A barley line developed by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is helping Chinese farmers raise yields by 20-25 percent, bringing millions of dollars in extra income to the Yangtze basin.
The variety, Gobernadora, is resistant to scab (fusarium head blight), a major disease in the region which leads to the production of toxins in the seed, and can affect human and animal health. It has been a serious problem in China's Yangtze basin but is also common elsewhere in the country, affecting 7 million hectares sown with wheat and barley in two-thirds of China's provinces. It also caused billion-dollar losses in the U.S. Midwest in 1993-94.
Over the last 10 years, however, Professor Liu Zongzhen, plant pathologist at the Shanghai Academy of Agriculture Sciences, has identified a new source of scab resistance in Gobernadora, which is one of the ICARDA cultivars supplied to China. Besides scab resistance, it also has high resistance to Barley Yellow Mosaic Virus, another common problem.
Gobernadora has been widely adopted by Chinese farmers under the name Zhenmai 1. In 1995, farmers in Shanghai and three nearby provinces planted more than 100,000 hectares of the new variety-and are harvesting yields that are 20 to 25 percent higher than those of traditional varieties, representing millions of dollars in extra income.
According to Professor Liu, who has spent many years researching scab-resistant varieties of small-grain cereals, a large number of livestock can be fed on the extra barley grain, resulting in more meat for the market-and more manure, widely used in China as organic fertilizer.
Professor Liu's achievement is based on collaborative work with ICARDA, which holds a worldwide mandate for barley improvement. It does much work on it in the Middle East, where it is based. However, one of ICARDA's senior barley breeders, Hugo E. Vivar, is based at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, from where ICARDA's Latin American program is conducted.
"It's important that we find out exactly why Gobernadora/Zhenmai 1 has this welcome trait," he says. "ICARDA's Latin American program is now working with Oregon State University (in the U.S.) to find out more about the scab-resistance inheritance mechanism, using new biotechnology tools. This (past) summer, double-haploid plants-an alternative plant-improvement technique-were used to analyze crosses between Zhenmai 1 and a scab-susceptible malting barley parent, to find out more about the inheritance of scab resistance. Our colleagues at Oregon will do molecular marker analyses, another biotechnology tool for finding the genes that control scab resistance," says Vivar.
"It is satisfying work, because in the end these diseases hurt people, not plants. Diseases on crops have always brought severe economic losses, with the potato famine caused by late blight in Ireland in the 19th century often cited as the worst instance. It forced millions of people to emigrate. Any research that helps prevent such catastrophes in the future is money more than well spent."
(ICARDA News Release)