Reconciling Agriculture with Biodiversity and Innovations in Plant Breeding

Kotschi, Johannes

doi:10.14512/gaia.19.1.5

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The farmer-based multiplication of the materials at each selection cycle is an important contribution to strengthening informal or local seed systems and fostering diffusion of gradually improved materials, in turn upscaling the impact of the breeding process on food security and biodiversity conservation 9 . However, one of the major technical and institutional bottlenecks downstream of most processes of participatory plant breeding resides in the phases of quality assurance and dissemination of improved seed beyond the immediate participants to the breeding program.…”

Section: Early Results Implications For Conservation and Use Of Undementioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, improved varieties are often unavailable or expensive and thus inaccessible to subsistence producers and poorest groups; in addition, they don't always respond to the agro-ecological challenges of marginal areas nor farmers’ preferences for their traditional uses. Therefore, improving the genetic basis of locally relevant underutilized crops and achieving relatively small increases in yields could greatly boost food production, income-generating opportunities and livelihoods 9 in vulnerable areas. It can pave the way for downstream developments, such as quality seed multiplication and dissemination among farmers and, where appropriate, value chain development based on local agricultural biodiversity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Participatory breeding in the Peruvian highlands: Opportunities and challenges for promoting conservation and sustainable use of underutilized crops

Galluzzi

Estrada²,

Apaza³

et al. 2014

Renew. Agric. Food Syst.

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Underutilized crops tend to harbor high levels of genetic diversity, be maintained on-farm in small-scale farming systems and be relatively neglected by formal research and development strategies, including breeding programs. While high genetic variability allows these crops to adapt to marginal environments, inappropriate management practices and reductions in population sizes in individual farmers' plots may lead to productivity loss and poor harvests. This situation further limits their cultivation and use, notwithstanding the potential these crops may hold for diversification of agricultural systems, food security and market development. Peru hosts a wealth of native agrobiodiversity, which includes many underutilized crops. To improve their performance and promote their continued conservation and use, a participatory breeding program was developed on five underutilized crops of the Peruvian highlands; the breeding approach, based on a combination of evolutionary and participatory methods, is designed to achieve a balance between yield improvement and maintenance of genetic diversity. Preliminary results in quinoa and amaranth are encouraging, fostering further engagement of farmers by increasing availability of quality seed for downstream uses. However, methodological, financial and institutional issues need to be addressed for the effort to be expanded and upscaled. This paper provides an overall description of the initiative as well as a discussion on early results obtained in quinoa and amaranth, highlighting those aspects that make this approach particularly relevant for minor crops and identifying the opportunities and challenges for the initiative to move forward.

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Section: Early Results Implications For Conservation and Use Of Undementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Participatory breeding in the Peruvian highlands: Opportunities and challenges for promoting conservation and sustainable use of underutilized crops

Galluzzi

Estrada²,

Apaza³

et al. 2014

Renew. Agric. Food Syst.

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“…How does one breed for farmer’s needs? Involving a large number of farmers in evaluation and selection throughout the selection process is an excellent way to take into account heterogeneity across environments ( Kotschi, 2010 ). This form of decentralized selection is critical in involving and empowering farmers from the beginning of the breeding process.…”

Section: Perspectives On a Gcn-quinoamentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of a Worldwide Consortium on Evolutionary Participatory Breeding in Quinoa

Murphy

Bazile²,

Kellogg

et al. 2016

Front. Plant Sci.

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Chenopodium quinoa is gaining global importance due to its excellent protein quality and tolerance of abiotic stresses. The last 60 years have seen major strides in the expansion of quinoa crop production and experimentation. Quinoa’s wide genetic diversity has led to its agronomic versatility and adaptation to different soil types, particularly saline soils, and environments with extremely variable conditions in terms of humidity, altitude, and temperature. The potential of quinoa to contribute to global food security was recognized in 2013 in the declaration of the International Year of Quinoa (IYQ). Promoting the use of improved homogeneous quinoa varieties standardized to comply with applicable norms on seeds or suited to intensified conventional agriculture farming systems may not generate the necessary resilience needed to respond to current and future global challenges. Maintaining and increasing quinoa biodiversity is imperative, as the dynamics of the global expansion of quinoa may constitute a threat to farmers if the spread is generated with a narrow genetic base. In this article, we propose that the method of evolutionary participatory breeding could be a useful tool to develop new quinoa genetic material in cooperation with farmers. We introduce preliminary results on quinoa population development with farmers in the Pacific Northwest region of the USA. We conclude that a global collaborative network on quinoa (GCN-Quinoa) could be the baseline for participatory plant breeding programs originating in developing or developed countries to meet the needs of farmers across a diversity of agronomic systems and a wide range of physical environments.

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“…First, the demand of a growing population for food, water and land along with uncoordinated land use results in the degradation of natural resources. Second, the crowding out of local varieties through formalized breeding (Kotschi 2010) is accompanied by a change in property rights and use patterns with an asymmetric impact on gender relations, posing a threat to indigenous knowledge.. As formalized, individual titles gain currency, layered use-rights often serving as niches for marginal plants and planters disappear. Additionally, agrobiodiversity loss on the one hand implies the vanishing of varieties from the cropping portfolio; on the other hand, it threatens the experimental and practical knowledge of ecological, economic and social characteristics of local cultivars.…”

Section: The Social-ecological Artefact Agrobiodiversitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Intraface: Negotiating Gender-Relations in Agrobiodiversity

Padmanabhan¹

2016

fzg

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The diversity of plants and animals in agriculture is a social-ecological artefact per se and the result of long-term interaction between humans and agrobiodiversity, displaying the material resistance of the latter. The conceptual framework intraface aims at the analysis of the gendered organization of varieties in an inter-and transdisciplinary research setting. The "negotiations at the intraface" contribute to synthesizing disciplinary perspectives and life-worldly knowledge with a focus on sustainability outcomes with special emphasis on gendered power and interests. The eminent loss of agrobiodiversity requires transdisciplinary knowledge integration for sustainable transformation. The procedure of intraface analysis is illustrated on the case of paddy-rice diversity in Kerala, South India.

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Reconciling Agriculture with Biodiversity and Innovations in Plant Breeding

Cited by 4 publications

References 19 publications

Participatory breeding in the Peruvian highlands: Opportunities and challenges for promoting conservation and sustainable use of underutilized crops

Participatory breeding in the Peruvian highlands: Opportunities and challenges for promoting conservation and sustainable use of underutilized crops

Development of a Worldwide Consortium on Evolutionary Participatory Breeding in Quinoa

Intraface: Negotiating Gender-Relations in Agrobiodiversity

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