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Every Crop Needs Its Wild Relatives

>From UN Environment Programme
Monday, June 28, 2004

COLOMBO/NAIROBI/ROME, 28 June 2004 — A project aimed at boosting the
conservation and use of the wild living relatives of some of the world’s key
crops is being launched today.

The project, bringing together the biologically rich countries of Armenia,
Bolivia, Madagascar, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan, aims to improve key features
of traditional crops, ranging from their economic and nutritional value to
their ability to naturally fight disease.

The importance of conserving wild crop relatives as future sources of novel
traits is highlighted by recent developments with the tomato. An increase of
0.1 per cent in the solid content of this fruit is worth around $10 million
a year to processors in California.

One wild living tomato has allowed plant breeders to boost, by 2.4 per cent
or $250 million annually, the level of solids in commercial varieties.

Meanwhile, three different wild peanuts have been used to breed commercial
varieties resistant to root knot nematodes. It is helping to save peanut
growers around the world an estimated $100 million a year.

Researchers believe the new project, which is co-funded by the Global
Environment Facility (GEF), will play its part in fighting hunger and
improving the livelihoods of farmers across the globe.

The project, called “In Situ Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives through
Enhanced Management and Field Application”, is being launched today in
Colombo, Sir Lanka, by the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute
(IPGRI) in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) and national and international partners. (See notes to editors.)

It comes at a time of increasing concern over the loss of these precious
genetic resources. For example, more than one in 20 of the species of
Poaceae, the botanical family that includes cereal crops such as wheat,
maize, barley and millet, are threatened with extinction from deforestation,
habitat loss and intensive agriculture.

Forests are rich in wild plants that may be new sources of novel genetic
traits for improved crops including coffee, mango and rubber. During the
1990s, 94 million hectares, or 2.4 per cent of total forest cover, was lost.

The new scheme will pool existing information from a wide variety of sources
on crop wild relatives in each of the five countries. An information
exchange network will be set up allowing scientists and breeders to pinpoint
promising traits for improving crop production. The project will pinpoint
ways on how to best conserve the rich genetic resources of the countries
concerned.

The project will enhance conservation measures already undertaken and make
available resources in order to build upon these. For example, Sri Lanka has
carried out several actions to conserve crop wild relatives and raise
awareness of their importance, but has no national strategy.

Armenia and Uzbekistan have surveyed their crop wild relatives and created
limited protected areas at least partly to conserve these plants. For
example, Armenia’s Erebuni Reserve is one of the few in the world
deliberately established to conserve the wild living relatives of a key
crop, in this case wild wheats.

Bolivia and Madagascar need to extend surveys of where wild living crop
relatives may be found and establish areas to protect them.

Notes to Editors

Some examples of the value of crop wild relatives Crop wild relatives make a
huge contribution to plant breeding. It is estimated that between 1976 and
1980, wild relatives contributed approximately $340 million per year in
yield and disease resistance to the farm economy of the United States alone.

In addition, improvements in molecular technology have made it easier and
quicker to identify useful traits in wild relatives and to develop new and
improved varieties.

Wild relatives have increased the productivity of globally important crops
such as barley, maize, oats, potatoes, rice and wheat.

Breeders have also used them to boost the nutritional value of foods. For
example, the high anti-cancer properties found in some varieties of broccoli
originated in a Sicilian wild relative.

Wild relatives have provided traits such as disease resistance, tolerance to
extreme temperatures, tolerance to salinity (from a wild relative growing in
the Galapagos Islands) and resistance to drought. They have also helped
increase the nutritional value of the cultivated tomato by providing more
Vitamin C and beta-carotene. One wild relative has made it possible to
increase the solids content of the tomato by 2.4% worth $250 million a year
in the state of California alone.

Nutritional value By crossing cultivated broccoli with a wild Sicilian
relative, scientists are breeding a variety that contain higher levels of
the cancer fighting chemical, sulforaphane, an anti-oxidant that destroys
compounds that can damage DNA. The new variety of broccoli contains 100
times more sulforaphane.

Wheat is the staple food for approximately one in three of the world’s
population. But diets based solely on cereals lack important nutrients such
as iron, zinc and vitamin A.

A wild relative of wheat, Triticum turgidum var dicoccoides, from the
Eastern Mediterranean, was used to increase the protein content of bread and
durum wheat. The International Centre for the Improvement of Wheat and Maize
(CIMMYT) has shown that other wild relatives of wheat have up to 1.8 times
more zinc and 1.5 times more iron in their grains than ordinary wheat and
could be used to improve levels of these minerals in wheat varieties.

Disease resistance In the 1970s an outbreak of grassy stunt virus devastated
the rice fields of millions of farmers in South and South-East Asia. The
virus, transmitted by the brown plant hopper, prevents the rice plant from
producing flowers and grain.

Scientists from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) screened
more than 17,000 cultivated and wild rice samples for resistance to the
disease.

A wild relative of rice, Oryza nivara, growing in the wild in Uttar Pradesh
was found to have one single gene for resistance to the grassy stunt virus.
This gene is now routinely incorporated in all new varieties of rice grown
across more than 100,000 km2 of Asian rice fields.

Apart from UNEP, GEF and the IPGRI, the other agencies involved are the
Botanic Gardens Conservation International, the United Nations Food and
Agricultural Organization, IUCN-the World Conservation Union, UNEP’s World
Conservation Monitoring Centre and ZADI, the German Centre for Documentation
and Information in Agriculture.

For more information, please contact:

For UNEP: Eric Falt, Spokesperson/Director of UNEP’s Division of
Communications and Public Information, in Nairobi, on tel: +254-20-623292,
mobile: +254-733-682656, e-mail: eric.falt@unep.org or Nick Nuttall, UNEP
Head of Media, on tel: +254-20-623084, mobile: +254-733- 632755, e-mail:
nick.nuttall@unep.org

For IPGRI: Jeremy Cherfas, Public Awareness Officer, in Rome, on tel:
+39-066118-234, e-mail: j.cherfas@cgiar.org