As a fast growing region with increasing challenges for smallholder farmers, Asia is a key target region for CIMMYT. CIMMYTâs work stretches from Central Asia to southern China and incorporates system-wide approaches to improve wheat and maize productivity and deliver quality seed to areas with high rates of child malnutrition. Activities involve national and regional local organizations to facilitate greater adoption of new technologies by farmers and benefit from close partnerships with farmer associations and agricultural extension agents.
Visitors from the Embassy of Vietnam in Mexico and members of CIMMYT senior management stand for a group photograph next to the Norman Borlaug statue at CIMMYT’s global headquarters. (Photo: Jose Luis Olin Martinez for CIMMYT)
Vietnamese officials expressed interest in increased future cooperation with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). A delegation from the Embassy of Vietnam in Mexico visited CIMMYTâs global headquarters in Texcoco, Mexico, on October 21, 2019. The delegation was composed of Hien Do Tat, First Secretary of Technology Science, and translator Cuc Doan Thi Thu.
CIMMYT sends germplasm to Vietnam and has previously collaborated with the country through several projects. More than twenty Vietnamese scientists have received training from CIMMYT.
The Vietnamese delegation was particularly interested in CIMMYTâs work with drought-tolerant maize and requested expert help with fall armyworm, which has appeared in Vietnam for the first time earlier this year. They also expressed surprise at the range of CIMMYT activities, as they were under the impression that the organizationâs sole purpose was plant breeding.
CIMMYT Director General Martin Kropff reinforced interest in further cooperation with Vietnam, emphasizing the importance of appropriate mechanization and sustainable intensification in agricultural development.
Vietnam produced 5.1 million tons of maize a year, grown on more than one million hectares, according to the latest available figures.
When the destructive fall armyworm arrived in Asia in the summer of 2018, scientists were not taken by surprise. They had been anticipating its arrival on the continent as the next stage of its aggressive eastward journey, driven by changing climatic conditions and international trade routes. The pest, native to North and South America, had invaded and spread throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa within two years, severely damaging billions of dollars of maize crops and threatening food security for millions of people. Asian countries would have to mobilize quickly to cope with this new threat.
After reaching India in 2018, the pest spread to other parts of Asia, including Bangladesh, mainland China, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
Fall armyworm is a major threat to Asiaâs maize farmers, many of whom derive a crucial source of household income by selling maize as feed grain for the growing poultry sector. What is not sold is paramount for subsistence and daily nutrition in communities in the hills of Nepal, in the tribal regions of India, in the mountainous provinces of southern China, and in parts of Indonesia and the Philippines.
The pest is here to stay
Fall armyworm cannot be eradicated â once it has arrived in an agro-ecosystem, farmers must learn how to cope with it. Farmers in the Americas have lived with this pest for the last two hundred years, but their tools and management techniques cannot be simply applied in Africa or Asia. Solutions need to be tailored to specific countries and local contexts, to account for the vast differences in local ecologies, practices, policies and other conditions.
Timothy J. Krupnik and B.M. Prasanna are two of the scientists responding to fall armyworm in Asia. Both are with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). As a long-established organization with global presence, CIMMYT had decades of experience managing fall armyworm in its native lands before the global spread started. These scientists see the enormous threat to maize crops in Asia, and the negative impact it could have on the income and wellbeing of smallholders and their families, but they also point to opportunities to develop, validate and deploy effective solutions.
In South Asia, farmers have developed intensive agricultural techniques to produce food for rapidly growing populations, meaning agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizer and pesticides are more readily available than in much of Africa. The private sector is generally good at getting solutions to farmers, who are often willing and able to adopt new ways of farming. âThe private sector in South Asia is in a good position to exchange and transfer technologies across the region,â explains Prasanna, who leads CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program and the CGIAR Research Program on Maize.
The accessibility of pesticides also has its risks, says Krupnik, a senior scientist based in Bangladesh. âIf used incorrectly, pesticides can be unsafe, environmentally damaging and even ineffective,â he says. Krupnikâs team is currently engaging with pesticide companies in Bangladesh, helping them develop an evidence-based response to fall armyworm. âWe want to encourage effective, environmentally safer solutions such as integrated pest management that cause least harm to people and ecosystems,â he explained.
A fall armyworm curls up among the debris of the maize plant it has just eaten at CIMMYTâs screenhouse in Kiboko, Kenya. (Photo: Jennifer Johnson/CIMMYT)
A global effort
The global nature of the challenge may have a silver lining. âOver the last three years, we have learned important lessons on fall armyworm management in Africa, including what technologies work and why,â says Prasanna. âWith the pest now a global problem, there is great potential for cooperation among affected countries, especially between Africa and Asia.â
Researchers emphasize that a collective effort is needed to respond to the fall armyworm in Asia. CIMMYT is working with partners around the world to help leverage and share expertise and technologies across borders.
China has as much acreage of maize as the whole African continent, and has tremendous institutional expertise and capacity to deal with new challenges, explains Prasanna. His team is in discussions with Chinese researchers to share knowledge and solutions across Asia.
Bangladesh and Nepal are among the countries seeking linkages with international experts and researchers in other countries.
In Africa, CIMMYT was part of a global coalition of scientists and governments who joined forces in 2017 to tackle the fall armyworm threat and develop scientific solutions. The researchers want to see this approach expand into Asia, supported by the donor community.
As the pest continues its relentless expansion in the region, extensive work is ahead for both research and development institutions. Researchers need to identify and promote best management practices. Technologies will have to be environmentally sustainable, durable and inclusive, says Prasanna.
Joining hands
âTo achieve this, we need a multidisciplinary team including breeders, pest management experts, seed specialists, agronomists and socioeconomists, who can share science-based evidence with development partners, governments and farmers,â Prasanna says.
CIMMYT researchers are on the path towards developing improved maize varieties with native genetic resistance to fall armyworm. They are also engaging with farming communities to make sure other integrated pest management solutions are available.
In addition to developing agronomic practices and technologies, scientists are reaching out to farming communities with the right messages, Krupnik explains. âAs well as being technical experts, our scientists are embedded in the countries where we work. Weâve lived here for a long time, and understand how to engage with local partners,â he says.
Cross-border collaboration and knowledge transfer is already happening. Partners in Laos enthusiastically adapted fall armyworm informational materials from Bangladesh for local dissemination. Krupnik and his team have also collaborated on a video with guidance on how to identify and scout for fall armyworm in a field, developed by Scientific Animations without Borders.
Fall armyworm will continue its spread across Asia, and researchers will have many questions to answer, such as how fall armyworm interacts with very diverse Asian agro-ecosystems, the pest population dynamics, and measuring the economic impacts of interventions. Solutions need to be developed, validated and deployed for the short, medium and long term. Krupnik and Prasanna hope that international cooperation can support these crucial research-for-development activities.
âFall armyworm is here to stay. We are running a marathon and not a 100-meter sprint,â proclaimed Prasanna. âLetâs work collectively and strategically so that the farmer is the ultimate winner.â
Velu Govindan will always remember his father telling him not to waste his food. âHe used to say that rice and wheat are very expensive commodities, which most people could only afford to eat once a week during his youth,â recalls the wheat breeder, who works at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
As in many parts of the world, the Green Revolution had a radical impact on agricultural production and diets in southern India, where Govindanâs father grew up, and by the late 1960s all farmers in the area had heard of âthe scientistâ from the USA. âBorlaugâs influence in India is so great because those new high-yielding varieties fed millions of people â including me.â
But feeding millions was only half the battle.
Today, at least two billion people around the world currently suffer from micronutrient deficiency, characterized by iron-deficiency anemia, lack of vitamin A and zinc deficiency.
Govindan works in collaboration with HarvestPlus to improve nutritional quality in cereals in addition to core traits like yield potential, disease resistance and climate tolerance. His area of focus is South Asia, where wheat is an important staple and many smallholder farmers donât have access to a diversified diet including fruit, vegetables or animal products which are high in micronutrients like iron and zinc.
âItâs important that people not only have access to food, but also have a healthy diet,â says Govindan. âThe idea is to improve major staples like rice, maize and wheat so that people who consume these biofortified varieties get extra benefits, satisfying their daily dietary needs as well as combatting hidden hunger.â
The challenge, he explains, is that breeding for nutritional quality is often done at the expense of yield. But varieties need high yield potential to be successful on the market because farmers in developing countries will not get a premium price simply for having a high micronutrient content in their grain.
Fast evolving wheat diseases are another issue to contend with. âIf you release a disease-resistant variety today, in as little as three or four yearsâ time it will already be susceptible because rust strains keep mutating. Itâs a continuous battle, but thatâs plant breeding.â
Velu Govindan speaks at International Wheat Conference in 2015. (Photo: Julie Mollins/CIMMYT)
Mainstreaming zinc
When it comes to improvement, breeding is only the first part of the process, Govindan explains. âWe can do a good job here in the lab, but if our varieties are not being taken up by farmers itâs no use.â
Govindan and his team work in collaboration with a number of public and private sector organizations to promote new varieties, partnering with national agricultural research systems and advanced research institutes to reach farmers in India, Nepal and Pakistan. As a result, additional high-zinc varieties have been successfully marketed and distributed across South Asia, as well as new biofortified lines which are currently being tested in sub-Saharan Africa for potential release and cultivation by farmers.
Their efforts paid off with the development and release of more than half dozen competitive high-zinc varieties including Zinc-Shakthi, whose grain holds 40% more zinc than conventional varieties and yields well, has good resistance to rust diseases, and matures a week earlier than other popular varieties, allowing farmers to increase their cropping intensity. To date, these biofortified high-zinc wheat varieties have reached nearly a million households in target regions of South Asia and are expected to spread more widely in coming years.
The next step will be to support the mainstreaming of zinc, so that it becomes an integral part of breeding programs as opposed to an optional addition. âHopefully in ten yearsâ time, most of the wheat we eat will have those extra benefits.â
There may be a long way to go, but Govindan remains optimistic about the task ahead.
Velu Govindan examines wheat in the field.
Born into a farming family, he has fond memories of a childhood spent helping his father in the fields, with afternoons and school holidays dedicated to growing rice, cotton and a number of other crops on the family plot.
The region has undergone significant changes since then, and farmers now contend with both rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall. It was a motivation to help poor farmers adapt to climate change and improve food production that led Govindan into plant breeding.
He has spent nearly ten years working on CIMMYTâs Spring Wheat Program and still feels honored to be part of a program with such a significant legacy. âNorman Borlaug, Sanjay Rajaram and my supervisor Ravi Singh â these people are legendary,â he explains. âSo luckily weâre not starting from scratch. These people made life easy, and we just need to keep moving towards achieving continuous genetic gains for improved food and nutrition security.â
CIMMYT Principal Scienist M.L. Jat is optimistic fires from crop burning will be reduced this year in Haryana and Punjab, India. “There are more happy seeder machines in the two states this year than any time in the past.” Read more here.
CIMMYT’s Balwinder Singh, who is with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in New Delhi and who recently co-authored a study on crop burning in Punjab and Haryana, told The Wire that the air pollution problem could be much more severe towards the end of October.
âHarvesting is getting late this year and burning will move into the cooler days of November, which will be more harmful as particulate matter will not disperse in cooler days. Another risk in delayed harvesting is that many farmers will harvest and burn the residue within a short time span towards the time between the end of October and early November, which will increase the intensity of fire events and also particulate matter,â he said. Read more here.
A study by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), carried out in collaboration with Stanford and Cornell Universities, has shown that there is a sustainable way to increase food production already in the fields: microsatellites. Read more here (in Italian).
Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food production. In the latest episode of the BBC radio show Witness History, Rebecca Kesby interviews Ronnie Coffman, student and friend of Norman Borlaug.
Among other stories, Coffman recalls the moment when Borlaug was notified about the Nobel Prize â while working in the wheat fields in Mexico â and explores what motivated Borlaug to bring the Green Revolution to India.
Simon N. Groot is the winner of the 2019 World Food Prize. With this award, food and agriculture leaders recognize his work to increase vegetable production in more than 60 countries, through the development of high-quality seeds and training programs for farmers.
Grootâs efforts were crucial in leading millions of farmers to become horticulture entrepreneurs, resulting in improved incomes and livelihoods for them, and greater availability of nutritious vegetables for hundreds of millions of consumers.
Like small-town Iowa farm boy Norman Borlaug, Groot comes from a small town in the Netherlands, where he learned the value of seeds at a young age. Both shared the same vision to feed the world and succeeded.
âI think I was born to be a vegetable seedsman.â
– Simon N. Groot
Groot devoted his whole life to the seed and plant breeding industry. After 20 years in the industry in Europe and North America, Groot travelled to southeast Asia at the age of 47 with a vision to set up the regionâs first vegetable seed breeding company. Frustrated by the poor quality seeds he found and noticing a total lack of commercial breeding activities in the region, Groot decided to set up his own company, using his own capital, partnering with Benito Domingo, a Philippines local with a passion for seeds and local connections to the traditional seed trade, agriculture industry and universities.
The company, named East-West Seed Company, started out as a small five-hectare farm outside Lipa City, Philippines. Groot brought over well-trained plant breeders from the Netherlands to begin plant breeding and help train locals as breeders and technicians. Groot was the first to introduce commercial vegetable hybrids in tropical Asia: varieties which were high-yielding, fast-growing and resistant to local diseases and stresses. Today, East-West Seed Company has over 973 improved varieties of 60 vegetable crops which are used by more than 20 million farmers across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Inspired by Borlaug
Groot described meeting Dr. Borlaug at a conference in Indonesia in the late 1980s as âa pivotal momentâ for him, writing that âhis legacy has continued to serve as an inspiration for everything I have done at East-West Seed.â
In response to being awarded the 2019 World Food Prize, Groot wrote: âBringing about the âVegetable Revolutionâ will be a fitting tribute to the work of Dr. Borlaug.â
The World Food Prize has been referred to as the âNobel Prize for food and agriculture.â Awarded by the World Food Prize Foundation, it recognizes individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world. Winners receive $250,000 in prize money.
The World Food Prize was founded in 1986 by Norman Borlaug, recipient of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Punjab government is working on war footing to curb farm fires ahead of the celebrations of 550 birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, but rising incidents of stubble burning in Pakistan, particularly near border areas of Punjab, have raised concern among scientists at Punjab remote sensing center (PRSC) and Punjab agricultural university (PAU).
Experts from Cornell and International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in a recent study âTradeoffs Between Groundwater Conservation and Air Pollution From Agricultural Fires in Northwest Indiaâ stated that pollution, particularly caused by stubble burning, leads to an estimated 16,000 premature deaths caused every year in New Delhi capital region, with an aggregate reduction in life expectancy of 6 years.
A young man uses a precision spreader to distribute fertilizer in a field. (Photo: Mahesh Maske/CIMMYT)
Data from microsatellites can be used to detect and double the impact of sustainable interventions in agriculture at large scales, according to a new study led by the University of Michigan (U-M).
By being able to detect the impact and target interventions to locations where they will lead to the greatest increase of yield gains, satellite data can help increase food production in a low-cost and sustainable way.
According to the team of researchers from U-M, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), and Stanford and Cornell universities, finding low-cost ways to increase food production is critical, given that feeding a growing population and increasing the yields of crops in a changing climate are some of the greatest challenges of the coming decades.
“Being able to use microsatellite data, to precisely target an intervention to the fields that would benefit the most at large scales will help us increase the efficacy of agricultural interventions,” said lead author Meha Jain, assistant professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability.
Microsatellites are small, inexpensive, low-orbiting satellites that typically weigh 100 kilograms or less.
“About 60-70% of total world food production comes from smallholders, and they have the largest field-level yield gaps,” said Balwinder Singh, senior researcher at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
To show that the low-cost microsatellite imagery can quantify and enhance yield gains, the researchers conducted their study in smallholder wheat fields in the Eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains in India.
They ran an experiment on 127 farms using a split-plot design over multiple years. In one half of the field, the farmers applied nitrogen fertilizer using hand broadcasting, the typical fertilizer spreading method in this region. In the other half of the field, the farmers applied fertilizer using a new and low-cost fertilizer spreader.
To measure the impact of the intervention, the researchers then collected the crop-cut measures of yield, where the crop is harvested and weighed in field, often considered the gold standard for measuring crop yields. They also mapped field and regional yields using microsatellite and Landsat satellite data.
They found that without any increase in input, the spreader resulted in 4.5% yield gain across all fields, sites and years, closing about one-third of the existing yield gap. They also found that if they used microsatellite data to target the lowest yielding fields, they were able to double yield gains for the same intervention cost and effort.
“Being able to bring solutions to the farmers that will benefit most from them can greatly increase uptake and impact,” said David Lobell, professor of earth system science at Stanford University. “Too often, we’ve relied on blanket recommendations that only make sense for a small fraction of farmers. Hopefully, this study will generate more interest and investment in matching farmers to technologies that best suit their needs.”
The study also shows that the average profit from the gains was more than the amount of the spreader and 100% of the farmers were willing to pay for the technology again.
Jain said that many researchers are working on finding ways to close yield gaps and increase the production of low-yielding regions.
“A tool like satellite data that is scalable and low-cost and can be applied across regions to map and increase yields of crops at large scale,” she said.
The study is published in the October issue of Nature Sustainability. Other researchers include Amit Srivastava and Shishpal Poonia of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in New Delhi; Preeti Rao and Jennifer Blesh of the U-M School of Environment and Sustainability; Andrew McDonald of Cornell; and George Azzari and David Lobell of Stanford.Â
Growing up on a rainfed farm in India, P.H. Zaidi learned how smallholder family farmers adapted their farming practices to meet weather challenges, such as dry spells or excessive rain. For the most part, small changes to their crop selection and timing of field operations maintained a wholesome harvest.
As time passed Zaidi witnessed farmers in his hometown and beyond struggling against increasingly extreme and erratic weather events. The Asian tropics have now become hotspots for climate change effects and associated variabilities, said the maize physiologist who works with the Global Maize Program of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), based in Hyderabad.
âRainfed farmers produce most of the food for people in Asia, but without sufficient supplemental irrigation systems they are heavily dependent on monsoon rains,â Zaidi said. âClimate variability can be devastating for family farmers who are unable to foresee erratic changes in weather patterns.â
âAn extreme weather event can negatively affect household food security and income, which in turn results in a deterioration of capacity to deal with future shocks,â he explained.
Nearly half a billion people in Asia lack access to nourishing food. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) finds climate change-related disasters and a lack of clean water are the main causes of persistent hunger in the region.
Zaidi believes farmers are born innovators and, with the right tools and know-how, they can ensure a healthy harvest despite year-to-year climate variability. He has dedicated his lifework to researching new agricultural technologies that help resource-poor farmers to protect their food and income security.
Stable harvests despite climate change
After getting an undergraduate degree in agricultural science, Zaidi obtained his doctorate at the University of Agriculture Science & Technology in Faizabad, India. He studied how maize physiology interacts with physical stresses, such as severe heat, drought, and excessive moisture. Maize has become an important part of Asian cropping systems, with several countries recording impressive growth rates in maize production and productivity. However, increasing demands â food, feed, and industry â and climate challenges highlight the need for international agricultural research.
In 2002, Zaidi worked as a post-doctoral fellow at CIMMYT in Mexico, where he was mentored by maize abiotic stress experts. He took those research approaches and strategies for breeding stress-resilient maize varieties back home. Working with the Indian governmentâs maize program, he contributed to developing high-yielding stress-resilient maize for resource-poor maize farmers living in vulnerable agro-ecologies.
With a wealth of knowledge and experience in agricultural systems in Asia, he was employed by CIMMYT as maize physiologist and breeder in 2007. He worked to develop, deploy and scale-out hardy maize varieties that increase yield potential and reduce risk, ensuring a stable harvest despite climate variability. He also developed and standardized screening phenotyping techniques and selection criteria to identify maize germplasm tolerant to stresses including heat, drought and water-logging.
âThrough effective collaboration and training, national governments, private seed companies and NGOs are using the varieties with resilient traits in their breeding programs to ensure hardy varieties reach farmers throughout the region,â Zaidi noted.
From 2015 to 2018, a total of 68 such high-yielding stress-resilient maize hybrids were licensed to seed partners in the region, he explained. These partners took them forward for large-scale farmer participatory testing in their respective target ecologies. After extensive testing through the national system, nine stress-resilient maize hybrids have already been released and are being deployed in various countries in Asia. Others will be released soon.
Zaidi has received several awards for his contributions to maize research, including CIMMYTâs Outstanding Scientist Award in 2009.
Female-headed households are likely to experience higher welfare losses due to commodity price hikes than their male-headed counterparts, as they tend to spend a larger percentage of their income on food items. However, the full extent of this impact of market has not been widely examined in the empirical literature.
Applying the difference-in-difference estimation procedure to data collected from more than 22,000 households in Bangladesh in 2005 and 2010, researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) set out to examine the gender-differentiated impacts of the commodity price hikes during the food price crisis of 2008 on food and non-food consumption behavior based on the sex of the household head.
They found that, in general, the commodity price hikes had more adversely affected female-headed households, which reduced their expenditure on food and non-food items such as cereals and education at a greater rate than their male-headed counterparts did.
However, their study also reveals that the welfare impacts on these households varied greatly depending on socio-economic conditions. Results showed that households headed by women who were relatively better educated, who owned larger pieces of land and received remittances were buffered to a certain extent and their expenditure was affected less.
Understanding these buffering factors, the authors argue, is crucial when designing policy interventions in developing countries. The study provides a number of recommendations for government and international donor agencies to help female-headed households better cope with market shocks. For example, they could improve the reach of general education, increase womenâs access to land and agricultural assets and remove barriers to the in-flow of remittances for female-headed households. Extending the reach of social protection and microcredit programs could further complement market shock buffering capacity, as could providing targeted capital.
This study was made possible through the support provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia â Mechanization and Irrigation (CSISA-MI) project, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the CSISA Phase II project.
See more recent publications by CIMMYT researchers:
An international team of scientists, including some from India, has found a way to breed wheat varieties that are of better quality and have a higher yield while also resisting diseases and the adverse effects of climate change. Read more here.
In July 2019 ICIMOD, along with its partners and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico, launched a web-based Regional Drought Monitoring and Outlook System for South Asia â an integrated information platform linking weather and climate data with agriculture practices in South Asia. The system provides multiple indices for droughts and seasonal weather outlooks, besides maps and baseline. Read more here.
In the early 20th century, Aaron Aaronsohn, a prominent agronomist best known for identifying the progenitor of wheat, began looking for durum wheat landraces in Israel. He traveled to villages across the country, carefully collecting and recording details of the local varieties used in each area.
This task was not without purpose. Aaronsohn recognized that as increasing numbers of settlers like himself came to the territory, the varietal change from the introduction of new and competitive wheat varieties and the rapid intensification of agriculture would soon cause all the traditional structures he had identified to disappear.
Aaronsohn was one of the first to begin collecting germplasm in the region, but others saw the importance of collecting before large-scale change occurred. For example, Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov gathered samples from Israel on one of his expeditions through the Middle East. By the end of the century, a number of collections had been established, but overall efforts at conservation were fragmented.
âThatâs why we say the collection was on the verge of extinction,â explains Roi Ben-David, a researcher at the Volcani Center, Israelâs Agricultural Research Institute (ARO). âThere were single accessions in genebanks around the world but no one really gave them special treatment or saw their value. Many were in private collections; others were simply lost.â
When Ben-David and his colleagues began looking for landraces six years ago, even the collection housed at the Israeli Genebank (IGB) was disappointing, with many samples stored in unmarked boxes in sub-optimal conditions. âWhen we came in nobody was really trying to study what we had and put it together to represent the areaâs wheat landscape as it was 100 years ago.â
Long-term efforts to restore and conserve a collection of Israeli and Palestinian wheat landraces (IPLR) have led to the restoration of 930 lines so far, but there are many varieties that cannot be recovered. Therefore, it came as a great surprise to Ben-David when he arrived at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) headquarters in Mexico and stumbled upon one of the collections presumed lost. âI think it was actually my first week at CIMMYT when I spotted a demonstration plot growing one of the lost varieties â a subset of the Ephrat-Blum collection â and I couldnât believe it.â
He had heard about this collection from the late Abraham Blum, but had never been able to locate it. âSomeone might have moved the seeds, or maybe the box was not well labelled and thrown out. We donât know, but needless to say it was a very good surprise to rediscover 64 of our missing lines.â
What prompted you and your colleagues to start looking for landraces in Israel?
We began because we recognized local landraces are good genetic resources but unfortunately, we couldnât find any. It wasnât so much that they didnât exist, but the accessions were scattered across the world, mostly in private collections in countries like the USA or Australia. The Israeli Genebank, which sits only two floors above my office, had a few buckets of germplasm but nobody really knew what was inside.
The Middle East and the Fertile Crescent are centers of diversity, not only for wheat but for all crops that were part of the Neolithic revolution 10,000 years ago. They started here â the exact point of origin was probably in what is now southeast Turkey â so we have had thousands of years of evolution in which those landraces dominated the agricultural landscape and adapted to different environments.
Why do you think so much of the collection was lost?
The lines from Israel were lost because their conservation simply wasnât prioritized. Losses happen everywhere but what was missing in this case was the urgency and understanding of just how important these collections are. Luckily, the current manager of the IGB, who is a fundamental partner in building the IPLR, understood the need to prioritize this and allocated a budget to conserve it as one collection.
What is the value of conserving landraces and why should it be prioritized?
Landraces are an extremely important genetic resource. Wild relatives are the biggest treasure, but breeders are usually reluctant to use them because they are so very different from modern varieties. So landraces form the link between these two, having already been domesticated and developed within farming systems while remaining genetically distinct from the modern. In wheat, theyâre quite easy to spot because of how tall they are compared to the semi-dwarf varieties that replaced them in the 20th century.
There are two main reasons why we need to prioritize conservation. First, we believe that the evolution under domestication in this region is important to the community as a whole. Second, it is now a critical time, as weâre getting further from the time in which those traditional lines were in use. The last collection was carried out in the 1980s, when people were still able to collect authentic landraces from farmers but this is just not possible any more. We travelled all over the country but the samples we collected were not authentic â most were modern varieties that farmers thought were traditional. Not everybody knows exactly what theyâre growing.
The time factor is critical. If we were to wake up 50 years from now and decide that itâs important to start looking for landraces, I donât know how much we could actually save.
Are there any farmers still growing landraces in Israel?
When we started looking for farmers who are still growing landraces we only found one farm. It is quite small â only about ten acres shared between two brothers. They grow a variety which is typically used to make a traditional food called kube, a kind of meat ball covered in flour and then then either fried or boiled. If you boil it using regular flour it falls apart, so people prefer to use a landrace variety, which is what the brothers grow and are able to sell for up to six times as much as regular durum wheat in the market. However, theyâre not really interested in getting rich; theyâre just trying to keep their traditions alive.
How are you and your colleagues working to conserve the existing collection?
There are two approaches. We want to develop is ex-situ conservations to preserve the diversity. As landraces are not always easy to conserve in a genebank, we also want to support in-situ conservation in the field, like traditional farmers have done. Together with the IGB weâve distributed seed to botanical gardens and other actors in the hope that at least some of them will propagate it in their fields.
Having established the collection, weâre also trying to utilize it for research and breeding as much as possible. So far weâve characterized it genetically, tested for drought tolerance and other agronomic traits and weâre in talks to start testing the quality profile of the lines.
Did you continue working on this while you were based at CIMMYT?
Yes, this was an additional project I brought with me during my sabbatical. The main success was working with Carolina Sansaloni and the team at the Genetic Resources program to carry out the genotyping. If it were left to my own resources, I donât think we could have done it as the collection contains 930 plant genotypes and we only had the budget to do 90.
Luckily, CIMMYT also has an interest in the material so we could collaborate. We brought the material, CIMMYT provided technical support and we were able to genotype it all, which is a huge boost for the project. We had already been measuring phenotypes in Israel, but now that we have all the genetic data as well we can study the collection more deeply and start looking for specific genes of interest.
What will happen to the lines you discovered at CIMMYT?
Theyâve been sent back to Israel to be reintegrated into the collection. I want to continue collaborating with people in CIMMYTâs Genetic Resources program and genebank to do some comparative genomics and assess how much diversity we have in the IPLR collection compared with what CIMMYT has. Is there any additional genetic diversity? How does it compare to other landraces collections? That is what we want to find out next.
Roi Ben-David is based at Israelâs Agricultural Research Organization (ARO). He works in the Plant Institute, where his lab focuses on breeding winter cereals such as wheat. He has recently completed a one-year sabbatical placement at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
CIMMYTâs germplasm banks contain the largest and most diverse collections of maize and wheat in the world. Improved and conserved seed is available to any research institution worldwide.
