rebuilding Iraq heritage seed

[bunkie]

hope everyone had a good Christmas!

in my search for finding any GMO seeds in Iraq, i have come across a lot of groups and organizations that are helping the Iraq people recoup their losses in their seedbank from the invasion. i was pleasantly surprized:

EVANA rebuilding Iraq's collapsed seed industry

www.evana.org/index.php?id=4653

United Nations Development Group Iraq Trust Fund Project Summary Sheet

faoiraq.org/images/word/A5-16.pdf

SeedQuest - Central information website for the global seed industry

www.seedquest.com/News/releases/2008/september/23742.htm

i also came across this pdf of what Iraq had set up in the 90's for a seed industry. it looked like it was a pretty good one that needed little improvement...a few things suggested near the end. too bad they couldn't use that for the reconstruction base now.

FOCUS: Seed Industry in Iraq

www.icarda.cgiar.org/seed_unit/Pdf/Focus/FOCUS-Iraq.pdf

i also had the thought of Afghanistan and its war and was wondering if their seedbank/s were going to have the same destruction, but i read this morning that they are starting up several seedbanks throughout the country....story in third link above.

[PatrickW]

I don't have time to go through these links now, but be careful!

After Iraq's seed banks were destroyed, the seed industry came in and replace Iraq's heritage varieties with modern ones, and called this 'rebuilding Iraq's collapsed seed industry'. They said things to give you a warm fuzzy feeling like they found Iraqi farmers using 'outdated' seeds, unsuitable for modern farming, and provided new and suitable seeds for them. They talked about 'modernizing' seed laws, to conform to international standards. The propaganda that was flying around then was thick and heavy.

From what I recognize in those domain names above, they are not the good guys! You certainly shouldn't be paying attention to CGIAR or the UN development group, which are seed industry backed!

I don't think the links above contain the messages you think they do!

[orflo]

Can you give some more info on the relation between seed-industry and CGIAR?

[PatrickW]

Sorry, I probably shouldn't post comments while on my way to bed without reading carefully what I'm commenting on!

There's nothing wrong with CGIAR, I was thinking of something else. To be honest, I don't know much about CGIAR. The report linked to is an assessment of Iraq's seed industry before the invasion, which according to the report was basically healthy. I don't know that they've had anything to do with post-invasion Iraq.

Your link to Evana however does not look like anything intended to help Iraq recover their heritage seeds. It looks very much to me that the 'high quality seeds' referred to in the article is a euphemism for commercial varieties. I remember coming across this short article a few years ago.

The other two links do make it look like the attitudes of those rebuilding Iraq's seed industry have changed in recent years, and there have been some positive developments. What's not clear however is if farmers are truly allowed to save their own seeds and grow heritage varieties, or if anyone has been allowed to patent these older varieties and collect royalties from the farmers. I think fully understanding these issues are key to understanding the situation there.

[bunkie]

thanks patrick for the explanations of these groups. that was my next venture, to look into the background of these groups.

as far as the Iraq farmers' seed that they have been saving, and it being 'outdated' and 'unsuitable', i remember alan explaining something about their saving seed from the same plants/seed over and over and it would leave some of the characteristics out possibly. if i said that wrong alan, correct me. i don't see how the Iraq famers saving seed would make for bad seed? they have done it for thousands of years, and isn't what they do the same things we are doing in our gardens?

[PatrickW]

Bunkie, there's lots of rhetoric and advertising slogans that go with promoting commercial seed varieties. For example there is the often discussed F1 hybrid vigor which is supposed to make these commercial seeds more productive in a wider range of environments, While there might be some people here that disagree with this, in fact there have been many credible studies that show hybrid vigor is a complete myth. This vigor is often established by comparing the F1 plant with it's parents, which are often themselves highly inbreed, which is a very unfair comparison. Along these lines there have been claims made of GM varieties that they are more productive, or resistant to various pests because they contain pesticides, and so on. In the end nearly all of these claims turn out baseless, but it takes time for people to figure out the seed companies are lying, and by that time they've usually come out with new varieties and new claims. These baseless claims often show up in political speeches, 'scientific' articles and whatnot and it's really important to know something about the source before coming to any personal conclusions.

It is possible a stock of seeds can develop inbreeding depression, perhaps a result of being saved from too few plants at some point (you generally need to save seeds from a certain number of plants to maintain an adequate gene pool size), and this can make them unsuitable for replanting. This doesn't make them 'bad' seeds, but someone will have to figure out a way of expanding the gene pool before they can be used. This is more an issue of knowledge and skills than a fundamental problem with farmer saved seeds. I'm going to do a blog post on this soon!

[PapaVic]

"(Hybrid) vigor is often established by comparing the F1 plant with it's parents, which are often themselves highly inbreed, which is a very unfair comparison." [Patrick]

Patrick, how then does one explain a huge increase in growth vigor and fruit production in the F1 cross of two inbred varieties? I don't have extensive experience with many crops, but I've observed a huge increase in growth vigor, plant health, and fruit production when crossing certain inbred tomato lines. How is that explained other than "hybrid vigor?"

Bill

[PatrickW]

Bill, part of what you may be seeing is not hybrid vigor in the F1 but inbreeding depression in the parent varieties.

On page 7 (in the green box) of this GRAIN publication is their explanation:

www.grain.org/seedling_files/seed-07-01-en.pdf

In short, while you may see hybrid vigor in your garden, this doesn't necessary prove a correlation with increased yields in agriculture.

At the same time commercial hybrid corn and wheat were becoming popular, research into improved open pollinated varieties stopped. Some people believe if this research had continued, ultimately the highest yielding varieties would have been OP. This happened 40 years ago, so it's a little hard to turn back the clocks and do it differently. In the meantime, the hybrid technology we use now in seed production is very expensive. It probably wouldn't survive without huge government subsidies, and farmers pay way too much for both the seeds as well as all the chemical inputs that go along with growing hybrid varieties.

In reality all F1 technology in agriculture does is trap us all into a vicious cycle of dependence on the large seed and chemical companies, and it's going to take us decades to escape from it.

Like I mentioned in my last post, this is not a completely undisputed theory, but it does seem logical to me.

Almost all claims of increased yields or otherwise 'higher quality' crops made by large seed companies in connection with their hybrid or GMO varieties can be explained in a similar way, and it's nearly all just empty marketing claims.

[PapaVic]

"Bill, part of what you may be seeing is not hybrid vigor in the F1 but inbreeding depression in the parent varieties." [Patrick]

Yes, Patrick, I caught that implication in your earlier post when you said:

"It is possible a stock of seeds can develop inbreeding depression, perhaps a result of being saved from too few plants at some point (you generally need to save seeds from a certain number of plants to maintain an adequate gene pool size), and this can make them unsuitable for replanting."

However, let me give you a more specific example of my recent experience. I crossed Cherokee Purple x Bradley tomato. Both parents were commercial source plants, and I seriously doubt their seeds were product of one plant selections or stock suffering from inbred depression. In fact, both parents were very productive and appeared in all respects to be superior examples of their respective lines.

The F1 Cherokee Purple x Bradley vines outproduced all other tomatoes in the garden in 2008 with one day pickings of a dozen or more tomatoes not uncommon. The only other full sized tomato to keep up with this was another F1 ... Bolseno.

So, I have two questions now:

1) How do you explain the expressed vigor, plant health, and extreme productivity of this Cherokee Purple x Bradley hybrid over both its parents, and

2) How do you explain the documented inbred depression in certain open pollinated strains even when seed is saved from a sufficient number of plants.

[PapaVic]

Here is a picture of a load of tomatoes picked from a single vine of Cherokee Purple x Bradley on a single day.


Bill

[PapaVic]

I think this is a classic example of the suppression of undesirable recessive alleles from one parent by dominant alleles from the other, hence "hybrid vigor" by definition.

Yes, I know it does not happen in every case ... not in every cross made.

But I believe it does exist in enough crosses to support the definition.

And it seems to have been proven over and over again.

I don't think it's a bad thing. I don't even think it's unnatural. In fact, quite the opposite, it appears most natural to me that one line will outcross with another "in the wild" or in the field. And just as natural, it seems to me that human beings have the God-given propensity to intentionally cause outcrossing of domesticated livestock and food crops ... and have been doing so for millennia.

Now, to take it one step farther, when a hybrid occurs by the hand of man, and hybrid vigor is expressed and recognized, it seems natural to me that the man would have the desire to continually recreate the same F1 hybrid, in an annual crop, to take advantage of the realized hybrid vigor.

Bill

[PatrickW]

*** I'm sorry, I misunderstood Bill's previous posts, so this needs to be edited. Sorry if you read it before, but it's changed!

Bill,

There's nothing wrong with F1 hybrids, and what you did with this tomato cross looks great. The point I was trying to make was just that simply because you see hybrid vigor in your garden doesn't prove increased yields for farmers. It might seem a logical conclusion, but a number of studies and scientists have suggested otherwise. Like I said however, it's not undisputed.

In your last couple of posts you brought up another interesting point about the Cherokee Purple tomato. Since I don't know anything about this tomato except for it's name I have to make a guess here. I will assume it was originally grown by the Cherokee Indians, some hundreds of years ago. If this was the case, it could indeed be suffering from some degree of inbreeding depression.

Tomatoes are strongly inbreeding plants. You can normally even grow them side by side and experience very few crosses. Because of this, tomato plants are very resistant to inbreeding depression, and it's not normally necessary to save seeds from a large number of plants. At the same time, it's very possible the Cherokee Purple tomato is the result of hundreds of successive seed savings from totally inbreed plants, and it's not out of the question it could be suffering from inbreeding depression for this reason.

[PapaVic]

Possibly, Patrick, but ...

There is no real evidence that Cherokee Purple was grown by Native American Indians. The anecdotal evidence is second hand and recent, like in the 90s a fellow in Tennessee got the seeds from a lady who said she had heard from others that the variety had once been grown by the Cherokee tribe. That certainly doesn't constitute real evidence the variety was grown for any particular length of time exceeding any other modern tomato ... and by that I mean any other smooth, large, meaty beefsteak ... all of which are relatively modern (1870 - present).

Secondly, Bradley is a tomato bred in the 1960s at the University of Arkansas.

What I'm saying is that the cross produced an F1 that exhibits vigor and production exceeding both Cherokee Purple and Bradley. And I think it shows the suppression of undesirable recessive alleles from one parent by dominant alleles from the other, as I said above.

Doesn't that match the definition of "hybrid vigor?" That's my first question. And I think it's been answered with a (paraphrased) "yes, one may see hybrid vigor in one's garden ... "

And I have seen it, as have others, and as proven by many field trials over time.

Bill

[PapaVic]

"The point I was trying to make was just that simply because you see hybrid vigor in your garden doesn't prove increased yields for farmers." [Patrick]

I agree, Patrick. There are many open pollinated varieties that will produce as much or more than many hybrid cultivars of the same or similar type.

On the other hand, there are many modern hybrid cultivars into which specific traits have been incorporated from meticulously bred and selected parent lines, and those resulting hybrids have provided farmers with yields that cannot be achieved by any known open pollinated varieties.

Is that true or false? That is my second question.

Bill

[PapaVic]

Now, do I think humanity can get along without these super duper hybrids? Yes, I do. Maybe not at the population level we appear to be achieving or at the level of gratification that we would enjoy otherwise ... but I think humanity would survive without hybrid cultivars.

On the otherhand, is there a reason why we should live without hybrid cultivars?

If we are capable of producing beneficial hybrid cultivars at a reasonable cost to the farmer, and the farmer can produce and deliver a crop at a reasonable price to the market, is there a reason why breeders shouldn't continue to produce and sell hybrid seed?

That's my third question.

(First two questions are in posts at the bottom of page 1)

Bill