INTERVIEW - Farmer work in crop science key to beating hunger
Date: 03-Oct-02
Country: ITALY
Author: David Brough
"We need to bring farmers into the process of plant breeding and have them take many of the decisions," said Salvatore Ceccarelli, a barley breeder with the Aleppo, Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).
Farmers have played little part in developing local crops alongside scientists in the past, but so-called "participatory plant breeding" in which they work side-by-side with plant breeders, is now becoming increasingly popular.
Ceccarelli, speaking on the sidelines of a plant genetics seminar, said that if poor farmers could help develop better local crop varieties, more resistant to droughts, or less dependent on fertilisers, they could raise food supplies in hunger-stricken areas of the world.
Some 800 million people go to bed hungry, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says.
"Farmers' needs have been poorly understood. Participatory work is the key," said Eva Weltzien, a Mali-based sorghum breeder with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), an independent research centre.
Farmers in developing countries, for example, have asked plant breeders to develop taller crops, not just varieties with higher yields, and seeds that can be stored longer.
"Farmers say: Give me a variety that is 10 centimetres taller, but has the same yield," Ceccarelli told Reuters in a joint interview with Weltzien at the headquarters of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI), a group that promotes conservation of plant genetic resources.
"In a dry year, crops are shorter. But if you have developed taller plants, you can use a harvester and your harvesting costs are less than doing the work by hand," Ceccarelli added.
Many poor farmers would be better placed improving their own crops than using imported varieties, the scientists said.
Ethiopian farmers were more suited to developing their local grain teff than using maize from abroad that they did not process properly, they added.
SHRINKING CROP VARIETY
Agricultural biodiversity has shrunk rapidly as farmers have demanded more productive crops.
According to the FAO, over time some 10,000 plant species have been used for human food and farming, but now no more than 120 species provide 90 percent of human food supplied by plants.
Sometimes plant breeders encourage farmers to plant more remunerative alternatives when their main crop is producing insufficient income, aggravating poverty.
In northern Syria, some farmers had turned to cumin, a spice, instead of cotton that is trading at historically low prices.
Plant breeding experiments in research centres, without the input of farmers, often fail to mirror the real world, the scientists said.
"Most studies of drought are done in a laboratory. But droughts do not take place in laboratories. There are many different types of drought - cold winter drought and mild winter drought, for example," Ceccarelli said.
