By Henry Neondo

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Tuesday called for increased
investment in a plant breeding technique that could bolster efforts aimed at
pulling millions of people out of the hunger trap


IAEA scientists use radiation to produce improved high-yielding plants that
adapt to harsh climate conditions such as drought or flood, or that are
resistant to certain diseases and insect pests.

Called mutation induction, the technique is safe, proven and cost-effective.
It has been in use since the 1920s.

"The global nature of the food crisis is unprecedented. Families all around
the world are struggling to feed themselves," says Mohamed ElBaradei,
Director General of the IAEA.

"To provide sustainable, long-term solutions, we must make use of all
available resources. Selecting the crops that are better able to feed us is
one of humankind's oldest sciences. But we've neglected to give it the
support and investment it requires for universal application.

The IAEA is urging a revival of nuclear crop breeding technologies to help
tackle world hunger." For decades the IAEA, in partnership with the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), has assisted its
Member States to produce more, better and safer food.

In plant breeding and genetics, its expertise is helping countries around
the world to achieve enhanced agricultural output using nuclear technology.

Already more than 3000 crop varieties of some 170 different plant species
have been released through the direct intervention of the IAEA: they include
barley that grows at 5000 meters (16,400 ft) and rice that thrives in saline
soil.

These varieties provide much needed food as well as millions of dollars in
economic benefits for farmers and consumers, especially in developing
countries.

In Japan alone, the Institute of Radiation Breeding (IRB) calculates that
crops developed using mutation induction generated economic returns of
nearly US$ 62 billion against US$ 69 million invested during the period
1959 ? 2001.

That translates into a remarkable 900 fold return on investment, and this in
the public sector But with increased investment and broader application, the
technology could positively impact the health and livelihood of even greater
numbers of people.

And as world hunger grows, the need has never been more urgent. This year,
shortages combined with increasing demand have created a new global food
crisis.

At its root: adverse weather conditions linked to climate change, the
diversion of land for the cultivation of bio-fuels, and a tendency to live
on food credit.

"For decades most of the developed world has lived on readily available,
cheap and diversified food, enjoying plentiful amounts but seemingly with
little or no need to invest in agriculture," says Qu Liang, Director of the
FAO/IAEA Joint Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture.

"Food crises were always dealt with by relief organizations, through food
aid and donations, and disappeared as quickly from the headlines as they
appeared. Now, with the earth's resources dwindling, we are reaping the
results of decades of under-investment in agriculture."

Today, food shortages and sky-rocketing prices are pushing millions of
people deeper into the poverty and hunger cycle. As a result, social unrest
and food protests, some violent, have flared in countries around the globe.
As usual, the poor are hardest hit by rising prices.

In addition to the more than 850 million people worldwide who were already
going hungry, millions more now are being pushed below the one-dollar-a-day
poverty level.

This is undermining progress not only towards meeting the most important of
the eight Millennium Development Goals, that of cutting hunger and poverty
by half by 2015, but also targets on education, child and maternal mortality
reduction, and containing the spread of major diseases.

"The year 2008 was a wake-up call to the realization that world food
production was unsustainable and vulnerable to factors such as climate
change and energy demands," says IAEA Deputy Director General Werner
Burkart, who heads the Department of Nuclear Sciences and Applications.

"The big issues are interlinked. With energy increasingly being produced
from corn, soya and other crops, there is growing competition between food,
feed and fuel for soil, water and human and financial resources." Nature
provides every species with the potential to develop many different
characteristics?for example, the height of a plant, its yield, its
susceptibility or resistance to disease.

All of these possibilities are written into a plant's blueprint, its genome,
but only a few are expressed. Over a long period of time, a plant can adapt
itself to different conditions through a process of spontaneous mutation and
natural selection.

It was the survival of certain edible plants amid adverse conditions that
first attracted hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago.

They selected the robust, easy to harvest wild grains, consumed the crop and
saved the seeds for planting the following year.

Modern plant breeding was born. "We call spontaneous mutation the motor of
evolution," says Pierre Lagoda, Head of the FAO/IAEA Joint Division's Plant
Breeding and Genetics Section. "If we could live millions of years and
survey billions of hectares (acres) of land with 100 percent precision, we
would find variants with all of the traits we're looking for but which have
mutated naturally." "But we can't wait millions of years to find the plants
that are necessary now, if we want to feed the world. So with induced
mutation, we are actively speeding up the process."

Today, scientists apply mutagens?for example, gamma rays or chemicals?to
accelerate the process. Unlike genetic modification, which introduces new
material into a plant's genetic makeup, induced mutation simply accelerates
the natural process of spontaneous changes occurring in plants.

Exposure to radiation changes a plant's blueprint at one position in the
genetic code, creating a variant that is different from the parent plant.

Huge numbers of mutants are produced in the search for desired
traits?perhaps a resistance to certain diseases or pests, or an ability to
thrive in saline soil or drought conditions.

Those that seem promising are selected and turned over to plant breeders who
work to incorporate that quality, perhaps by cross-breeding, into indigenous
plants.

"But we're not producing anything that is not produced by nature itself,"
says Pierre Lagoda. "For example, up until now nature has produced 140,000
distinct varieties of rice all with different characteristics?there's rice
that is tall, rice that grows in water or dry climates or in salty soil. All
of these expressions of the potential of rice are in the rice itself."

Induced mutation is an important part of the solution to the world's food
crisis. "We are not the only solution to the world's food crisis but we
offer a tool, a very efficient tool, to the global agricultural community to
broaden the adaptability of crops in the face of climate change, rising
prices, and soils that lack fertility or have other major problems," says
Pierre Lagoda.

Through its Technical Cooperation Programme, the IAEA provides the tool and
the expertise, but national agricultural research systems and plant breeders
take the next step, selecting and cross-breeding plants to achieve the
desired result. Plant breeding can be done in several ways. The classical
way can take seven to ten years.

A breeder looking for pest resistance, for example, might find the
characteristic in a wild variety that has poor quality and yield.

This will be crossed with a plant that does have good quality and yield, and
any offspring combining the desired traits will then be selected and
propagated. Hybrids, the product of crosses, are only as good as the source
parents.

With many decades of monocultures, the variations amongst candidate parents
have become very narrow. This endangers food security as resistance to yet
latent biotypes of pests and diseases and extreme weather conditions may
have become severely eroded.

Additionally, it is becoming increasingly difficult to prospect for plant
genetic resources across national boundaries.

The solution to both bottlenecks is to artificially induce the variations
that plant breeders so obviously need. Mutation induction produces millions
of variants.

Breeders then have to screen for the desired traits and crossbreed. Nature
can help this process. If improved varieties are planted in a diseased
field, the survivors will be the resistant ones. Because fewer pesticides
are needed for disease and insect resistant crops, they are environmentally
friendly and reduce the expenses of poor farmers.

But this safe, proven technology still faces some resistance. One reason is
public concern surrounding words like radiation and mutation.

"I understand that people are suspicious of these technologies, but in our
case it's important to understand that in plant breeding we're not producing
anything that's not produced by nature itself," says Pierre Lagoda. "There
is no residual radiation left in a plant after mutation induction."
www.checkbiotech.org