INTERNATIONAL AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH AND FOOD SECURITY

Racing against Time to Save our ‘Green Gold’

Ken Street

Dr Street is a Senior Research Scientist with International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, Syria

Plants and their spectacular diversity are the key to food security-directly or indirectly they support the livelihoods of every person on earth. Thus, the preservation of plant diversity is vital to the well-being of every person on the planet, indeed the effective use of these plant genetic resources in agricultural systems depends upon their diversity. However this diversity is being increasingly threatened. A recent report on the status of the world’s plant genetic resources prepared by FAO indicated that losses of diversity worldwide have been large and that the process of erosion is increasing. The most significant contemporary cause of genetic erosion lies in the introduction and spread of modern commercial agriculture and the use of new crop varieties that supplant the traditional, highly variable, landraces. Other significant causes for agro-biodiversity loss were population pressure, land clearing, environmental degradation and overgrazing. There is thus an urgent need to collect and conserve agro-biodiversity in those areas where it is most threatened. Australia’s Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) and ACIAR are funding projects with CLIMA from the University of WA and the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) to collect, conserve, document and utilise the region’s rich genetic treasure. This involves multinational teams travelling to remote areas in Central Asia and the Caucasus to collect seed of landraces and wild relatives of agriculturally important crop and pasture plants.

• Central Asia and the Caucasus (CAC) form a little known crescent of now independent republics that once formed the outer rim of the Soviet Union. This region has a physical and climatic environment as diverse as the cultures and people who live there.
• The CAC landscape ranges from arid desert steppes to lush semi-tropical high rainfall zones to rugged inaccessible mountain ranges with permanent ice caps. From this diversity of environments, and farming systems, has evolved an extremely high level of plant genetic diversity, both within domesticated species and their wild progenitors.
• The Russian plant scientist N I Vavilov, the father of modern plant genetic resource conservation, mapped out the distribution of diversity for many ag17 July, 2006uly, 2006that the CAC region was an important centre of diversity for a whole range of crops.
• Examples of crops that originated or evolved there are cereals (wheat, barley, rye), legumes ( lentils, chickpea, faba bean, pea), forages (medics, vetches, clovers), vegetables (cabbage, onion, garlic, melons), fruit trees (almond, apricot, apple, pear, pistachio, cherry, plums, walnut, pomegranate, quince, hazelnuts, azarole, cornelian cherry, Russian olive, grape, fig, chestnut, mulberry), industrial crops (safflower, flax, cotton) and countless medicinal and aromatic plants. Thus the region is a treasure trove of ancient varieties and their wild progenitors.
• The region currently faces a difficult transition phase from the centrally controlled Soviet governance to a free market-based system, and this is impacting on the environment in general and the agro-ecosystem in particular. This is causing rapid genetic erosion.
• Because the countries in the CAC region are struggling under severe economic constraints they do not have the resources to combat genetic erosion. However, the genetic resources in CAC are of global importance and so it falls upon the international community to assist the national programs to conserve their ‘green gold’.

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