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Plant breeding that combines scientific breeding methods with the local
knowledge of poor farmers is being used to improve nutrition among the
world's most disadvantaged.
Dr Jacqueline Ashby of the newly launched Rural Innovation Institute in
Cali, Colombia, says such "participatory plant breeding" (PPB) involves
farmers telling breeders the range of traits they want in a plant, or
evaluating varieties before they are officially released by Anna Salleh .

"Farmers will evaluate varieties right through to the cooking pot," says
Ashby, whose institute falls under the auspices of the World Bank-sponsored
International Center for Tropical Agriculture.

She says PPB is being used to develop new varieties of maize, potato and
upland rice but most recently it is also being used to breed new varieties
of so-called minor crops.

These vegetables, legumes, pulses, fruit and condiments, usually grown by
women, have high levels of vitamins and minerals.

But Ashby says over the past 20 years many of these have been replaced by
less-nutritious cash crops, adding to nutrition problems.

Involving women in such PPB projects is important, she says, as this leads
to greater food security for the family as a whole.

PPB may also increase crop yields, Ashby says.

"Farmers really know their local environment very well," she says. "Trials
have shown that when farmers and breeders select from the same pool of
varieties growing in the farmer's field, farmers consistently select plants
that can produce higher yields."

Whose green revolution?

Ashby says farmers who have not benefited from developments in agricultural
science, referred to as the Green Revolution, can benefit from PPB.

"In the early days of the Green Revolution, many of the varieties [of maize]
being produced were very, very hard and difficult to grind," says Ashby, a
development sociologist. As a result, she says, the varieties were not
broadly adopted.

"That sort of problem doesn't occur when farmers are involved in screening
and selecting the varieties because they will test them for the qualities
that are important to them."

Many of the world's rural poor live on marginal land, such as on mountain
sides, which have a diverse range of unique growing conditions, says Ashby.

And the narrow range of high-yielding varieties of staple crops developed
during the Green Revolution often don't work there.

For example, an imported variety developed by breeders in the US state of
Iowa had been selected to have a loose husk, which could easily be detached
during machine harvesting.

But this variety is not useful for the poor farmers, who harvest by hand,
because the loose husk allows water into the grain and shortens its storage
life.

"You just don't think of those types of things when you come from Iowa,"
says Ashby.

Saving seeds for next year

Ashby says most PPB is occurring where people don't have access to modern
biotechnology.

Intellectual property from PPB projects remains in the public domain, with
farmers allowed to save seeds from year to year.

This is in contrast to the standard model for plant breeding in the
developed world, she says, where it is costing farmers increasingly more for
new varieties, and saving seed is prohibited where the crop is genetically
modified.

[abc.net.au]