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SCIENCE: It All Starts With a Seed

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Feb 28 2005 (IPS) - When a virulent fungus began devouring North American wheat fields in 1950, U.S. and Canadian plant pathologists staved off disaster by cross-breeding five Mexican wheat varieties with a dozen imported ones, creating a new strain that successfully resisted so-called "stem rust".

Their work ultimately led to a global wheat production boom, and to the distribution of more than 100 improved varieties to farmers around the world.

Today, as new and re-emerging pests and diseases threaten to wipe out entire crop types, and with markets demanding new and better varieties, the thousands of seed collections stored in crop genebanks around the world are taking on urgent importance to the future of agriculture, says a new report by the Genetic Resources Conservation Programme at the University of California.

However, many of these collections are languishing from a lack of funding, experts warn.

"There are already a lot of collections that have been lost," said Dr. Geoff Hawtin, executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international entity established last year through a partnership between the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the 15 Future Harvest Centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

"Wild species are especially important and tend to be under-represented," he told IPS. "Many are threatened, and are more difficult to conserve than commercial strains."

In the United States, agricultural goods earn more than 191 billion dollars for the economy every year. But farmers are increasingly under siege from diseases like soybean rust, which costs almost a billion dollars a year, and potato blight, which destroys 400 million dollars worth of plants annually.

Altogether, pests and plant diseases are conservatively estimated to exact a toll of 20 to 33 billion dollars in the United States each year, warns the report, "Safeguarding the Future of U.S. Agriculture: The Need to Conserve Threatened Collections of Crop Diversity Worldwide," released Monday.

Organic markets, valued at 11 billion dollars in the U.S., are especially dependent on genetic variation. When disease or pests attack, the organic prohibition on pesticides and genetic modification techniques makes naturally obtained disease resistance one of the few alternatives available to farmers.

The problem, experts like Hawtin say, is that despite their value, many genebanks are struggling to survive, particularly in developing countries, whose collections include crops that have been grown for centuries.

Pathogens that cause diseases in the United States can often be traced to an obscure plant in a distant region, which may also hold the cure.

Genes carrying resistance to barley’s "yellow dwarf virus" came from the highlands of Ethiopia, for example, and resistance to the Russian wheat aphid (now a problem in U.S.-grown wheat) hails from Iran and surrounding countries.

In fact, only a handful of crops, including sunflower and strawberry, were domesticated from wild plants native to the United States.

"The vast majority evolved in far-flung ‘centres of origin’, where farmers selected them for traits to suit their needs and carried them along as they moved from place to place," says the report.

But it warns that "while plant pathogens are older than agriculture itself, several recent trends increase the risk that an unforeseen pest or disease will cause widespread damage to U.S. crops."

One is the pervasive problem of monoculture, where a handful of high-yield varieties have displaced the wide diversity once found in farmers’ fields. And common sense dictates that vast acreage devoted to a genetically uniform crop is more vulnerable to pests.

At the same time, pathogens or insects that mutate to overwhelm a crop’s natural resistance or evade the effects of fungicides and pesticides, combined with monoculture conditions, increase the chance that novel pests could rapidly spread.

Entirely new pests are likely to be introduced with the increased volume of global travel and food imports, while accelerating climate changes due to a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are expected to bring prolonged droughts in some areas and heavier rainfall in others. The overall warming trend allows pests to expand into new geographic regions.

Some of these factors are already present. A new rust fungus has invaded U.S. soybean fields, causing yield losses of up to 80 percent. All commercial varieties are susceptible, and if undetected and untreated, the rust can ruin a field in two weeks.

Potato blight of the kind that caused the Irish potato famine has re-emerged, while U.S. corn production, worth 30 billion dollars annually, is facing assaults from multiple diseases, including some that recently emerged abroad and appear able to cross borders with ease.

A new strain of potent rice blast disease has appeared, and fusarium head blight, or scab, has already caused 3 billion dollars in damage to the U.S. wheat and barley industries.

In all these cases, plant scientists are searching domestic and international genebanks to find strains resistant to these diseases that could be used for cross-breeding.

The genetic information in the genebanks is considered "the commons", Hawtin stressed, meaning that it is publicly shared.

"Patents would not be taken out on any of the materials as they are, without modification, pursuant to an international treaty on plant genetic resources," he said. "They couldn’t lock up the original material."

"That said, we want to see it used," Hawtin added. The Trust does not take a position on whether the data is employed in high-tech – and controversial – genetic experimentation, or traditional horticulture.

The report also points out that the United States has a stake in conserving global crop diversity as a way to solve the related problems of economic development, hunger, and environmental quality in the developing world.

A United Nations report recently cited the importance of genetically improved crop varieties and native crop genetic resources as a way to boost production on subsistence farms, home to half of the world’s 800 million chronically hungry people.

Crop genebanks are also playing an important role in reinvigorating food production in areas hit by the Asian tsunami and in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, just as they did following the genocidal horrors of the Khmer Rogue in Cambodia and the Hutu regime in Rwanda.

However, existing global capacity is not keeping pace with demand, the report says. For example, of the 1,460 facilities housing collected materials, only 35 meet international standards for long-term storage.

A decade ago, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported that nearly a fifth of the 5.4 million samples held in collections around the world are degenerating, and that number has increased in the interim.

The reasons are as basic as power outages, a lack of resources to regenerate decaying seed in old collections, and disease transmission within collections.

The report says that one solution is to increase funding for the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is trying to build a 260-million-dollar endowment that would rescue collections most at risk. The Trust has raised about 56 million dollars so far.

Cape Verde, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Sweden, Syria, Togo, and Tonga have signed on as supporters of the Trust. Even Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, recently donated 50,000 dollars.

The U.S. has given about five million dollars in start-up funds, but has yet to sign a statement of support.

"There are no political objections that we’re aware of," Hawtin said. "Hopefully, it’s just a question of time."