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Introduction
The purpose of
this book is to examine the wider scientific and social contexts
of modern plant breeding and agriculture. We will begin by
examining the historical development of plant breeding over the
past two centuries, before focusing on the dramatic changes of
the last two decades. Perhaps the best-known recent development
in plant breeding is the emergence of genetic engineering, with
its attendant social and scientific controversies. But, as we
shall see, GM crops and ‘agbiotech’ (agricultural biotechnology)
are just one manifestation of a more extensive series of seismic
changes that have profoundly altered the course of plant
breeding since the 1980s. Today, in the middle of the first
decade of the twenty-first century, plant breeding and crop
improvement are at an historic crossroads. On one hand, are the
tried and tested breeding methods that underpinned the Green
Revolution and enabled us to feed the expanding world
populations in the twentieth century. More recently, however,
governments across the world have largely dismantled their
applied research infrastructures and have greatly reduced the
capacity for public-good applications of newly emerging breeding
technologies, including transgenesis. Much of this institutional
restructuring occurred as part of the ideologically driven
privatisation of public assets in the 1980s and 1990s. The
resulting depletion of public sector breeding has left a void
that was filled by a few private sector companies who applied a
new paradigm of crop improvement based on transgenesis – and
from this, the agbiotech revolution was born.
As we confront the challenges of increasing populations,
economic growth, rising affluence, the spread of environmental
degradation, and the depletion of non-renewable resources,
twenty-first century agriculture will need all the tools and
scientific expertise that plant breeders can muster. Not to
mention the appropriate crop management strategies, market
freedoms, and social stability that will be necessary to
translate the promise of the breeder into the reality of
productive and profitable crops for the wellbeing of the farmer.
We will see how research into plant science is becoming
increasingly remote from its application for breeding. For a
variety of different but linked reasons, public sector
scientists are largely failing to provide the requisite
leadership in the development of practical public-good
technologies for crop improvement, especially in developing
countries where the need is greatest. One of the main take-home
messages of this book is that we must re-engage plant and
agricultural science with the rest of society at a whole series
of levels. These include better links between basic science and
applied technologies, between scientific breeders and their
farmer-customers, between the public sector and the private
sector, between industrialised countries and the developing
world, between inexpensive conventional breeding and the
costliest high-tech methods, and between agronomists and
managers, and the economists and politicians working in
agriculturally related areas of their respective professions.
The book is divided into six parts that first introduce us to
the science of plant breeding before describing its changing
social organisation and evolution as a mixed public/private
venture over the last two centuries.
Part I includes a brief
account of the origins of breeding and its transition from a
farm-based empirical activity to the highly sophisticated
scientific programmes of today. We will follow the increasingly
successful efforts of plant scientists of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries to harness their growing knowledge of plant
reproduction and development for practical and profitable
commercial application. We will see how agricultural innovators
became ever more skilled in manipulating those twin pillars of
breeding, namely genetic variation and selection. The
rediscovery of the principles of Mendelian inheritance and their
application to simple and complex genetic traits was the key
scientific foundation of twentieth century crop breeding.
The practical application of genetic knowledge to crop
improvement in the field was made feasible by the theoretical
and statistical tools provided by quantitative genetics after
1918. In the 1920s, chemical and X-ray mutagenesis were first
used to create new crop varieties, while the 1930s saw the
beginnings of increasingly successful applications of tissue
culture in breeding programmes. Soon, scientific breeders could
create artificial hybrid combinations from different species,
and even different genera. And it was not long before the first
manmade crop species, a plant called triticale, was produced. By
the 1950s, the technique of wide crossing, coupled with
chemically induced chromosome manipulations, had enabled
breeders to transfer chromosomes, or parts thereof, from plants
that were normally much too distantly related to interbreed.
More effective types of radiation mutagenesis, using nuclear
sources such as cobalt-60 or caesium-137, were effectively used
after World War II to create more than 3000 new crop varieties.
In Part II, we will switch
to consider the societal contexts of these scientific
developments that led us from the farmer-breeder of the
nineteenth century to today’s multinational, high-tech
agribusiness. During the nineteenth century, it was realised
that the most effective method for applying scientific
principles to crop improvement was to establish a professional
body of trained plant breeders and researchers. In many of the
newly industrialising countries, this was achieved by direct
government action. Without a doubt, the most comprehensive,
effective, and enduring crop improvement network is that of the
USA, as originally established by the Morrill Act in 1862,
during the depths of the Civil War. The British establishment,
in contrast, took a distinctly more laissez-faire route to
agricultural betterment. Here, there was a gradual evolution of
a disparate group of mostly privately funded research centres
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was
in some of these British research centres that the application
of the newly rediscovered principles of Mendelian genetics first
propelled crop science into a new era. In the USA, the huge
potential of hybrid crops, in terms of both yield and
profitability, began to be realised during the 1920s with the
introduction of the high-yielding maize varieties that
eventually spread across the continent and beyond. For most of
the twentieth century, plant breeding and crop science research
were very much concentrated in the public sector, with major
contributions from universities and specialised crop-focused
research centres.
The success of this public sector based paradigm became ever
more apparent as increasingly sophisticated breeding
technologies were developed. These technologies, developed by
public sector plant researchers as free public goods, were
called upon to resolve the worsening food crisis as populations
in developing countries expanded rapidly during the 1960s. The
Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was largely the result
of the focused application of such public-good plant breeding,
assisted by some US-based philanthropic foundations. Thanks to
the work of a few groups of dedicated plant breeders, new
high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice were developed, just
in time to head off the spectre of mass hunger that haunted the
Indian subcontinent and much of Eastern Asia. The spectacular
success of the Green Revolution in much (but not all) of the
developing world led to the establishment of an international
network of plant research and breeding centres, including such
vital resources as seed and germplasm banks.
In Part III, we move on to
consider the turbulent events of the late twentieth century and
the surprisingly rapid unravelling of the hitherto successful
public/private paradigm of plant breeding research and
development. The 1970s and early 1980s marked the apogee of
public sector and public-good international plant breeding.
Within a few years, governments around the world began to
dismantle their public sector plant science infrastructures, in
line with the new privatisation agenda that emanated largely
from the UK. Meanwhile, the private sector emerged from the
shadows as an increasingly dominant force in the enterprise of
crop modification and improvement. Two additional factors
facilitated the growth of the private sector: the shift to a
more benign regulatory environment for the legal protection of
new plant varieties; and the invention of a new set of plant
manipulation technologies that would allow the patenting of
transgenic (GM) crop varieties. We will go on to follow the fate
of some of the rationalised, reduced, or terminated public
breeding programmes across the world and the resulting retreat
of the vast majority of public sector researchers into more
academic studies.
The topic of Part IV is
agbiotech. The decade from 1985–1995 witnessed a fundamental
shift in the world of plant breeding, as the private sector
became the more dominant partner and transgenic technologies
were increasingly promoted as the way forward for crop
improvement in general. We will analyse the consequences of
these important developments for the future of agriculture. I
will present the case that it was not so much genetic
engineering (transgenesis) itself that has been the root cause
of the many public controversies about agricultural
biotechnology (agbiotech). Rather, it is the context in which
the technology was created, promoted, and then applied to crop
manipulation, which was radically different to previous forms of
high-tech scientific crop improvement. After World War II,
highly intrusive and ‘artificial’ methods of crop genetic
modification had already been developed in the public domain
with little or no fanfare or public controversy. These
technologies were used freely to create new crop varieties
around the world and were especially widely applied in
developing countries.
In contrast, transgenic technologies were largely developed and
patented by the private sector. Some companies then used the new
technologies for the manipulation of a few simple input traits
in a few profitable commercial cash crops. In the meantime,
however, these technologies had already been widely hailed, by
public sector scientists and companies alike, as a radical and
revolutionary breakthrough in plant breeding of almost unlimited
potential for the future of agriculture. Subsequently, the fact
that, notwithstanding the optimistic rhetoric, nothing of any
matching public value has so far emerged from transgenesis, has
engendered a mixture of public scepticism and distrust about the
entire agbiotech enterprise. We will also see how the actions of
a few agbiotech companies are currently in danger of sabotaging
some rather promising future developments in transgene
technology to produce cheap medicines via biopharming.
In Part V, we will discuss
alternative methods of enhancing crop production, especially
amongst the rapidly increasing populations of the developing
world. I will show that there need not be any looming crisis in
feeding the world population over the next fifty years. We
already have the crops, the breeding expertise, and the
organisational skills to achieve this task – providing it is
managed properly. I will present the case for a judicious
expansion of our use of arable land, especially in parts of
South America, where a large amount of non-forested land is
available for sustainable crop cultivation. Combined with re-use
of fallow, abandoned, and set-aside land, these measures could
significantly increase global food production over the next few
decades. Other productivity enhancing measures include better
on-farm management, improvement of physical and regulatory
infrastructure (ports, roads, credit facilities, tax regimes
etc.), and the ending of discriminatory tariffs and subsidies.
Implementation of these exceedingly practical but relatively
unglamorous measures, along with the prospect of continuing
yield gains via plant breeding, should ensure that we will be
able to ‘feed the world’ over the next fifty years, without
recourse to more nebulous and uncertain ‘magic bullet’
solutions.
In Part VI, we will look
forward to the future of plant breeding in the twenty-first
century, whether in the public/private sectors, or in
industrial/developing countries. We will discuss the uncertain
situation of international organisations like CGIAR
(Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research), our
endangered global seed banks, and the often heroic, and largely
unseen, efforts of breeders in countries from Iraq to Côte
d’Ivoire in trying to maintain these precious resources against
the depredations of warfare and civil strife and the more benign
neglect of increasingly jaded funding bodies. We will then look
forward to consider some new options that could allow a
reinvigorated public sector to resume its place as a major
partner in the global enterprise of crop improvement. The
long-term success of international agriculture is dependent on a
diverse, mixed ecology of public and private agents and
agencies. We need strong, well-resourced public-good ventures,
which in turn are balanced and complemented by appropriately
regulated, for-profit, private sector ventures that are both
innovative and truly competitive.
The current problems of plant breeding have not been helped by
the fact that many public sector scientists have largely
withdrawn from practical breeding and public debate, to the more
secluded and serene realms of basic research. The latter are not
so much ivory towers as ivory cloisters of an almost adamantine
unworldliness. This withdrawal has left the public arena bereft
of many of the voices that could bring some balance into the
sterile and polarised discourse on transgenic crops that has
plagued the debates of the past decade. It is only by regaining
a sense of balance in each of these aspects of crop improvement
that we can recapture public confidence, and move forward with a
renewed sense of optimism to confront and resolve the many
challenges of agriculture in the twenty-first century.
This introduction and excerpts from Part I
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