Safety for the Seeds of the Future

By John Peacock and Mike Robbins

There are wildlife reserves where endangered animal species can live in the wild. So why not plant reservations? Now, through a wide partnership of countries and institutions in the Eastern Mediterranean, they are becoming a reality in four countries in West Asia. But with an important difference: these reservations will be working farms.

This biodiversity can be preserved in genebanks. ICARDA does this, as do a number of national programs and institutions within the region. In fact, ICARDA's genebank is one of the world's biggest, with 110,000 accessions so far, and distributes about 26,000 a year to scientists all over the world to use in crop breeding.

But this alone is not enough. We don't know how long we can store the material without it degenerating: moreover, while it is in a coldstore, it is not adapting to the changing world outside, which limits its usefulness in breeding. Just as important, genebanks cannot preserve more than a fraction of what we need to keep. Ex-situ conservation, as it is known, is important and has helped enormously, but we need in-situ conservation as well.

Conservation and Sustainable Use aims to do that, right in the environment to which we will need it to be adapted. That is part of the reason why scientists do not want to just create reservations for biodiversity; we need to use working farms, where the genetic material is tested by changes in farming practices and can be watched over by farmers who know what to look for. Anyway, simple reservations would dig too deep into scarce land resources. People must eat today, as well as tomorrow.

Conservation and Sustainable Use has been put together with Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, and a number of important institutions (see box on page 14). ICARDA will administer and coordinate the project, but will not spend the money; as the implementing bodies, the national programs will do that.

Total cost over five years will be roughly US$18.5 million, of which the crucial US$8 million core is expected to come from GEF, subject to remaining administrative and policy decisions. GEF is the Global Environment Facility, a financial mechanism providing grant and concessional

funds to developing countries for projects and activities to protect the world's environment. By the end of 1991, the framework for action for the GEF gained the support of a sufficient number of countries to become a reality. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, it was decided that GEF would operate the financial mechanisms for implementation of the Conventions on Climate Change and Biological Diversity. Today, responsibility for implementing the GEF is shared by UNDP, UNEP and the World Bank. Projects thus funded fall under four basic areas; climate change, biological diversity, international waters and ozone depletion.

GEF's contribution is the key to making the Conservation and Sustainable Use project fly; other generous contributions in cash and kind have been pledged on this basis.

Besides in­situ conservation at the eight sites, the project's objectives are to:

*Gather information on the genetic base of 10 target crops and the social and farming practices which affect them;
*Produce a working model for in-situ, on­farm conservation that can be repeated elsewhere in the world;
*Devise a broad range of policy measures that can safeguard and enable such world;
*Strengthen national capacities for the sustainable conservation of agrobiodiversity.

None of this will be simple. For example, producing the database means using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The scientists will have some help: one of the participating institutions is the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI). which is based in Rome but has its regional office on the ICARDA campus. It already holds some data for the area. But there will be a need to train national scientists in the use of GIS, so that training will be part of the project.

If the project is to gather information on the way the genetic material is affected by changing social and landuse practices, it will need to be monitored. This will be done through a network of extension officers. Farmers can also help-they know what to look for. Other assistance will also be needed from farmers. One of the key parts of the project is to persuade them to (say) keep sheep away from wild relatives of forage legumes at the flowering stage, let a wild variety of crop wild relatives grow at the margins of their fields, and grow a good mix of landraces (farmerbred crop varieties) in the fields themselves. In the main, farmers do not need to be persuaded of the importance of biodiversity (seem Three Among The Millions, page 6). But-again-people must eat today, as well as tomorrow. So there will have to be compensation in cash and kind for farmers who are asked to change their farming patterns.

Meanwhile, on the ground, landuse survey will be done of the target sites and "buffer strips" introduced. Stone­clearing for land exploitation often destroys the wild relatives' habitat, but is necessary for income generation, so the project will get these cleared stones used to make new, similar habitats. Small simple dams and terraces will be built to provide niches for alternative income generation and diversified plant production. Where there is no alternative to discouraging agricultural activity in a given area, the project will go for imaginative solutions such as apiculture. (This can work well, and ICARDA's Highland Regional Project has helped encourage beekeeping in the Taurus Mountains in Turkey with some success.) Field gene banks will be established for vulnerable species in field margins.

There is much more to this project, and the activities above are only a sample; it is impossible to describe them all. Conservation and Sustainable Use of Dryland Biodiversity is one of the most exciting projects with which ICARDA has become involved, not least for the unanimity that has been achieved across nations, institutions and disciplines in putting it together. But perhaps its most important feature is this: what we learn in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Palestine over the next five years could provide a model for sustainable in­situ conservation of agrobiodiversity around the world.

International Center for Agricultural Research Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)

Return to CGIAR Newsletter Table of Contents