Tag: biodiversity

Brown and green fields. (Photo: Elizabeth Lies/Unsplash)

Q&A: Regenerative agriculture for soil health

Written by Madeline Dahm on May 9, 2022. Posted in Features.

South Asia was the epicenter of the Green Revolution, a historic era of agricultural innovation that fed billions of people on the brink of famine.

Yet despite the indisputably positive nutritional and developmental impacts of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, the era of innovation also led to the widespread use of farming practices—like intensive tilling, monoculture, removal and burning of crop residues, and over-use of synthetic fertilizer—that have a deleterious effect on the soil and cause off-site ecological harm. Excess pumping of irrigation water over decades has dried out the region’s chief aquifer.

South Asia’s woes illustrate the environmental costs of intensive food production to feed our densely-populated planet. Currently, one billion hectares of land worldwide suffers from degraded soils.

The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) works with two of the world’s most widely cultivated and consumed cereal crops. To grow enough of these staple foods to feed the world, a second Green Revolution is needed: one that avoids the mistakes of the past, regenerates degraded land and reboots biodiversity in farm areas.

M.L. Jat, a CIMMYT Principal Scientist, has spent 20 years studying and promoting sustainable agricultural practices for maize- and wheat-based farming systems. In the following Q&A, Jat tells us about regenerative agriculture: integrated farming and grazing practices intended to rebuild soil organic matter and restore degraded soil biodiversity.

Q: What major components or practices are part of regenerative agriculture?

A: Regenerative agriculture is a comprehensive system of farming that harnesses the power of soil biology to rebuild soil organic matter, diversify crop systems, and improve water retention and nutrient uptake. The depletion of biodiversity, degradation of soil health, warming, and drier weather in farm areas have necessitated a reversal in agriculture from “degeneration to regeneration.”

The practices address food and nutritional security challenges while protecting natural resources and lowering agriculture’s environmental footprint, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. CIMMYT has worked for years to research and promote conservation agriculture, which contributes to the aims of regenerative agriculture, and is already practiced on more than 200 million hectares globally — 15% of all cropland — and is expanding at a rate of 10.5 million hectares per year.

Q: What are the potential roles of major food crops — maize, rice, and wheat — in regenerative agriculture systems?

A: Regenerative agriculture is “crop neutral;” that is, it is applicable to almost all crops and farming systems. The world’s rice, wheat, and maize crops have an enormous physical and ecological footprint on land and natural resources, but play a critical role in food and nutrition security. Considering that anthropogenic climate change has reduced the global agricultural total factor productivity by about 21% in the past six decades, applying regenerative agriculture approaches to these systems represents a momentous contribution toward sustainable farming under increasing climatic risks.

Download "Regenerative Agriculture for Soil Health, Food and Environmental Security: Proceedings and Recommendations” from the Trust for Advancement of Agricultural Sciences. — Download “Regenerative Agriculture for Soil Health, Food and Environmental Security: Proceedings and Recommendations”.

Q: What elements or approaches of regenerative agriculture are applicable in India and how can they be applied?

A: Regenerative practices for maize and wheat systems in India include no-tillage, crop residue recycling, legume inter-cropping and cover crops, crop diversification, integrated nutrient management, and precision water management.

The potential area of adoption for regenerative agriculture in India covers at least 50 million hectares across a diversity of cropping systems and agroecologies — including irrigated, rainfed, and arid farmlands — and can be approached through appropriate targeting, investments, knowledge and capacity enhancement, and enabling policies.

In the breadbasket region of the Indo-Gangetic Plains, regenerative agriculture can help address the aforementioned second-generation problems of the Green Revolution, as well as contributing to the Indian government’s Soil Health Mission and its COP26 commitments.

Q: In order to get regenerative agriculture off the ground in South Asia, who will be involved?

A: Adapting and applying regenerative agriculture’s portfolio of practices will require the participation of all stakeholders associated with farming. Application of these principles is location- and situation-specific, so researchers, extension functionaries, value chain actors, philanthropists, environmentalists, NGOs, farmers, and policy planners all have a role to play in the impact pathway.

CIMMYT, the Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA), public and private programs and agencies, and farmers themselves have been developing, refining, and scaling out conservation agriculture-based regenerative agriculture practices for some three decades in South Asia. CIMMYT and BISA will continue to play a key role in mainstreaming regenerative agriculture in local, national, and regional development plans through science-based policy and capacity development.

Q: Farmers constitute a strong economic and political force in India. How can they be brought on board to practice regenerative agriculture, which could be more costly and knowledge-intensive than their current practices?

A: We need to pursue business “unusual” and harness the potential opportunities of regenerative agriculture to sequester soil carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Regenerative agriculture practices can offer farmers additional income and certainly create a “pull factor” for their adoption, something that has already started and will constitute a strong business case. For example, innovative business models give farmers an opportunity to trade ecosystem services and carbon credits through repurposing subsidies and developing carbon markets for private sectors. CIMMYT, along with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and private partners such as Grow Indigo, are already helping to put in place a framework to acquire carbon credits through regenerative agriculture in India.

For more information about the application of regenerative agriculture on India’s farmlands, see “Regenerative Agriculture for Soil Health, Food and Environmental Security: Proceedings and Recommendations” from the Trust for Advancement of Agricultural Sciences.

Cover photo: Brown and green fields. (Photo: Elizabeth Lies/Unsplash)

Seed banks: the last line of defense against a threatening global food crisis

Written by Bea Ciordia on April 15, 2022. Posted in In the media.

As climate breakdown and worldwide conflict continue to place the food system at risk, seed banks from the Arctic to Lebanon try to safeguard biodiversity.

Bringing wild wheat’s untapped diversity into elite lines

Written by Rodrigo Ordóñez on November 23, 2021. Posted in Features.

A collaboration involving 15 international institutes across eight countries has optimized efforts to introduce beneficial traits from wild wheat accessions in genebanks into existing wheat varieties.

The findings, published in Nature Food, extend many potential benefits to national breeding programs, including improved wheat varieties better equipped to thrive in changing environmental conditions. This research was led by Sukhwinder Singh of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) as part of the Seeds of Discovery project.

Since the advent of modern crop improvement practices, there has been a bottleneck of genetic diversity, because many national wheat breeding programs use the same varieties in their crossing program as their “elite” source. This practice decreases genetic diversity, putting more areas of wheat at risk to pathogens and environmental stressors, now being exacerbated by a changing climate. As the global population grows, shocks to the world’s wheat supply result in more widespread dire consequences.

The research team hypothesized that many wheat accessions in genebanks — groups of related plant material from a single species collected at one time from a specific location — feature useful traits for national breeding programs to employ in their efforts to diversify their breeding programs.

“Genebanks hold many diverse accessions of wheat landraces and wild species with beneficial traits, but until recently the entire scope of diversity has never been explored and thousands of accessions have been sitting on the shelves. Our research targets beneficial traits in these varieties through genome mapping and then we can deliver them to breeding programs around the world,” Singh said.

Currently adopted approaches to introduce external beneficial genes into breeding programs’ elite cultivars take a substantial amount of time and money. “Breeding wheat from a national perspective is a race against pathogens and other abiotic threats,” said Deepmala Sehgal, co-author and wheat geneticist in the Global Wheat program at CIMMYT. “Any decrease in the time to test and release a variety has a huge positive impact on breeding programs.”

Deepmala Sehgal shows LTP lines currently being used in CIMMYT trait pipelines at the experimental station in Toluca, Mexico, for introgression of novel exotic-specific alleles into newly developed lines. (Photo: CIMMYT)

Taking into genetic biodiversity

The findings build from research undertaken through the Seeds of Discovery project, which genetically characterized nearly 80,000 samples of wheat from the seed banks of CIMMYT and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

First, the team undertook a large meta-survey of genetic resources from wild wheat varieties held in genebanks to create a catalog of improved traits.

“Our genetic mapping,” Singh said, “identifies beneficial traits so breeding programs don’t have to go looking through the proverbial needle in the haystack. Because of the collaborative effort of the research team, we could examine a far greater number of genomes than a single breeding program could.”

Next, the team developed a strategic three-way crossing method among 366 genebank accessions and the best historical elite varieties to reduce the time between the original introduction and deployment of an improved variety.

Sukhwinder Singh (second from left) selects best performing pre-breeding lines in India. (Photo: CIMMYT)

Worldwide impact

National breeding programs can use the diverse array of germplasm for making new crosses or can evaluate the germplasm in yield trials in their own environments.

The diverse new germplasm is being tested in major wheat producing areas, including India, Kenya, Mexico and Pakistan. In Mexico, many of the lines showed increased resistance to abiotic stresses; many lines tested in Pakistan exhibited increased disease resistance; and in India, many tested lines are now part of the national cultivar release system. Overall, national breeding programs have adopted 95 lines for their targeted breeding programs and seven lines are currently undergoing varietal trials.

“This is the first effort of its kind where large-scale pre-breeding efforts have not only enhanced the understanding of exotic genome footprints in bread wheat but also provided practical solutions to breeders,” Sehgal said. “This work has also delivered pre-breeding lines to trait pipelines within national breeding programs.”

Currently, many of these lines are being used in trait pipelines at CIMMYT to introduce these novel genomic regions into advanced elite lines. Researchers are collaborating with physiologists in CIMMYT’s global wheat program to dissect any underlying physiological mechanisms associated with the research team’s findings.

“Our investigation is a major leap forward in bringing genebank variation to the national breeding programs,” Singh explained. “Most significantly, this study sheds light on the importance of international collaborations to bring out successful products and new methods and knowledge to identify useful contributions of exotic in elite lines.”

Read the full article:
Direct introgression of untapped diversity into elite wheat lines

Cover photo: A researcher holds a plant of Aegilops neglecta, a wild wheat relative. Approximately every 20 years, CIMMYT regenerates wheat wild relatives in greenhouses, to have enough healthy and viable seed for distribution when necessary. (Photo: Rocío Quiroz/CIMMYT)

Durum wheat field landscape at CIMMYT's experimental station in Toluca, Mexico. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)

Protecting plants will protect people and the planet

Written by Emma Orchardson on July 27, 2021. Posted in Blogs.

This story was originally published on the Inter Press Service (IPS) website.

Back-to-back droughts followed by plagues of locusts have pushed over a million people in southern Madagascar to the brink of starvation in recent months. In the worst famine in half a century, villagers have sold their possessions and are eating the locusts, raw cactus fruits, and wild leaves to survive.

Instead of bringing relief, this year’s rains were accompanied by warm temperatures that created the ideal conditions for infestations of fall armyworm, which destroys mainly maize, one of the main food crops of sub-Saharan Africa.

Drought and famine are not strangers to southern Madagascar, and other areas of eastern Africa, but climate change bringing warmer temperatures is believed to be exacerbating this latest tragedy, according to The Deep South, a new report by the World Bank.

Up to 40% of global food output is lost each year through pests and diseases, according to FAO estimates, while up to 811 million people suffer from hunger. Climate change is one of several factors driving this threat, while trade and travel transport plant pests and pathogens around the world, and environmental degradation facilitates their establishment.

Crop pests and pathogens have threatened food supplies since agriculture began. The Irish potato famine of the late 1840s, caused by late blight disease, killed about one million people. The ancient Greeks and Romans were well familiar with wheat stem rust, which continues to destroy harvests in developing countries.

But recent research on the impact of temperature increases in the tropics caused by climate change has documented an expansion of some crop pests and diseases into more northern and southern latitudes at an average of about 2.7 km a year.

Prevention is critical to confronting such threats, as brutally demonstrated by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on humankind. It is far more cost-effective to protect plants from pests and diseases rather than tackling full-blown emergencies.

One way to protect food production is with pest- and disease-resistant crop varieties, meaning that the conservation, sharing, and use of crop biodiversity to breed resistant varieties is a key component of the global battle for food security.

CGIAR manages a network of publicly-held gene banks around the world that safeguard and share crop biodiversity and facilitate its use in breeding more resistant, climate-resilient and productive varieties. It is essential that this exchange doesn’t exacerbate the problem, so CGIAR works with international and national plant health authorities to ensure that material distributed is free of pests and pathogens, following the highest standards and protocols for sharing plant germplasm. The distribution and use of that germplasm for crop improvement is essential for cutting the estimated 540 billion US dollars of losses due to plant diseases annually.

Understanding the relationship between climate change and plant health is key to conserving biodiversity and boosting food production today and for future generations. Human-driven climate change is the challenge of our time. It poses grave threats to agriculture and is already affecting the food security and incomes of small-scale farming households across the developing world.

We need to improve the tools and innovations available to farmers. Rice production is both a driver and victim of climate change. Extreme weather events menace the livelihoods of 144 million smallholder rice farmers. Yet traditional cultivation methods such as flooded paddies contribute approximately 10% of global man-made methane, a potent greenhouse gas. By leveraging rice genetic diversity and improving cultivation techniques we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, enhance efficiency, and help farmers adapt to future climates.

A farmer in Tanzania stands in front of her maize plot where she grows improved, drought tolerant maize variety TAN 250. (Photo: Anne Wangalachi/CIMMYT)

We also need to be cognizant that gender relationships matter in crop management. A lack of gender perspectives has hindered wider adoption of resistant varieties and practices such as integrated pest management. Collaboration between social and crop scientists to co-design inclusive innovations is essential.

Men and women often value different aspects of crops and technologies. Men may value high yielding disease-resistant varieties, whereas women prioritize traits related to food security, such as early maturity. Incorporating women’s preferences into a new variety is a question of gender equity and economic necessity. Women produce a significant proportion of the food grown globally. If they had the same access to productive resources as men, such as improved varieties, women could increase yields by 20-30%, which would generate up to a 4% increase in the total agricultural output of developing countries.

Practices to grow healthy crops also need to include environmental considerations. What is known as a One Health Approach starts from the recognition that life is not segmented. All is connected. Rooted in concerns over threats of zoonotic diseases spreading from animals, especially livestock, to humans, the concept has been broadened to encompass agriculture and the environment.

This ecosystem approach combines different strategies and practices, such as minimizing pesticide use. This helps protect pollinators, animals that eat crop pests, and other beneficial organisms.

The challenge is to produce enough food to feed a growing population without increasing agriculture’s negative impacts on the environment, particularly through greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable farming practices that degrade vital soil and water resources, and threaten biodiversity.

Behavioral and policy change on the part of farmers, consumers, and governments will be just as important as technological innovation to achieve this.

The goal of zero hunger is unattainable without the vibrancy of healthy plants, the source of the food we eat and the air we breathe. The quest for a food secure future, enshrined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, requires us to combine research and development with local and international cooperation so that efforts led by CGIAR to protect plant health, and increase agriculture’s benefits, reach the communities most in need.

Barbara H. Wells MSc, PhD is the Global Director of Genetic Innovation at the CGIAR and Director General of the International Potato Center. She has worked in senior-executive level in the agricultural and forestry sectors for over 30 years.

Terry Molnar sits for a portrait with his dog. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)

Four questions with CIMMYT’s Maize Genebank Curator

Written by Marta Millere on May 21, 2021. Posted in Videos.

Seeds are a cornerstone of food security. That is why the maize and wheat genebanks have always been at the heart of the work of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).

Earlier this year, as the CIMMYT community wished farewell to Denise Costich, Terence (Terry) Molnar stepped into her shoes and took over the management of the world’s largest and most diverse collection of maize.

Molnar calls himself a curator, but unlike his counterparts at libraries and museums, his job is not only about registering and showcasing the 28,000 unique seed collections of maize. He and his team make sure that the rich maize biodiversity collected throughout time and geographies stays alive, viable and accessible to others.

We sat down with Molnar to learn more about his unique role and what we can do to celebrate biodiversity on the International Day for Biological Diversity — and every other day.

How biodiversity conservation can help manage future pandemics — for plants and for humans

Written by Rodrigo Ordóñez on May 21, 2021. Posted in In the media.

In a conversation with The Counter, CIMMYT senior scientist Dave Hodson discusses why conservation may be the key to our survival.

Tom Payne, Wheat Germplasm Collections & International Wheat Improvement Network Manager. (Photo: X. Fonseca/CIMMYT)

A conservation conversation

Written by Madeline Dahm on May 20, 2021. Posted in Features.

Germplasm banks around the world are protectors of genetic diversity, altogether preserving roughly 700,000 samples of wheat varieties from fields far and wide. Thomas (Tom) Payne, the head of CIMMYTs Wheat Germplasm Collection, or genebank, manages the Mexico-based collection of nearly 150,000 accessions from over 100 countries. He has been affiliated with CIMMYT since 1988, and has dedicated his career to wheat improvement and conservation, working in Ethiopia, Mexico, Syria, Turkey and Zimbabwe. In addition to managing the genebank, he is the chair of the CGIAR Genebank Managers Group, has served as secretary to the CIMMYT Board of Trustees, manages the CIMMYT International Wheat Improvement Network and was awarded the Frank N. Meyer Medal for Plant Genetic Resources in 2019.

In advance of his retirement in July 2021, CIMMYT senior scientist Carolina Saint Pierre sat down with Tom Payne over Zoom to ask him a few questions from the wheat breeding team about his lifetime of experience in wheat biodiversity conservation.

What is your favorite Triticum species?

Triticum aestivum, bread wheat, is my favorite. Bread wheat feeds around 2.7 billion people worldwide. In fact, more food products are made from wheat than from any other cereal. An interesting detail about Triticum aestivum, however, is that it’s a hexaploid, meaning that it is a distinct species formed from three separate species. The inherent genetic diversity resulting from its three ancestral species and its ability to naturally incorporate genetic diversity from other species gives breeders a broad palette of genetic diversity to work with for current and future needs.

How can genebank managers of vital food crops add diversity to existing collections?

Some of the thousands of samples that make up the wheat active collection in the Wellhausen-Anderson Plant Genetic Resources Center at CIMMYT's global headquarters in Texcoco, Mexico. (Photo: X. Fonseca/CIMMYT) — Some of the thousands of samples that make up the wheat active collection in the Wellhausen-Anderson Plant Genetic Resources Center at CIMMYT’s global headquarters in Texcoco, Mexico. (Photo: X. Fonseca/CIMMYT)

There are many vital genebanks, with community, national, regional, and international affiliations. Harmonization of these efforts into a global conservation network is needed. In wheat, for example, we do not adequately understand the diversity of the crop’s wild relatives. A recent study from Kansas State University observed that two thirds of the accessions of Aegilops tauschii held by several key collections were duplicates. This is an alarm to the global wheat community. The ex-situ collection of a critical species is less representative and more vulnerable than the sheer number of accessions would imply. We need to conduct a thorough characterization of all crop wild relatives to assess the risks to diversity, and a gap analysis of newly collected materials to ensure that their long-term conservation adds unique diversity to existing collections.

Which of the Triticum species that you store in the CIMMYT wheat genebank should, in your opinion, be explored much more?

Species that can readily cross with cultivated wheat, both bread wheat and durum wheat, should have intensified conservation and characterization efforts. Examples of these include Triticum monococcum subspecies monococcum (Einkorn) and Triticum turgidum subspecies dicoccon (Emmer).

What were the most surprising results from the genetic diversity analyses of nearly 80,000 wheat accessions from the CIMMYT genebank?

Modern, molecular genetic tools confirmed, for the most part, the centuries-old Linnaean taxonomic classification of Triticum and Aegilops species. There are generally two broad schools of taxonomists, “lumpers” and “splitters.” The former groups species based on a few common characteristics, and the latter defines multiple taxa based on many traits. The Seeds of Discovery work, in partnership with Michiel van Slageren from Kew Gardens, is confirming the salient taxonomy of the Triticum genus. Van Slageren previously studied and published a taxonomic monograph on the wheat ancestral Aegilops genus.

How can a genebank managers help in pre-breeding?

Maintaining native genetic diversity for use in the future is an important role that genebank managers play in pre-breeding and applied breeding processes. Furthermore, the identification of rare and odd variation plays an important role in understanding trait expression. Genebank managers are now gaining a stronger understanding of the genetic representativeness of their collections, and they can identify where gaps in the conserved genetic diversity may exist. A better understanding of the collections will enable their sustainable conservation and use.

Tom Payne at the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, for the official opening ceremony in 2008. He holds one of the sealed boxes used to store the nearly 50,000 unique maize and wheat seed collections deposited by CIMMYT. (Photo: Thomas Lumpkin/CIMMYT)

What would you consider the biggest challenge when striving for genetic diversity in breeding wheat for the future?

CIMMYT and other CGIAR Centers are rightfully proud of their stewardship of global public goods, and the free access to and distribution of germplasm and information. Yet outside of the CGIAR, the two-way sharing of germplasm and knowledge is often still not realized by many crop communities. International agreements have attempted to bridge recognition of intellectual property rights with guaranteed access and benefit-sharing mechanisms. However, the playing field remains uneven between public and private organizations due to varied levels of investment and exclusivity, access to technology and information, and marketability.

What is one way we can ensure long-term conservation of staple crops around the world?

In the past few years, several internationally renowned germplasm collections have been destroyed due to civil conflicts, natural disasters and fires — for example in Aleppo, Cape Town and Sao Paulo. Each time, we hear what a shame it was that the destroyed heritage was lost, that it was irreplaceable and beyond value. When a genebank loses an accession, the ancestral lineage extending hundreds of generations becomes permanently extinct. Genebank managers recognize this threat, and hence duplicate samples of all accessions are now slowly being sent to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard for long-term preservation.

Cover photo: Tom Payne, Wheat Germplasm Collections & International Wheat Improvement Network Manager. (Photo: X. Fonseca/CIMMYT)

Latin America poised to lead the next 50 years in food systems and agrobiodiversity research

Written by Mary Donovan on October 16, 2020. Posted in News.

With global agriculture in stasis and under threat from climate change, Latin America’s role to address these challenges through innovation and partnerships is crucial. This was the main takeaway from a 2020 World Food Prize roundtable event, where representatives from four CGIAR centers discussed opportunities for increased investment in Latin America for developing innovations to improve global agriculture and agro-biodiversity.

The event was moderated by Natasha Santos, the Vice President of Global Stakeholders Strategy and Affairs for Bayer Crop Sciences. Speaking online from Brazil, Santos stressed the importance of private sector partnerships in Latin America for achieving sustainable growth and development.

Jesus Quintana, the Managing Director for the Americas, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT opened the event with a short description of his organization’s work with development finance to promote sustainable development in the Amazon. “With USAID,” he said, “we are searching for business models that strengthen local innovations and social businesses to conserve biodiversity, including agri-food systems.”

Picking up on the idea of agri-food systems, Bram Govaerts, Interim Deputy Director General, Director of Integrated Development and Representative for the Americas, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), noted that the World Food Programme will receive the Nobel Peace Prize 50 years after Norman Borlaug – whose work was the inspiration for the CGIAR – became the first recipient of the prestigious award from the fields of food and agriculture. The span between awards, Govaerts said, serves as notice that much important work still remains in the fight against hunger and nutrition insecurity worldwide.

In this vein, Govaerts described CIMMYT’s work with a program called AgroTutor, which delivers site-specific data and recommendations tailored to farmers’ needs that help improve yields and facilitate more profitable market interactions.

The continuing mission to eradicate global hunger and promote development in the face of climate change can be uniquely addressed in the Andes, said Ginya Truitt Nakata, Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, International Potato Center (CIP). Home to 85 of the world’s 110 biological life zones, Truitt Nakata said CIP’s Andean Initiative would use the mountains as a living laboratory for co-investigation of agricultural challenges with networks of smallholder farmers.

“The data and lessons we draw from these spaces will have application for farmers around the world,” she said.

As the event centered around recent CGIAR innovations in Latin American, Ruben G. Echeverría, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), said the greatest need, system-wide, is the bottleneck of ideas and innovations prior to implementation. For this reason, IFPRI is developing project incubation facilities to scale up innovations for stronger, further-reaching impact with farmers. “This work requires partnerships with public and private finance to help transform our knowledge into impact for food systems,” he said.

Following the short presentations, the roundtable opened a conversation that focused on the need for inclusiveness in research, private sector partnerships, and data collection supported by monitoring and learning.

“As the CG system, we are talking about participatory development with farmers – women, men and youth. It takes a little longer but the adoption rates [of innovation] are much higher,” Truitt Nakata said.

Agriculture in Latin America, like other regions of the world, also struggles with “brain drain,” losing talented young people to other sectors of the employment market. “So, when we talk about youth,” Echeverría responded, “We need more than participation. It’s about attracting young people to agricultural opportunities through IT and finance.”

Focusing on the technical side of innovation, Govaerts and Quintana cited the need for improved use of data.

“We need to multi-purpose data and use monitoring in real time to ensure better return on investment,” said Govaerts, “We need to know where we made progress and where we made mistakes.” Quintana endorsed that sentiment, “Careful monitoring of projects should be the heart of collaborative work, to generate baselines so we can accurately measure our impact and make more responsible use of resources.”

Given the wealth of ideas exchanged in the hour-long event, Marco Ferroni, the Chair of the CGIAR System Management Board, said the presentations showed the indispensable value of the region’s to food system and agrobiodiversity research.

“Latin America is the world’s largest food exporting region and important producer of ecosystem services that shape global weather patterns and climate… Motivated by the need to increase the scope of our impact, partnerships help us achieve critical mass in terms of data, analysis and delivery to stakeholders. For all these reasons, and others, Latin American food systems need and deserve policy attention and investment,” Ferroni said.

FOR MORE INFORMATION AND MEDIA CONTACTS:

Bioversity/CIAT: Adriana Varón a.p.varon@cgiar.org

CIMMYT: Ricardo Curiel: r.curiel@cgiar.org

CIP: Viviana Infantas: v.infantas@cgiar.org

IFPRI: Katarlah Taylor: k.taylor@cgiar.org

‘Seeds for Needs’ approach to develop climate resilient crop varieties

Written by Mary Donovan on September 22, 2020. Posted in In the media.

“This is a very relevant approach in the Indian context also. Contingent plannings are prescription based and when the time comes the seeds are unavailable for the farmers. This approach will answer the questions like which seeds are made to be available where and in what quantity. As we have our own indigenous biodiversity, our farmers face monsoon delays and monsoon failures so Seed for Needs is the key to fight such problems and to maintain our biodiversity” said Dr M L Jat, Principal Scientist, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

A new study analyzing the diversity of almost 80,000 wheat accessions reveals consequences and opportunities of selection footprints. (Photo: Eleusis Llanderal/CIMMYT)

Massive-scale genomic study reveals wheat diversity for crop improvement

Written by Rodrigo Ordóñez on September 11, 2020. Posted in Press releases.

Researchers working on the Seeds of Discovery (SeeD) initiative, which aims to facilitate the effective use of genetic diversity of maize and wheat, have genetically characterized 79,191 samples of wheat from the germplasm banks of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

The findings of the study published today in Nature Communications are described as “a massive-scale genotyping and diversity analysis” of the two types of wheat grown globally — bread and pasta wheat — and of 27 known wild species.

Wheat is the most widely grown crop globally, with an annual production exceeding 600 million tons. Approximately 95% of the grain produced corresponds to bread wheat and the remaining 5% to durum or pasta wheat.

The main objective of the study was to characterize the genetic diversity of CIMMYT and ICARDA’s internationally available collections, which are considered the largest in the world. The researchers aimed to understand this diversity by mapping genetic variants to identify useful genes for wheat breeding.

From germplasm bank to breadbasket

The results show distinct biological groupings within bread wheats and suggest that a large proportion of the genetic diversity present in landraces has not been used to develop new high-yielding, resilient and nutritious varieties.

“The analysis of the bread wheat accessions reveals that relatively little of the diversity available in the landraces has been used in modern breeding, and this offers an opportunity to find untapped valuable variation for the development of new varieties from these landraces”, said Carolina Sansaloni, high-throughput genotyping and sequencing specialist at CIMMYT, who led the research team.

The study also found that the genetic diversity of pasta wheat is better represented in the modern varieties, with the exception of a subgroup of samples from Ethiopia.

The researchers mapped the genomic data obtained from the genotyping of the wheat samples to pinpoint the physical and genetic positions of molecular markers associated with characteristics that are present in both types of wheat and in the crop’s wild relatives.

According to Sansaloni, on average, 72% of the markers obtained are uniquely placed on three molecular reference maps and around half of these are in interesting regions with genes that control specific characteristics of value to breeders, farmers and consumers, such as heat and drought tolerance, yield potential and protein content.

Open access

The data, analysis and visualization tools of the study are freely available to the scientific community for advancing wheat research and breeding worldwide.

“These resources should be useful in gene discovery, cloning, marker development, genomic prediction or selection, marker-assisted selection, genome wide association studies and other applications,” Sansaloni said.

Read the study:

Diversity analysis of 80,000 wheat accessions reveals consequences and opportunities of selection footprints.

Interview opportunities:

Carolina Sansaloni, High-throughput genotyping and sequencing specialist, CIMMYT.

Kevin Pixley, Genetic Resources Program Director, CIMMYT.

For more information, or to arrange interviews, contact the media team:

Ricardo Curiel, Communications Officer, CIMMYT. r.curiel@cgiar.org

Rodrigo Ordóñez, Communications Manager, CIMMYT. r.ordonez@cgiar.org

Acknowledgements:

The study was part of the SeeD and MasAgro projects and the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (WHEAT), with the support of Mexico’s Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER), the United Kingdom’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), and CGIAR Trust Fund Contributors. Research and analysis was conducted in collaboration with the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) and the James Hutton Institute (JHI).

About CIMMYT:

The International Maize and What Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is the global leader in publicly-funded maize and wheat research and related farming systems. Headquartered near Mexico City, CIMMYT works with hundreds of partners throughout the developing world to sustainably increase the productivity of maize and wheat cropping systems, thus improving global food security and reducing poverty. CIMMYT is a member of the CGIAR System and leads the CGIAR programs on Maize and Wheat and the Excellence in Breeding Platform. The Center receives support from national governments, foundations, development banks and other public and private agencies. For more information visit staging.cimmyt.org.

Denise Costich (center, pink hat) stands with members of the Totomoxtle project in Tonahuixtla. (Photo: Provided by Denise Costich/CIMMYT)

The many colors of maize, the material of life

Written by Jennifer Johnson on June 4, 2020. Posted in Features.

Tonahuixtla, a small town located in Mexico’s state of Puebla, had suffered extreme environmental degradation due to deforestation and erosion. Agricultural land was in poor condition and the town had stopped producing many of their heirloom maize varieties, a loss to both biodiversity in the region and local culture. Poverty had increased, forcing many to migrate to bigger cities or to the United States for work. Those who were left behind, most of them women, had few ways to generate income to support their families.

Today, the story of Tonahuixtla is different. The town actively participates in reforestation and erosion-prevention activities. Landrace maize production is increasing, preserving the town and region’s biodiversity and customs. The residents have job opportunities that allow them to stay in their town and not migrate, all while preserving local biodiversity and protecting the environment.

What caused this change?

Corn husks.

Long considered a waste product, corn husks have been given a new lease on life through the Totomoxtle project. Named for the traditional indigenous Nahuatl word for corn husk, Totomoxtle turns the husks of native maize, found in a variety of colors, into a beautiful and sustainable veneer for furniture and walls. Founded by Mexican graphic designer Fernando Laposse, Totomoxtle has given farmers an incentive to plant native maize again, preserving invaluable biodiversity for future generations.

When Denise Costich, head of the maize collection of the germplasm bank at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), heard about the Totomoxtle project she knew she wanted to help. Passionate about preserving native maize, she and her team identified 16 landrace varieties from the CIMMYT maize collection that would produce husks in interesting colors and could grow well in the altitude and climate conditions of Tonahuixtla. She invited Laposse and project members to come visit the genebank and learn about CIMMYT’s work, and provided them with seed of the landraces they had identified.

“This is what we normally do in our work at the germplasm bank, we give people seed,” Costich said. “But this turned into a closer collaboration.”

In the dry and mountainous terrain surrounding the village of Tonahuixtla, native maize preservation and reforestation efforts have been key in protecting the local environment and culture. (Photo: Denise Costich/CIMMYT)

Colorful collaboration

The maize germplasm bank team arranged for Totomoxtle project members to receive training in how to make controlled pollinations in the native maize varieties, at one of CIMMYT’s experimental stations.

“The technicians at CIMMYT’s Agua Fria station loved meeting the project members from Tonahuixtla, and immediately became passionate about the Totomoxtle project,” Costich said. “To this day, the technicians still save all of the colored corn husks from CIMMYT maize trials and send them to Tonahuixtla to provide them with additional material for their project.”

In the village of Tonahuixtla, project members — many of them women — work to iron the corn husks flat and glue them on to a stiff backing, then send them via courier to Laposse’s workshop in London where he uses them to create beautiful furniture and wall panels. This work allows the residents of Tonahuixtla to stay in their village and not be forced to migrate, all while preserving maize biodiversity and protecting the environment.

“Part of what this project is doing is also helping to keep families together — providing livelihoods so that people can stay in their communities, so that they don’t have to send all of their young people off to Mexico City or to the United States. To me, it’s really all connected,” Costich said.

Native maize tassels against a bright blue sky in Tonahuixtla. (Photo: Denise Costich/CIMMYT)

In the town of Tonahuixtla, Puebla, Mexico, a native maize field sits below a tree-covered hillside. The town has been active in reforestation efforts to control erosion. (Photo: Denise Costich/CIMMYT)

Denise Costich (front right, sitting) poses for a photo with Tonahuixtla residents and members of the Totomoxtle project. (Photo: Provided by Denise Costich/CIMMYT)

Denise Costich (front right, sitting) poses for a photo with Tonahuixtla residents, members of the Totomoxtle project, and CIMMYT Germplasm Bank staff. (Photo: Provided by Denise Costich/CIMMYT)

The value of sustainability

The project also shows the intersection between biodiversity conservation and protecting the local environment. The maize husks used for the project are a sustainable and biodegradable material, and any residue from the maize husks that are not used for the Totomoxtle project are either fed to animals in the dry season or used to make fertilizer, which is then returned to the maize fields, a completely circular cycle in which nothing is wasted.

“I think that many of the communities that we work in really do understand the value and the importance of biodiversity,” Costich said. “In Tonahuixtla, the people are trying to reforest the hillsides in their region. They understand the connection between having no vegetation on the hills and having the rain water just roll right off the hills and into the temporary streams, thus losing that critically important resource. Over the years, as a result of the work they have done there, they have seen with their own eyes the improvement in the environment, not only that the hills are now covered with vegetation, but also they see a lot less runoff and erosion. I think that’s a really important lesson for everyone. I come from an ecology background, so I am always very excited to get involved in projects where it’s not just about maize, it’s about everything. It’s also about people’s lives, and nutrition, and the connections between them.”

Preserving local maize biodiversity is not just important for Tonahuixtla — it is important to all of humanity. Native maize varieties have adapted for thousands of years in farmers’ fields across Mesoamerica, developing natural resistance to local plant pests and diseases, as well as climatic conditions such as heat or drought. These native maize seeds, passed down generation to generation, could hold the key to developing improved maize varieties that can resist emerging maize diseases or extreme weather events related to climate change. If this biodiversity is lost, it represents a loss to global food security as a whole.

CIMMYT works to protect many of these native maize varieties in their germplasm bank, which is home to over 28,000 different collections of maize. Kept in cold storage under optimum conditions in the CIMMYT seed vault, these seeds are preserved for future generations and are available to anyone who needs them, including farmers such as those in Tonahuixtla, who had lost much of their native maize diversity.

“The biodiversity of cultivated plants is basically the guarantee for the future,” Costich said. “This is our security backup. Seed security is food security.”

Maize cobs and veneer made out of corn husks are on display at an exhibition of the Totomoxtle project in Mexico City. (Photo: Denise Costich/CIMMYT)

Members of the CIMMYT Germplasm Bank team stand for a photo with a variety of landraces at an exhibition of the Totomoxtle project in Mexico City. (Photo: Emilio Diaz)

Cover photo: Denise Costich (center, pink hat) stands with members of the Totomoxtle project and CIMMYT Germplasm Bank staff members near Tonahuixtla. (Photo: Provided by Denise Costich/CIMMYT)

Plant-based materials catch on with home-goods designers

Written by Mary Donovan on May 26, 2020. Posted in In the media.

“What my project tries to do is visualize the diversity of corn that we have in my home country,” said Mexican designer Fernando Laposse. He partnered with CIMMYT, working with a village of Mixtec farmers and herders to transform waste from these plants into furniture. The corn’s kernels and husks come in hues of cream, deep red, pink, black and purple.

A NordGen staff member brings a box of seed into the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway. (Photo: Thomas Sonne/Common Ground Media for NordGen)

Preserving the legacy of biodiversity

Written by Rodrigo Ordóñez on May 21, 2020. Posted in Videos. 3 Comments on Preserving the legacy of biodiversity

Seed security is the first step towards food security. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) preserves 28,000 unique seed samples of maize and 150,000 of wheat at its genebank in Mexico.

The Global Seed Vault in Svalbard opened in 2008. Since then, CIMMYT has duplicated and deposited 50 million seeds — 170,000 samples of maize and wheat — at Svalbard.

This year, CIMMYT sent 24 boxes of seed, with 332 samples of maize and 15,231 samples of wheat.

Join these seeds on a journey, as they travel more than 8,000 km from CIMMYT’s genebank in Mexico to the Global Seed Vault in the Arctic.

A supermarket, rather than a museum

This treasure, kept in the global network of genebanks, is key to ensuring sustainable, nutritious agricultural systems for future generations.

The purpose of genebanks is not just to preserve seed, but to use its biodiversity to address the needs of the future — and the needs of today.

Climate change is already impacting resource-poor farmers and consumers in low- and middle-income countries. Researchers and breeders at CIMMYT are rolling out solutions to these challenges, based on the diverse genetic resources kept in the genebank. As a result, farmers can use new varieties that yield more, need less inputs, and are more tolerant to drought or heat.

Our internal estimates show that about 30% of maize and more than 50% of wheat grown worldwide can be traced to CIMMYT germplasm.

Humanity’s legacy

Maize and wheat originated about 10,000 years ago. Since then, it’s survived war, drought, diseases, migration, birds, low yields — and the hard choice between feeding children or planting again.

Keepers of genebanks around the world are only the depositors of this legacy, which belongs to all humanity. CIMMYT will continue to preserve these seeds and to make their biodiversity available to researchers and famers, to solve today’s and tomorrow’s most pressing issues.

Cover photo: A NordGen staff member brings a box of seed into the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway. (Photo: Thomas Sonne/Common Ground Media for NordGen)

Coronavirus lockdown diets look the same the world over: Bread, beans, and comfort food

Written by Mary Donovan on April 18, 2020. Posted in In the media.

Of the 6,000 plant species that have been cultivated by humans, just nine of them account for 66% of cultivated crops, according to the FAO’s 2019 report from the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Of the 7,774 local breeds of livestock worldwide, 26% are in danger of becoming extinct.

That poses dangers for the robustness of the environment, the safety of our food supply chain, and even our potential exposure to pandemics, due to diseases that jump from animals to humans. It also makes our food less nutritious, less interesting—and less unique.

The COVID-19 crisis could offer a chance to reassess the way we eat—to revamp the diversity of our diets and our food systems, revisiting local and forgotten foods, particularly when it comes to fruits and vegetables.

Why Conserving Biodiversity Is Crucial to Prevent Future Pandemics

Written by Mary Donovan on April 14, 2020. Posted in In the media.

“Today, 7.8 billion humans exploit almost each and every ecosystem of the planet. Livestock have followed humans in most of these ecosystems and are now far more numerous than wild vertebrates,” Frederic Baudron, a systems agronomist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, said in an interview. For example, there are 4.7 billion cattle, pigs, sheep and goats and 23.7 billion chickens on Earth. “We live on an increasingly ‘cultivated planet’, with new species assemblages and new opportunities for pathogens to move from one species to another.”

However, the biodiversity crisis is seldom considered a global issue and often not a pressing one, and conservationists say it isn’t written about as often as it should be. “Media coverage for the biodiversity crisis is eight-times lower than for the climate crisis”, according to Baudron. “We need to reduce the frequency of pandemics like COVID-19 by conserving and restoring biodiversity globally, most crucially in disease hotspots.”