS
Genes for Africa: Genetically Modified Crops in the Developing World By Jennifer A. Thomson Reviewed by Gordon Gonway in Nature 421, 478 (2003)
"In just 190 pages Thomson covers a wide range of topics: the biological basis of genetic engineering, the current status of GM crops, food safety, biodiversity, patenting, labelling and so on... This is a gem of a book. It is clear and concise and makes the complex seem simple without losing the essential truths, and, as far as I can tell, it is accurate, with no innuendo, no half-truth and no wild extrapolation... The book should be read by anyone interested in crop biotechnology, but its special significance is in relation to Africa."
University of Cape Town Press, 2002
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The following publications are accessible at: http://www.prgaprogram.org/publica.htm#ppb
Martini M. A and Aw-Hassan A. 2002. Village Based Participatory Breeding in the Mountain Slopes of Yemen. Report of a PRGA Small Grant for 1 July 2001 - 30 June 2002
Gyawali S., Bhandari B. and Dr. Subedi A. Farmer-Led Participatory Maize Breeding in Middle Hills of Nepal. Grant Final Report of Second Phase of the Project (August 2001 - September 2002) LIBIRD.
Weltzien, E. 2002. Scaling up participatory plant breeding: sustainable seed delivery systems for meeting farmers' needs for diversity and varietal change over time. Report of a PRGA Small Grant for Mar 2001 - Mar 2002.
Rosas, J.C . with Proyecto Investigación Participativa en Centro América (IPCA), Proyecto de Reconstrucción Rural (PRR), University of Guelph, Canada and CPRO-DLO/The Netherlands. 2001. Metodologías Participativas para el Mejoramiento Genético del Frijol Común. Reports of a PRGA Small grant for Dec 2000 - May 2001 (Part 1) and for Dec. 2001- May 2002.
Gabriel, J.L., M. Salazar, J. Herbas and G. Thiele. 2002. Proyecto de Mejoramiento Participativo de Papa en Bolivia. Report of a PRGA Small grant for Mar 2001 - Jul 2002.
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5. NEWS, ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESEARCH NOTES
UN Declaration on the International Year of Rice - 2004
Rice has vital importance when addressing issues such as food security, poverty alleviation and sustainable agriculture development. In recognition of this fact, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and its Member-Countries, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and other major stakeholders including the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA), have been focusing their efforts towards a United Nations Declaration of the International Year of Rice (IYR) in 2004.
During the 31st Session of the FAO Conference on 13 November 2001, the Government of the Philippines submitted a draft resolution proposing that the year 2004 would be the International Year of Rice (IYR). The FAO Conference adopted the resolution and requested that the Director-General transmit this resolution to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
On 16 December 2002, the 57th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) approved the draft resolution towards the declaration of the International Year of Rice submitted by the delegation of the Philippines (A/57/L.58/Rev.1, see annex 2). The draft resolution was co-sponsored by an additional 43 Member Countries: Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cuba, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of Korea, Ecuador, Fiji, Gabon, Grenada, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Madagascar, Mali, Malaysia, the Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Myanmar, Nauru, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Peru, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan, Thailand Togo, Vietnam and Zambia.
The UNGA invited FAO, in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centres, and other major stakeholders both within the United Nations systems and non-governmental organizations, to facilitate the implementation of IYR. The General Assembly requires certain conditions and criteria to be met as set forth in the guidelines established in the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Resolution 1980/67. The fundamental criteria is that an International Year must address a concern held by a majority of countries, which requires both national and international action to resolve a global problem with particular attention given to problems affecting developing countries. The present concern reflected at the national, regional and international level regarding the importance of a sustainable increase in rice production for poverty alleviation and food security corresponds with the ECOSOC requirements.
The FAO Steering Committee of the International Rice Commission (IRC) met in January 2003 to share ideas on how to proceed with the implementation of this major initiative. The Steering Committee agreed to establish an FAO Organizing Committee for the IYR and an informal international planning and coordination meeting for IYR to be organized in March 2003 for the purpose of creating an International Working Group for the implementation of the IYR.
Further details available from: Dat Tran, Secretary, FAO Organizing Committee for The International Year Of Rice. Dat.Tran@fao.org
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FAO Project on Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
FAO, together with a range of partners, including representatives from the agricultural research centers and national agricultural research services, is formulating a project to help assess and strengthen the sustainable use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.
There exists a globally recognised need for increased food production, particularly in the fragile, marginal environments of the developing regions. It is held that plant breeding, including applications of biotechnology, can contribute to increased production while safeguarding the natural resource base on which agriculture and human existence depend. This theme was emphasised by the contracting parties of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, approved at the thirty-first session of the FAO Conference in November 2001.
Through surveys, the project will attempt to assess the current state of and trends in resource allocation and output of plant breeding programs, public and private, from a range of countries and for several crops. It is hoped that strengths, weaknesses and gaps will be evident that will allow opportunities to be identified for strengthening programs. Through subsequent development of guidelines and policy advice, farming communities will benefit as access to adapted germplasm improves and breeding programs become better targeted to client requirements.
The project will run for three years in the first instance. External funding will be essential and the need for funds will differ according to the approach taken. Several alternative models have already been designed and a pilot questionnaire will shortly be sent out to gauge its effectiveness. Further details are available from Elcio Guimaraes at FAO: elcio.guimaraes@fao.org
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New Insights on the Double Helix
Structural biologists now believe that the DNA is much more than its famous structure. Recently, researchers examined the DNA molecule as it coils in the cell nucleus. They found out that the double helix regularly morphs into alternative shapes and weaves itself in knots. Contrary to the popular belief, researchers now have realized that the DNA has a fascinating life in three or perhaps four dimensions. This makes the DNA more than a simple string of code like it was believed for 50 years. Some researchers believe that these mysterious movements may be just as important as the genetic sequence itself in deciding which genes are switched on and off. The full report is published in Nature, Vol 421 or visit http://www.nature.com/nature
From Crop Biotech Net: http://www.isaaa.org/kc/
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Options for Accessing Technologies
Designing policies and procedures to ensure that public science has sufficient freedom to operate is a major concern of developing and developed countries. Freedom to operate will be crucial for public and nonprofit agencies' intent on developing improved seed varieties and other technologies destined for commercial release. So say Carol Nottenburg, Philip Pardey, and Brian Wright in a brief (January 2003) entitled "Accessing other people's technology," published by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Nottenburg and colleagues enumerate several options for nonprofit institutes seeking patent protection like the 16 centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). These include:
Cross-licensing. Through a material trust agreement, recipients of in-trust material distributed by research centers like those of the CGIAR agree not to seek intellectual property (IP) protection on the material. A possible model is where a center offers a material to another institution at no cost in exchange for access to information about subsequent discoveries and zero-cost non-exclusive research licenses.
Research-Only Licenses. This license does not permit commercialization. If the project succeeds, then the bargaining for permission to commercialize commences. Despite refusal to allow commercialization, the intellectual property rights holder gains valuable information about the technology and its downstream applications.
Market Segmentation Strategies. Developing countries can get the new technology for free, and proprietary claims are enforced in developed countries. Markets for IP can also be segregated based on fields of use, certain claims of a patent, limitations to specific uses of the technology, research use versus commercialization, or restrictions on third-party services. Mergers of Joint Ventures. Mergers and privatizations of previously public research agencies minimize the private costs of transactions in intellectual property. Joint ventures are a more flexible alternative where private sector companies get into joint ventures with public sector for specific activities.
Other options include direct programmatic research support from the private sector; patent pools; clearinghouse mechanisms; independent development of research tools; and pressure for sharing of technology.
The Brief ends with a note that "guiding changes in intellectual property regimes and responding creatively to the new environment are pressing challenges for those interested in the future of scientific research, including agricultural biotechnology."
The full paper is available at http://www.ifpri.org/divs/eptd/dp/papers/eptdp79.pdf
From Crop Biotech Net: http://www.isaaa.org/kc/
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Just How Far are Bananas from Extinction?
INIBAP, Montpellier, 21 January 2003 The world's most popular fruit and a basic staple food for hundreds of millions of people in the developing world the banana is under severe threat from virulent pests and diseases. An article in the 16 January edition of the New Scientist magazine has warned of the risk of shoppers finding the shelves empty when they go to buy their weekly bunch. Articles and broadcasts from around the world have followed with alarming and sometimes exaggerated stories of extinction.
While this helps to raise awareness of the importance of bananas in the world and the threats faced by banana farmers, it is important not to lose sight of the facts and to point to the positive progress that researchers are making to address these challenges.
The New Scientist article focussed on concerns over the spread of a new form of Panama disease (Fusarium wilt) - known as race 4 - which is threatening the Cavendish variety, the world's major export banana. The disease has spread through plantations in Australia, South Africa and parts of Asia. It is only a matter of time before race 4 reaches the hub of commercial production in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Cavendish took over as the No. 1 dessert banana in the 1960s from the Gros Michel, a variety that had dominated world markets until it fell prey to an earlier form of Panama disease. So fears are justified.
Cavendish bananas are already under attack from another fungal disease, black Sigatoka, but are protected commercially by as many as 40 sprayings a year of fungicide. The sprayings are not only expensive, making up a quarter of production costs, but present a serious risk to workers and a threat to the environment.
Unlike black Sigatoka, which attacks leaves, race 4 is a soil-borne fungus that attacks roots and cannot be controlled by fungicides. If race 4 reaches the commercial plantations, it is likely to wipe out Cavendish just as the earlier disease eradicated Gros Michel. The only option is to find another variety that resists race 4.
While the loss of the Cavendish would hurt consumers in developed countries, diseases have an even more severe impact on other types of banana, of which there are more than 500 varieties. Banana exports make up just 13% of world production. The other 87% represents bananas that never leave the country where they are produced. In the developing world banana is the most important food in terms of production value after rice, wheat and maize. Most banana farmers subsist on very limited margins and cannot afford the expensive chemicals to keep diseases in check. Epidemic diseases that attack these bananas undermine the very roots of food and income security for millions of people in the developing world. New resistant varieties are needed urgently.
What makes it difficult to breed new, improved varieties is that cultivated bananas are sterile and do not have seeds. They are propagated as suckers, or shoots, which arise from the base of the plant underground. There is no easy way to cross one variety with another. It is only in the past 10 years, after more than 80 years of research, that improved varieties acceptable for large-scale production have been made available.
Only five scientists, globally, are presently working to breed improved bananas. Such a meagre research effort is decidedly out of proportion to the scale and importance of the problem. But currently there is alarmingly little investment in banana research compared to the global significance of the crop. This must be reversed if the world's most popular fruit, an important survival food for families in the tropics, is not to decline further.
With the progress already made, if we can mobilise new and significant investment, there is every reason to believe that the banana will provide food and income security for those families for many years to come
http://www.inibap.org/new/release210103.doc
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FAO Calls for Greater Diversity in Bananas
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is urging producers to promote greater genetic diversity in commercial bananas. Contrary to media reports that bananas may be extinct within 10 years, FAO says that new breeding methods and tools, including biotechnology, will be helpful to develop resistant bananas for cultivation. This does not necessarily mean the use of transgenics, FAO clarified.
In addition, it would be necessary to promote awareness of the inevitable consequences of a narrow genetic base in crops and the need for a broader genetic base for commercial bananas. Plant breeding programs in developing countries for banana and other basic staple crops also need to be strengthened.
FAO explained that the Cavendish banana, which is being hit by Fusarium wilt, accounts for only 10% of the total banana production. "What is happening is the inevitable consequence of growing one genotype on a large scale," said Eric Kueneman, Chief of FAO's Crop and Grassland Service. The Cavendish banana is cultivated mostly by large-scale banana companies for export.
Small-scale farmers, however are growing a wide range of bananas that are not being attacked by Fusarium wilt. Instead, a broad genetic pool has been maintained which can be used for future banana crop improvement. Banana is essentially a clonal crop with many sterile species, which makes progress through conventional breeding slow and difficult. Because of this, new breeding methods and tools, including biotechnology, will be helpful to develop resistant bananas for cultivation. This does not necessarily mean the use of transgenics, FAO said.
Since more than 50 percent of the banana germplasm (land races) are sterile, biotechnology and mutation breeding are important tools that can improve banana varieties without the threat of genetic drift, said FAO.
For more details, contact John Riddle, Information Officer, FAO at john.riddle@fao.org
From Crop Biotech Net: http://www.isaaa.org/kc/
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Climate a Crucial Factor in Crop Yields
Natasha McDowell
Climate change in the United States has had a greater influence on crop yields than previously thought, a new study suggests. The results have global implications.
The research, published in this week's issue of Science, analysed climate trends from 1982 to 1998. During this time corn and soybean yields rose by 30 per cent, an increase that has until now been attributed to better farming practices.
But by looking at regions that have experienced the same changes in technology but different changes in climate scientists from the Carnegie Institute of Washington and Stanford University found that 20 per cent of the total gains were actually due to a cooling climate over this period. The researchers suggest that increases in temperature due to climate change will have the reverse effect, with global implications.
"Our results suggest that global warming will affect food production," says Gregory Asner who led the study. "We can expect a 17 per cent decline in yield of these crops for a one degree increase in growing-season temperature."
These results are likely to spur interest in developing countries, many of which are already experiencing warming temperatures.
"Agricultural production in the developing world is even more vulnerable to global warming than mid- and high-latitude places like the United States," says Cynthia Rosenzweig of Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "Temperatures are already high and developing countries usually have a less robust research infrastructure, meaning that they will be less able to generate differently-adapted crops."
Along with colleagues at NASA, as well as in Uruguay and Egypt, Rosenzweig has been investigating whether increasing temperatures are holding back crops in the developing world. Lower yields would put a strain on ecosystems by expanding agriculture into marginal and potentially more environmentally sensitive areas.
But David Lobell, co-author of the study, notes that lack of records in developing countries makes such research more difficult. "The first step is to try and get a measurement of crop yield," he says. He is using satellite records from the past 20 years to generate spatial maps of crop yield.
One area Lobell has already looked at is north-west Mexico. Here, he says, almost 100 per cent of gains in wheat yields have been due to a drop in temperature, rather than to better farming practices. However, he also points out that improved agricultural techniques have also had an important beneficial effect.
"In such countries, the impact of disease and pests are high and a lot of effort goes into just trying to maintain current yields," he says.
From SciDev.Net 2003
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ARS Develops New Salt-Tolerant Plants
The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the US Department of Agriculture has developed two new lines of salt-tolerant plants. Richard R.C. Wang, ARS research geneticist, and colleagues developed the new plants, known as W4909 and W4910, at ARS' Forage and Range Research Laboratory in Logan, Utah.
Salt tolerance is a prized trait and is especially valuable in the irrigated wheat producing regions of the American West. Irrigation can accelerate buildup of salts which weakens or kills plants. Salinity can reduce crop yields by about 25 percent.
ARS says that W4909 and W4910 contain salt-tolerance genes from wheat grass and a Ph-inhibitor gene. Presence of the inhibitor gene allows plant geneticists to move the salt-tolerance genes among domestic wheats. Normally, a gene called Ph1b would thwart that exchange.
Wang and colleagues are the first to use the Ph1b gene-inhibition technology to incorporate into wheat genetic material, genes borrowed from another plant species. The full article is in the January 2003 issue of ARS' Agricultural Research magazine. It is also available online at: http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/jan03/salin0103.htm
From Crop Biotech Net: http://www.isaaa.org/kc/
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Drought-resistant GM Crops: A Promising Future
Alessandro Pellegrineschi explores the scientific prospects for developing crops that are resistant to drought, and says that sceptics of GM technology must be won over to prevent future tragedies.
The recent catastrophic crop failure in southern Africa due to drought has brought on famine conditions of epic proportions. It also raises the question: what could genetic modification (GM) technology offer to poor farmers working marginal lands vulnerable to drought, including many of those in sub-Saharan Africa?
Several international agricultural research organisations have already devoted considerable effort to improving drought tolerance in the staple cereals that feed most of the world's poor. Plant breeders and farmers are well aware that some plants cope with drought conditions much better than others; GM technology makes it possible to transfer genes conferring this drought tolerance to, and among, important food crops.
Yet the introduction of such crops, which have the potential to significantly enhance food production in drought-stricken parts of the world, has become the target of attacks by environmentalist groups. The result may be to prevent whole communities from gaining access to a technological development that could literally make the difference between life and death.
New technology on the horizon
One example of a promising new use of GM technology, which is sadly facing an uncertain future, is a technique for increasing drought tolerance being investigated at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico.
Wheat plants that have been genetically modified to withstand drought are now being tested in biosafety greenhouses at CIMMYT. Most of the plants produced have shown high tolerance to extreme low-water conditions.
This research project illustrates how recent advances in both molecular genetics and genetic engineering can be applied to enhance drought tolerance in plants. Progress has been slow and difficult, however, due to the complex effects of drought on plants.
Complex plant pathways
For example, at least four independent signalling pathways act in plants to switch on an array of genes in response to dehydration. Some of these genes code for proteins that help protect various parts of the plant cell during water loss while others detoxify harmful substances. (1, 2) Understanding how it would be best to utilise these genes is a lengthy process.
CIMMYT researchers have initially focused on incorporating a type of DREB gene (encoding a 'dehydration-responsive element binding' protein), which enables the wheat plants to withstand extreme water loss. Unfortunately, when this gene is continually "switched on", plants are smaller and produce much lower yields than unmodified varieties significant disadvantages when it comes to plant breeding.
But the scientists then found that by fusing the DREB gene with the promoter region of another gene (rd29A), it is switched on only under stress conditions of dehydration or cold temperatures. The result is a plant that has a normal growth pattern and yield in good conditions, but is also much more resistant to drought, freezing, and high salinity. More work is now needed to fully characterise the function of the additional gene, and to dissect the complex process by which this gene is expressed.
A promising future?
The researchers at CIMMYT are optimistic that their technique offers a promising way to deal with the challenges of drought. Other approaches have also been investigated, such as: -developing plants that stall seed development during periods of drought in order to conserve water, or that are better at taking up water (known as drought avoidance) (3); -overexpression of a gene related to drought tolerance (4); -accumulation of sugars and salts to protect against water loss (5, 6); and -further investigation, at a molecular level, of the physiological mechanisms by which plants adapt to extreme environments (7). Such research, when combined, will lead to a much more complete understanding of drought tolerance in plants. And with the help of genetic engineering it will be possible to create plants with these traits, without the need for long and tedious breeding programmes. But taking the next critical step, namely moving these plants from the laboratory to the fields of resource-poor farmers in developing countries, will require a supportive public and the well-founded assent and collaboration of developing nation governments.
A concerted effort is now required to convince both decision-makers and environmentalist critics that the value of crops produced in this way and the capability to alleviate to some extent the suffering faced by rural people in drought conditions strongly outweighs any perceived health and environmental dangers. Failure to win over the sceptics could result in tragedies that are ultimately as much the responsibility of humans as of nature.
The author is a cell biologist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico.
References: 1. Singh K et al (2002) Transcription factors in plant defense and stress responses. Curr. Opin. Plant Biol. 5(5):430-6 2. Xiong L et al (2002) Cell Signaling during Cold, Drought, and Salt Stress. Plant Cell. 14:165-183 3. Laporte MM et al (2002) Engineering for drought avoidance: expression of maize NADP-malic enzyme in tobacco results in altered stomatal function. J. Exp. Bot. 53(369):699-705 4. Qin X & Zeevaart JA (2002) Overexpression of a 9-cis-epoxycarotenoid dioxygenase gene in Nicotiana plumbaginifolia increases abscisic acid and phaseic acid levels and enhances drought tolerance. Plant Physiol. 128(2):544-51 5. Rontein D et al (2002) Metabolic engineering of osmoprotectant accumulation in plants. Metab. Eng. 4(1):49-56 6. Garg AK et al (2002) Trehalose accumulation in rice plants confers high tolerance levels to different abiotic stresses. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 99(25):15898-15903 7. Bartels D & Salamini F (2001) Desiccation tolerance in the resurrection plant Craterostigma plantagineum. A contribution to the study of drought tolerance at the molecular level. Plant Physiol. 127:1346-1353 SciDevNet Jan 30, 2003
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Philippines Starts 'Super Rice' Program
The Philippine's Department of Agriculture is set to implement its Hybrid Rice Commercialization Program (HRCP), the flagship program of President Gloria Arroyo's administration. Introduced as 'GMA Super Rice' in honor of the President, yield projections of the hybrid variety are expected to be up to 240 cavans of rice per hectare. This is almost triple the present average yield of 85 cavans for every hectare.
The program is expected to help make the country self-sufficient in rice at the soonest possible time. The Department of Agriculture and the Philippine Rice Research Institute (Philrice) recently signed a joint venture agreement for the propagation of the hybrid rice in an 8,000-hectare portion of the Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm (IPPF) in Puerto Princesa, Palawan.
PhilRice has targeted the development of about 8,000 hectares for the production of GMA super rice seed to be used in more than 300,000 hectares of rice fields nationwide and to attain the government's goal of self sufficiency in rice.
From Crop Biotech Net: http://www.isaaa.org/kc/
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Canada's Testing Rules Hinder Plant Breeders
Canada's definition of new plant traits is hurting the country's plant breeding industry, say researchers.
Canadian regulations require that most plants developed through mutagenesis and traditional breeding techniques that contain traits "substantially different" than their parents, be tested for environmental stability and food safety.
Mutagenesis is a plant breeding process in which seeds of a crop are blasted with chemicals or radiation in the hopes that mutations will create valuable new genes. In other major exporting regions, such as the United States and the European Union, such tests are necessary only if the new traits are developed through the genetic modification process of adding genes from one organism into or onto another.
Gordon Rowland, who develops flax varieties at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, said smaller crops like flax are most deeply affected by the regulations because standard gene splicing techniques are not widely used in lesser grown crops. "It creates an innovation barrier for plant genetics in Canada," he said. "Right now I'm not doing any mutation breeding as a result of these regulations and I'm not alone."
Whether a new variety is "substantially different" enough to be put through the environmental stability and food safety tests is examined on a case-by-case basis. "It adds cost and time," Rowland said. " We need to be able to respond with new consumer desirable traits for the marketplace to keep farmers competitive, but also for disease or pest resistance. It doesn't take much of a change in a plant to get it caught under the CFIA's (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) net." Fees for testing range from a few hundred dollars to $2,000. The major costs are the test plots and the seasons it takes to operate them.
In 1994, the Canadian government established rules for testing new plant varieties that have new traits or traits that the Plant Biosafety Office says are "not substantially equivalent to plants of the same species in Canada." These new varieties are called plants with novel traits, or PNTs.
Customers of Canadian grains have been confused about the Canadian definition of PNTs, likening it to the GM definition used by the U.S., EU, Japan and others. But Phil MacDonald, speaking for CFIA, defended Canada's definition as the leading edge. "The GMO definition is not going to be defensible in the long run," he said. "In very short order Roundup Ready canola will able to be produced using site-directed mutagenesis. One variety is a GMO and one is not because of the breeding technique? I don't think so. It is the impact on the environment that is important."
MacDonald admitted the PNT definition has been an issue for plant breeders, but said CFIA's focus is on environmental safety and food safety. "We aren't going to step backward just because we are in the lead. Scientifically, our method is the best one and other countries will reach the same conclusions eventually."
Patty Rosher of the Canadian Wheat Board said the board would like to see "a regulatory system that is appropriate." In the past, the board has called on the CFIA to standardize its PNT regulations with the rest of theworld and use the GMO standards.
"When a PNT is approved, it goes on the CFIA website. To a consumer country, they don't see the difference of a PNT and GMO. They see the labelling. Customers ask us and we have to reassure them. Being out ofsync does cause us some issues," she said. "Radiant is a conventionally bred winter wheat that is resistant to wheat streak mosaic virus and it is being hung up right now in PNT testing."
Rob Graff of Agriculture Canada's research centre in Lethbridge bred Radiant. He said the variety was sent back to him to prove it isn't a PNT. "I don't think it is and right now I'm preparing a package to send back to them that I hope will prove that. But these things take up time. "Plant breeders in Canada are pretty much unanimous that Canada should have a definition that is similar to the rest of the world."
Regardless of its PNT status, Radiant lacks adequate rust resistance so its release has been delayed while new versions are tested. MacDonald said the CFIA is planning to release new regulations in the next month, whichbreeders hope will more clearly define PNT.
- Michael Raine, The Western Producer, Feb 6, 2003 http://www.producer.com/articles/20030206/news/20030206news10.html
From AgBioView Feb 11, 2003
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Chinese Public 'Cautious over GM food' Jia Hepeng
Most Chinese urban consumers favour non-genetically modified (GM) food, and more than 80 per cent think transgenic food products should be labelled, according to a survey commissioned by Greenpeace.
The results of the survey, released late last week, also indicate that more than 40 per cent of consumers would choose a non-GM product even if it cost 10 per cent more than a GM counterpart.
"The survey shows that China's urban consumers are basically the same as consumers in the developed countries, with the majority favouring non-GE [genetically engineered] food once they are given the right to choose,'' says Sze Pang Cheung, GM campaigner for Greenpeace China.
The survey, which was carried conducted by Zhongshan University out among 1,000 citizens of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, was carried out amid rising consumer concern about GM crops in China. Such concern escalated after Greenpeace revealed late last year that the company Nestlé was selling non-labelled GM food in China.
Sze says that the Chinese government has wisely taken a cautious approach in commercialising GM food crops because it is uncertain whether the market will accept GM food. "Food producers and supermarkets should also recognise and act on consumers' demands and eliminate GE ingredients from their products,'' she says.
Agricultural experts estimate that since 2001, China has imported more than 20 million tons, of GM food per year, most of which is soybean used to product edible oil.
Regulation on the safety of GM organisms, which was introduced by the State Council, China's cabinet in May 2001, stipulates that all products containing GM ingredients should be labelled after July 2002. China's Ministry of Health also required in April 2002 that all food must be labelled after July 2002.
But some have expressed concern that the regulations and rules have been poorly enforced. So far, few foods containing GM ingredients sold in China's supermarkets or stores have been labelled.
As a result, most Chinese consumers are unaware that GM products are currently being sold in China. Greenpeace's survey confirmed this, indicating that 64 per cent of Guangzhou citizens do not know that GM food products are already sold in supermarkets.
SciDevNet 23 January 2003
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Norman Borlaug Speaks Out on GM Crops
Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2003
In 2000, I served on a joint U.S.-European Union Biotechnology Consultative Forum - appointed by President Clinton and Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission - to look at the full range of issues that have polarized thinking about biotechnology, especially in food and agriculture, on both sides of the Atlantic.
While significant differences of opinion existed -- mainly related to the regulatory structure on certifying agri-biotech products - most of the 20 U.S. and European experts on the panel agreed that agricultural biotechnology holds great promise to make dramatic and useful advances during the 21st century. The most prestigious national academies of science in North America and Europe (including the Vatican), also have come out in support of genetic engineering to improve the quantity, quality, and availability of food supplies.
Unfortunately, the debate about the safety and utility of genetically modified (GM) crops continues to grow, and now looks to be heating up further. The U.S. is considering filing a challenge at the World Trade Organization to break the European Union's four-year moratorium on importing GM crops. Although the European Commission agrees that the ban needs to be lifted, various member states refuse to do so until more stringent GM labeling regulations are put in place.
The U.S. is contemplating a WTO suit because European resistance to GM foods is increasingly influencing the trade policies of other nations, to the point where some African governments recently have turned down American GM grain intended for starving people. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick says he has information that several European countries are threatening to make economic aid to developing countries contingent on whether they prohibit biotech crops. If this is true, it would be tragic and grossly irresponsible.
Although there have always been those in society who resist change, the intensity of the attacks against GM crops from some quarters is unprecedented and, in certain cases, even surprising, given the potential environmental benefits that such technology can bring by reducing the use of pesticides. Genetic engineering of crops -- plant breeding at the molecular level -- is not some kind of witchcraft, but rather the progressive harnessing of the forces of nature to the benefit of feeding the human race. The idea that a new technology should be barred until proven conclusively that it can do no harm is unrealistic and unwise. Scientific advance always involves some risk of unintended outcomes. Indeed, "zero biological risk" is not even attainable.
Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa says he's been told by anti-biotechnology groups that donated American corn is "poison" because it contains genetically modified kernels. Based on such misinformation, he is willing to risk thousands of additional starvation deaths rather than distribute the same corn Americans have been eating for years with no ill effects.
Some other African leaders whose people also are facing hunger and starvation say they're afraid to accept genetically modified corn because its pollen will "contaminate" local corn varieties with dire environmental consequences. Also, they say that they hope to export corn to Europe in the future and fear that their products would be rejected if genetically modified foods were allowed to enter their countries.
These concerns are unfounded. Temperate-zone corn (either GM or normal) will not grow well in tropical African ecologies and, moreover, it has yellow grain while Africans prefer white grain. Thus, even if a curious farmer were to plant some GM grain received as food aid, its continued presence in the field is unlikely. Certainly in the case of Zambia, a land-locked country with poor transportation and low agricultural productivity, the prospects for exporting corn to Europe in the foreseeable future are almost zero.
If low-income, food-deficit nations -- which desperately need access to the benefits of science and technology -- are being advised by governments and pressure groups in privileged nations to reject biotechnology, based on ideologically inspired pseudo-science, there is reason for serious concern. Of course, proper safeguards need to be put in place in Africa and elsewhere to regulate biotechnology research and the release of GM products. But to attempt to deny such benefits would be unconscionable.
Current GM crop varieties that help to control insects and weeds are lowering production costs and increasing harvests - a great potential benefit to all Third World farmers. Future GM products are likely to carry traits that will improve nutrition and health. All of these technologies have more benefits to offer poor farmers and consumers than rich ones.
For example, Kenya is ready to field-test virus-resistant sweet potatoes that should yield 30% to 50% more of this important food staple. Virus-resistant bananas and potatoes have already been bred, but are being barred in African countries where people urgently need their higher yields. Indian researchers are developing a vaccine against the epidemic livestock disease, rinderpest, which can be genetically engineered into peanut plants. African farmers would be able to protect their draft animals simply by feeding them the peanut plants - again if biotech is allowed.
The needless confrontation of consumers against the use of transgenic crop technology in Europe and elsewhere might have been avoided had more people received a better education in biological science. This educational gap -- which has resulted in a growing and worrisome ignorance about the challenges and complexities of agricultural and food systems -- needs to be addressed without delay.
Privileged societies have the luxury of adopting a very low-risk position on the GM crops issue, even if this action later turns out to be unnecessary. But the vast majority of humankind does not have such a luxury, and certainly not the hungry victims of wars, natural disasters, and economic crises.
Without adequate food supplies at affordable prices, we cannot expect world health, prosperity, and peace.
Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy; starvation is.
--- Dr. Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace laureate, is a professor of international agriculture at Texas A&M University.
http://online.wsj.com/
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CIMMYT's Position on the Issue of Transgenes in Mexican Landraces
Director General Iwanaga Gives CIMMYT's Position on Issue of Transgenes in Mexican Landraces and Implications for Diversity Worldwide.
El Batan, Texcoco, Mexico - CIMMYT's host country, Mexico, is the center of origin and genetic diversity of maize. Mexico has been a focal point of the debate over transgenic food crops since late 2001, when genes from transgenic (genetically modified) maize were reportedly found in Mexican landraces.
Landraces, the maize races developed and maintained by small-scale farmers over the centuries, have evolved and been selected to thrive under particular environmental conditions and to meet local food preferences. Consequently, landraces often possess unique traits, which they carry and exchange through their genes. Given the large number of landraces in the world, especially in Latin America, the diversity of traits and genes is enormous.
Reports of transgenes in Mexican maize landraces have caused people to fear that a resource of immense practical and cultural value has been lost. As an international maize research institution charged with holding maize genetic resources in trust for humanity, CIMMYT wishes to recapitulate its position on the many questions surrounding the issue of transgenes in maize landraces. Why are landraces an important resource? Has this resource been lost? What happens in farmers' fields in Mexico and other developing countries when transgenic varieties are present? What steps have been taken with regard to the maize varieties in CIMMYT's genebank?
First, however, it is important to know one basic fact about how maize plants reproduce. Unlike many crop species, maize plants are not self-fertilizing. They reproduce by crossing with other maize plants, a process that can cause the genetic makeup of maize plants to change dramatically from one generation to the next. If two distinct varieties of maize, a hybrid and a landrace, for example, grow in neighboring fields and flower at the same time, it is entirely possible that they will cross and that some of their offspring will possess characteristics from both varieties. Obviously this fact of maize reproduction has implications for the flow of genes between transgenic and non-transgenic varieties.
Why do we care about landraces? CIMMYT has an international responsibility to conserve maize landraces from all parts of the world. One of the first activities of CIMMYT's founders was to collect and conserve an enormous number of maize landraces, many of them from Mexico. We have continued this activity for more than three decades to ensure that the irreplaceable diversity represented by maize landraces is conserved for all people, everywhere. The genetic diversity in hundreds of these landraces has enabled CIMMYT and partner organizations to develop maize varieties that resist insects and diseases and tolerate drought, saline and infertile soils, and other stresses. Varieties possessing these traits are essential for helping people in the developing world to feed their families and improve their economic well-being.
CIMMYT also works in rural communities to understand how farmers manage and breed landraces and thus manage genetic diversity. The landraces that farmers grow today are often somewhat different from those collected in the same communities decades ago, and they are certainly different from those grown centuries ago, precisely because they have continued to evolve under the combined influence of farmers and the environment. Mexico is not a center of diversity for maize simply because many landraces are "found" in Mexico. In reality, those landraces are the products of farmers' continuing desire to maintain a great deal of diversity in the maize they grow. For this reason, we feel it is extremely important to study the dynamic conservation of landraces in farmers' fields as well as the relatively more static conservation of landraces in genebanks.
Understanding what happens in farmers' fields In Mexico there is a moratorium on planting transgenic maize, but Mexico imports large quantities of maize grain from the USA to be ground into flour for tortillas. Sources at the US Department of Agriculture report that 34% of the US maize area was planted to transgenic maize in 2002, and it is quite possible that some of the maize imported into Mexico was transgenic. Simply by looking at the grain, it is impossible to identify it as transgenic. It has been hypothesized that transgenic maize could have entered farmers' fields if someone unwittingly purchased transgenic maize grain and, instead of eating it, planted it, just to see what might happen. Traditional farmers continually experiment with their maize landraces, crossing them with other maize varieties to see if they can improve their maize crop.
When transgenes are present in Mexican maize landraces grown by farmers, does this mean that an important resource is lost forever? As scientists, we would answer "no," because the landraces may have changed, as they do all the time, but they have not disappeared. On the contrary, with the addition of a transgene, they could actually be considered more diverse. This additional diversity may not be desirable, however. It is precisely this issue that the Mexican government must resolve.
For Mexico the course of action with regard to transgenic maize will be particularly sensitive because of the desire to conserve maize landraces and because of the perception by some that landraces cannot be traditional and transgenic at the same time. A critical issue for Mexico at this juncture is to determine what occurs when transgenic maize enters farmers' fields.
How would a transgenic maize hybrid, adapted to conditions in a developed country with a temperate climate, survive in subsistence farming systems in the tropics or subtropics? Would the transgenic variety and the local landraces even flower at the same time? If a transgenic and landrace variety cross, would their progeny have characteristics that appeal to farmers? Or would the resulting plants be so disappointing that farmers would gradually eliminate them? CIMMYT has repeatedly urged that research be conducted on these issues, not only in Mexico but also in other countries, to provide data for informed decisions. In 1995, the year that commercial transgenic maize was first released in the USA, we raised these questions at an international forum and have persistently sought funding and partner institutions to answer them.
Building on our previous research, and thanks to newly available funding, CIMMYT is initiating a study to give decision makers better information on how small-scale farmers manage and select seed and thus influence how genes (including transgenes) flow into and between landraces. Key related questions include: How may the diffusion of transgenic varieties affect the livelihoods of small-scale farmers? Can this process and its impacts be managed or, if need be, reversed? What are the implications for wild relatives of transgenic food crops? Appropriate policies and regulations will be difficult to develop or promote successfully in the absence of detailed information from farmers' fields and communities.
Finally, the perception that transgenic maize is reducing diversity must not obscure the very real need for research to mitigate the many confirmed threats to maize diversity. Every day, diversity is eroded by habitat destruction, human migration from rural to urban areas, and the irreparable loss of traditional maize seed and knowledge as the farming population ages. The present concern about transgenic maize may only add to these threats. If farmers and consumers are convinced that landraces are "contaminated" by transgenes and therefore unsafe to grow or eat, farmers will have even fewer incentives to preserve landraces in their fields.
Could maize landraces in the CIMMYT genebank contain transgenes? Because of threats to diversity in farmers' fields, CIMMYT maintains one of the world's largest collections of maize and wheat seed. We hold these collections in trust for humanity under an agreement with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. Seed held in trust is conserved for the long term and remains exempt from intellectual property protection.
CIMMYT has taken several preventive measures to ensure that the seed of maize landraces stored in our genebank is not transgenic. Our approach for the genebank, like the multi-layered security system of a conventional bank, comprises a series of firewalls, each reinforcing the other, making the introduction of transgenes into the landraces in the genebank unlikely.
First, during collection, seed samples are examined for obvious physical indications that they are true landraces and not the descendents of a modern variety. Next, the seed samples undergo molecular characterization, which means that their genetic makeup is analyzed for the presence of transgenes. As an internal check on the validity of the molecular analysis, the seeds from those samples are planted and grown out in a CIMMYT greenhouse. The resulting plants are sprayed with herbicides that the majority of commercial transgenic varieties are known to resist, because they were either developed to possess herbicide resistance or because the herbicide resistance gene was used as a marker gene. If a plant survives the herbicide treatment, it is assumed to contain a transgene, which should also have been identified with the molecular tests. To date, none of our samples of landrace seed have tested positive for transgenes.
Once a seed sample is accepted for the genebank collection, tight quality control measures ensure that the seed sample is not mixed with seed from other samples and that its collection history is preserved. All seed samples are electronically tracked with bar codes and put into long- and short-term storage. In long-term storage, seeds are preserved in foil packets at ?18ºC. In short-term storage, seeds are kept in tightly capped plastic jars at low temperature and humidity. Access to the seed storage vaults is restricted to authorized personnel.
To maintain sufficient stocks of landrace seeds, genebank curators must periodically plant stored seed and grow it to maturity to maintain viability and produce more seed, a process known as regeneration. Regeneration offers a potential opportunity for transgenes to cross into landraces. Here again CIMMYT has erected rigorous barriers to prevent such occurrences. During regeneration, landraces are pollinated by hand. Each maize tassel is covered to ensure that only pollen from that tassel will be used to pollinate the ears. Pollen is collected from the covered tassels and then dusted carefully onto silks that were also previously protected from inadvertent pollination. The pollinated ears are finally enclosed in a special breeding bag to guarantee that no extraneous pollen can pollinate the silks. To further ensure that extraneous pollen is kept out, buffer zones that isolate the regeneration areas from other maize plants are strictly enforced.
It is highly unlikely that all of these systems would simultaneously fail and thus allow transgenes to enter CIMMYT's maize landrace collection. Along with taking measures to screen new seed samples, we continue to screen older samples for the presence of transgenes, especially those collected or regenerated since 1995, when commercial Bt maize was first released. The methods and results of these studies are made available to the public through the CIMMYT website.
Research must inform the debate CIMMYT believes that no single technology will alleviate hunger, reduce malnutrition, and overcome many crop production problems, but all options should be brought to bear on these critical challenges. Transgenic wheat and maize offer tremendous opportunities in this regard, but it is clear that genetically modified varieties?or any given modern variety, for that matter?will not be appropriate for every farm setting in every part of the world. The debate about Mexican landraces, genetically modified organisms, and genetic diversity has raised scientific questions that have implications around the world as countries wrestle with the many issues related to genetically modified crops. We urge national authorities to ensure that decisions with respect to genetically modified crops are based on factual information and involve consultation with a wide range of concerned individuals and groups. Through our research, we at CIMMYT strive to bring clarity and scientific fact to these deliberations. We are grateful to the organizations that have recognized the need for continued research and appeal to the international development community to support these important efforts.
CIMMYT, Mexico; December 5, 2002 http://www.cimmyt.org/whatiscimmyt/Transgenic/Iwanaga_051202.htm
From AgBioView Jan 24, 2003
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Patenting Policies Must be Tailored for the Poor Roger N. Beachy
A complex web of intellectual property (IP) policies surrounding the development of potentially valuable discoveries can make it difficult to use new technologies to address problems in developing countries (which often lack policies for defining IP rights).
In this article, Roger N. Beachy, president of the US-based Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, argues that academic research institutions should adopt IP policies that make the results of research available for use in developing countries, and that their scientists should be encouraged to do research that will benefit such nations.
Beachy notes that all research and licensing agreements at the Donald Danforth Center include a statement that it will make "provision for preserving the availability of the Intellectual Property for meeting the needs of the developing countries". He urges all academic and non-profit research institutions to follow suit.
From Science 299, 473 (2003)
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6. ON THE WEB
Cassava Biotechnology Network
We are glad to announce the launching of the CBN [Cassava Biotechnology Network] Web site at http://www.ciat.cgiar.org/biotechnology/cbn/index.htm. We are expecting your feed back on how to make it a better site. We are all invited to visit the site often as the contents shall be continually updated.
Please take particular note of the announcement for "The Ginés-Mera Memorial Fellowship Fund For Postgraduate Studies In Biodiversity" in the "What's New" section. Kindly give this as wide a publicity as possible.
Chikelu Mba, CBN-LAC Coordinator
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FAO Electronic Conference on GMOs and Gene Flow
This document presents an abbreviated summary of discussions in the FAO e-mail conference entitled "Gene flow from GM to non-GM populations in the crop, forestry, animal and fishery sectors", which took place from 31 May to 6 July 2002. The document has also been put on the web at http://www.fao.org/biotech/logs/C7/shortsum.htm.
It was the seventh conference hosted by the FAO Electronic Forum on Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture (http://www.fao.org/biotech/forum.asp) since its launch in March 2000. The theme of the conference was clearly of major interest - although running for a shorter time period (5 weeks) than previous Forum conferences, more people joined (382) and sent messages (61) than in any of the previous six conferences. A broad range of stakeholders participated, with 32, 24, 17 and 13% of messages coming from people working in universities, research centres, non-governmental organisations and private companies respectively. Roughly one third of the 118 messages posted were from participants in developing countries and two thirds from developed countries.
During the moderated conference, discussions focused overwhelmingly on the issues concerning gene flow in the crop sector with only a few messages dedicated solely to these issues in forest trees, fish or animals. From thediscussions it was clear that widely differing opinions are held regarding genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the current or potential impacts of gene flow. (Note, unless otherwise stated, the term gene flow used in this document refers to gene flow from GM to non-GM populations).
The main topic of discussion in the conference was the real or potential ecological impacts of gene flow and, in addition, how a science-based ecological risk assessment framework might be applied to gene flow.
Regarding the ecological impacts, discussions focused on two main areas. The first was the impacts of gene flow on biodiversity. Here, it was argued that transgene flow might have greatest impact on the within-species genetic diversity of domesticated populations and, secondly, that other factors (such as the introduction of invasive alien species) could have far greater impacts on biodiversity. These other negative factors were either seen as putting gene flow in perspective as a minor problem or, alternatively, they encouraged participants to call for prudence as, initially, people had often not considered their potential risks. The second area was the ecological impacts of specific transgenes - either those currently in use, affecting herbicide tolerance and insect resistance traits, where it was argued that spread of these transgenes to non-target plants could have or already had negative ecological impacts (the case of herbicide tolerant GM canola in Canada was mentioned in particular), or transgenes that might be used in the future. Because different transgenes may raise different ecological issues in different environments, it was proposed that the ecological impacts of gene flow should be considered on a case by case basis rather than as a whole.
Assessing the ecological risk of gene flow was considered by participants to be very important prior to GMO release. In this context, there was much detailed discussion about two key terms that need to be considered in anecological risk assessment framework i.e. hazard (undesired/injurious events or harm caused by gene flow to the environment) and exposure (the frequency of gene flow or the probability of the transgene spreading in the environment). The problems of identifying the hazards and testing for them were raised, as well as the complexities involved in predicting exposure. Participants were generally positive about using population genetics mathematical models for predicting the spread of transgenes in the wild.
A number of messages dealt with specific aspects of ecological risk assessment in developing countries. Here, the lack of key information on the ecology of native plant species was a common theme and the need to generate this information to enable risk assessment to be carried out using local ecological information was emphasised. It was also argued that the assessment needs to be based on the realities of local farming systems in developing countries, where farm sizes may be small and mixing of varieties and seed saving may be common practices.
Several participants emphasised the importance, after carrying out an ecological risk assessment of gene flow from a GM variety, of weighing up the risks in a bigger context i.e. against the gene flow risks associated with conventional breeding practices; considering the environment in which the GM varieties might be used (e.g. whether suffering environmental degradation) and, thirdly, against the potential benefits of the GM variety.
Three other topics that generated a good deal of discussion were i) whether GMOs are fundamentally different from conventionally bred organisms (CBOs), thus entailing new gene flow hazards ii) strategies to limit gene flow and iii) economic impacts of gene flow.
There was no consensus on the first of these topics, which was highly contentious, resulting from a dichotomy in the way that GMOs are viewed in relation to CBOs. For participants who considered that GMOs do not differ fundamentally in their genetic make-up from CBOs, gene flow from GM-populations was not more of an issue than gene flow from non-GM populations. For those, on the other hand, who considered them to be fundamentally different, it was important that the unique features of GMOs be identified and the consequences of their dispersal by gene flow be evaluated. The two main unique features proposed in this context were that GMOs may transfer exotic/foreign genes (of other species) to individuals of the same population, to wild relatives or to different species, with potential evolutionary implications, and, secondly, that the genetic modification process may create organisms that are potentially unstable, due to the way transgenes are regulated and since transgene insertion could damage the host DNA.
For the second topic, given the concerns about the ecological impacts of gene flow, as well as the potential difficulties involved in assessing its ecological risk (due to problems in identifying potential hazards and predicting exposure), an alternative approach proposed was to simply prevent or limit gene flow from GM populations. This seemed to receive general support from all parts. The pros and cons of a range of different strategies were discussed, including temporal or spatial separation of GM and non-GM populations; ensuring that GMOs (or the pollen) are sterile or chloroplast genetic engineering (where the transgene(s) is inserted into the chloroplast genome rather than the nuclear genome). It was also suggested that these strategies might be combined.
The third of these topics dealt with two main aspects concerning the economic impacts of gene flow: the potential negative implications for trade and export to non-GMO markets if gene flow occurs (mentioned as being especially detrimental for developing countries) and, secondly, the impacts of intellectual property issues, as ownership of genes or seeds raises the question of liability if gene flow causes damage and, secondly, patent owners may decide to enforce intellectual property legislation if gene flow takes place.
Finally, three other topics were given minor attention in discussions. The first was a reminder that, apart from the ecological and economic impacts, there is also a philosophical/ethical dimension to the gene flow question. The potential importance of this aspect for indigenous peoples was mentioned. The second was gene flow in centres of origin and diversification, where participants emphasised that the topic requires special attention because of the complex mixture of scientific, social and cultural issues that it raises. The third was gene flow to organic agriculture, which is an especially sensitive issue as organic agriculture does not permit use of GMOs. The specific case of organic canola farming in Canada was discussed.
A more detailed summary, including references to specific e-mail messages, has been published and is available at http://www.fao.org/biotech/logs/C7/summary.htm. The individual e-mail messages can be read at http://www.fao.org/biotech/logs/c7logs.htm.
[Abbreviations: CBOs = Conventionally bred organisms; FAO = Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; GMOs = Genetically modified organisms]. Forum Administrator e-mail: mailto:biotech-admin@fao.org FAO website http://www.fao.org Forum website http://www.fao.org/biotech/forum.asp FAO Biotechnology website http://www.fao.org/biotech/index.asp
If any of your colleagues wish to join this Forum, they should send an e-mail message to mailserv@mailserv.fao.org leaving the subject blank and entering the following one-line message: subscribe BIOTECH-L
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