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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The vaults securing the future of food -Sayantan Bera and Nikita Mehta

The vaults securing the future of food -Sayantan Bera and Nikita Mehta

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published Published on Mar 30, 2016   modified Modified on Mar 30, 2016
-Livemint.com

With global population set to hit 11 bn by 2100, gene banks are vital links in a chain of steps needed to avert hunger

New Delhi: From the outside, the tapering building in classic brick red and cream standing by a quiet stretch of road in west Delhi has the unmistakable look of a government office block, an impression reinforced by its manicured lawns and the acronym NBPGR embossed at the entrance.

But this is no ordinary government building. It houses the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, India’s apex body that conserves the fruits of centuries of farmers’ efforts to nurture and breed crops and also the wild relatives of the grains and vegetables that Indians eat every day, including crops that are no longer grown.

It’s home to a treasure trove. Stored not in the faceless building but in underground vaults is the world’s third-largest plant gene bank, underpinning food security in India and elsewhere.

The underground repository of plants has a certain clinical seriousness about it. Rows of chambers line both sides of a long and narrow corridor and each chamber is locked like a safety vault. Stepping inside a vault is like walking into a freezer. The temperature is minus 18 degree Celsius.

Inside these chambers are thousands of varieties of seeds, stored in aluminium foil packs and checked every once in a while by scientists in protective navy blue overalls.

On the floor above is a large room filled with thousands of test tubes for in-vitro preservation of vegetable and fruit varieties, while another houses metal tanks with liquid nitrogen for cryopreservation of seeds at minus 196 degree Celsius.

Only the US and China have larger collections than India’s national gene bank, maintained by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

With the global population set to rise from 7 billion today to 11 billion by 2100, such gene banks scattered across the world are vital links in a chain of steps aimed at averting hunger.

A single strain of disease can wipe out entire crops. And the fight against climate change may need scientists to prise out drought-tolerant genes hiding inside some wild grass.

Abu Ghraib to Aleppo

The Indian gene bank has had a peaceful run since being set up in 1986, following the Green Revolution that made the country self-sufficient in food after centuries of hunger and famine.

Globally, the history of such banks is pockmarked with wars and conflicts, while scientists try heroically to protect them.

For instance, before the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became notorious for prisoner abuse by American soldiers, the name had a different bearing for agriculture scientists. Lying to the west of capital city Baghdad, Abu Ghraib was home to Iraq’s National Seed Bank.

It was a prized possession. There were thousands of traditional varieties of wheat from the fertile crescent of the Mesopotamia, the birthplace of modern agriculture where farmers are believed to have domesticated wild plant varieties some 10,000 years ago.

In the chaos that followed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Abu Ghraib seed bank was destroyed. Thankfully, not all was lost. In 1996, between the first and second Iraq wars, scientists had managed to dispatch over 1,000 vital seed varieties for safekeeping at the international gene bank in Aleppo, Syria.

Now, Syria too is no longer safe, racked by civil war on the one hand and acts of terror by the Islamic State on the other. Here again, staff secured and deposited a duplicate collection at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on a Norwegian island, in a facility built inside perennial icy mountains. It’s not for nothing that Svalbard is known as the doomsday vault, a repository that could help restore global agriculture, were all to be lost one day to climate change or disease or war.

In the event none of this happens, global plant biodiversity is still under the serious threat of monoculture, the practice where swathes of farmland are brought under a particular variety of crop—usually high-yielding varieties of rice, wheat, corn and potatoes—that have led to thousands of other crops becoming extinct on the farm.

Genetic erosion

Loss of biodiversity through human activity has accelerated over the past 50 years, and up to 75% of the genetic diversity of crops has already disappeared, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

It’s no coincidence that rich regions such as North America and Europe—home to industrial-scale farming—are poor in genetic resources. On the other hand, “India is blessed due to diverse agro-climatic regions with all types of soil,” says Rishi Tyagi, who heads the germplasm conservation division at the NBPGR. “You name a crop and it can be grown here.”

In India, seeds are collected from farmers and through explorations by regional centres across the country. These are then deposited with the headquarters in New Delhi. Once a material is received, it is tested for its viability and seed health. Healthy seeds go through moisture dehydration at 15 degree Celsius and 15% relative humidity. Eventually, they find their way into the underground vaults.

Yet, India too has lost many native varieties of rice and millet, and the only way to get them back to the farm is through the gene bank.

Some years ago, farmers in Chamba district of Himachal Pradesh wanted to grow a variety of red rice that had disappeared from the fields. The variety was traditionally fed to pregnant women and was cherished for its medicinal values.

“We took out 20-30 seeds, multiplied them over three-four years and gave them to farmers. Now, they are growing it and making good money as there is a demand in the market,” says Tyagi.

Tyagi thinks India has done well in terms of conservation, but that the real challenge lies in finding out the value of collections. The national gene bank has more than 420,000 so-called accessions—the scientific term for varieties of plants—and each of these needs to be evaluated for traits. They can then be handed over to plant breeders for developing improved varieties—more salt-tolerant, for instance, or pest-resistant.

“It’s like your pocket is full with pebbles and coins, and you need to know which ones are coins so they can be encashed,” says Tyagi. “Then, you can tell the world we may have a solution to their problems. But funds for evaluating the (collected) genetic materials are a constraint.”

For instance, NBPGR—the headquarters and the 10 regional stations—gets a paltry Rs.60 crore every year.

India is home to another important repository of seeds. The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), a research organization based in Hyderabad, maintains one of the world’s largest gene banks that has varieties from 144 countries.

Its director general David Bergvinson agrees that globally gene banks are under-utilized. “Less than 2% of the diversity that we have in those gene banks is used to support modern agriculture,” he says.

Evaluating genetic resources is as crucial as sharing the knowledge that is already out there. The world has benefited from India’s rice strains, just as the global gene pool has helped India introduce crops such as soybean and Kiwi fruit.

Tyagi says the slow flow of sharing stems from the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its 2010 protocol, following which most countries got busy harmonizing their domestic laws to the treaty. CBD is an international agreement that promotes conservation, sustainable use and equitable benefit sharing of genetic resources.

Bergvinson thinks India has struggled to translate this global treaty in a way that could serve both the local and global community. “For the establishment of laws to implement the treaty… that is the sovereign right of each government and India has been one of the slower ones to implement that, but they are implementing it now,” he says.

Tyagi’s defence: of the 2.8 million germplasm accessions held in gene banks belonging to 446 organizations worldwide, India accounts for 106,007, or 3.78%, of the varieties. Hence, the argument that India does not share genetic material does not hold ground.

Beyond numbers, are gene banks and sharing resources all there is to preserving genetic resources?

Living fields

Both Tyagi and Bergvinson agree that in-situ conservation on farmers’ fields is equally important because when farmers stop growing traditional varieties, the process of genetic evolution also stops.

“The challenge is to persuade farmers to do this, when they are more interested in high-yielding varieties, not traditional landraces,” says Tyagi.

Debal Deb, a scientist who has been conserving traditional rice varieties in-situ for nearly two decades, criticizes what he calls the flawed management of gene banks in India and elsewhere.

“It is difficult for farmers to access these banks while seed companies can easily do so for developing transgenics. Even if access is open, over 80% of the seeds stored cannot be used by farmers—think of them as gene morgues—but seed companies can still retrieve the genes and use them,” says Deb.

The solution is to make gene banks accessible to farmers and ensure that seeds are grown every two-three years, says Deb, who has conserved 1,090 traditional lines of rice at his farm Basudha in Odisha. He meticulously grows and shares them with farmers all over India.

The withdrawal

Late last year, the doomsday vault in Norway, built in 2008, had its first ever request for withdrawal of some varieties. The International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) that was previously headquartered in Syria wants to restart its collection, but away from the horrors of the civil war, in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon.

Brian Lainoff, spokesperson of the Crop Trust that runs the Svalbard seed vault, told The Huffington Post that it was getting difficult for ICARDA to handle requests for seeds from Aleppo in Syria, which is why the organization wanted some of its deposits back.

Describing the seed vault, Lainoff said: “It really is kind of the only example of true international cooperation. There’s seeds sitting on the same shelf from North Korea and South Korea, and they get along just fine up there.”

At the national gene bank in New Delhi too, seeds collected from thousands of kilometres apart, from Kashmir to Koraput, are doing fine. But as Deb suggests, the seeds need to revisit the farmers’ fields more often.

Livemint.com, 29 March, 2016, http://www.livemint.com/Politics/dPTpReo4Q2dNxAnlm2RwAN/The-vaults-securing-the-future-of-food.html


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