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| Importance, Neglect and Potential
During the Depression in the United States in the 1930s, it is said that some parents too poor to care for their children, would put them on a freight train, wave good-bye and hope for the best. Maybe that’s what happened with yams. Like the children placed on the trains, yams are orphans. So are millets, cassava, taro, tef and cowpea. In fact, there are dozens of orphan crops, crops that receive little, if any, care or attention relative to their value and importance. There are more than 50,000 edible plants in the world. A few hundred make a significant contribution to food supplies, according to FAO. Some 150, historically, have entered into world commerce. And yet a sizeable portion of these – perhaps the majority of those FAO is referring to - and perhaps even a majority of those that have circulated in world trade - have never benefited from the efforts of a single scientifically-trained plant breeder. Consider yams. Nearly 40 million metric tons were produced last year. Have trouble comprehending that quantity? It’s an amount that would fill about a million train cars – more than the railroad companies in North America own. But, don’t worry. That’s not where the demand is. More than 95% of yams are grown in sub-Saharan Africa, primarily in Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. Millions of people – primarily poor people - depend on yams as a staple crop. But how many people do yams depend on? About a half-dozen. There are about six yam breeders in the world, the greatest concentration at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria. Of course, yams actually benefit from the efforts of many, many people, not the least being farmers. But, you get the point – relative to the importance of the crop, formal investment in it is scandalously low. And food security for millions is therefore put at risk. Bananas are another orphan crop. In weight terms, banana production is almost double that of yams. In terms of gross value of production, bananas and plantains are the developing world’s fourth most important crop after rice, wheat and maize. Millions of people – chiefly in Africa - depend on bananas as their primary staple crop. Per capita consumption in some places exceeds a kilo a day! Like yams, however, there are only a half-dozen banana breeders in the world. Major diseases threaten the crop. In the long run it is unlikely that the single variety that supports the entire industry exporting bananas from the tropics to Europe and North America can survive the onslaught. New, disease resistant varieties are desperately needed, which is one reason why existing banana collections, small in number, are so very important and vital to conserve. Orphan crops are not minor or insignificant crops. Writing in the journal, Food Policy, Naylor, Falcon, et al, observe that they are “valued culturally, often adapted to harsh environments, nutritious, and diverse in terms of their genetic, agroclimatic, and economic niches.” Collectively, 27 “orphan” crops with a value of $100 billion are grown on 250 million hectares (618 million acres) in developing countries. Hardly trivial sums. Despite their importance in the diets of millions of poor people, and their contribution to already fragile household and national economies, orphan crops receive relatively little scientific attention or private research investment. They are simply too difficult, time-consuming and expensive to breed for a target market of poor farmers. Similar reasons conspire against assembling and maintaining collections of the diversity of orphan crops, making the task of the few breeders that work with them that much more difficult and precarious. Donor funding for maintaining the diversity of yams or the diversity of tef, the most important cereal crop in Ethiopia, rises, falls and sometimes just disappears according to fashion and whim, leaving collections imperiled or worse. A few breeders working with secure and well-managed, well-documented crop diversity collections can accomplish a great deal. Burdening the same breeders with vulnerable, resource-starved collections of breeding stock is a recipe for failure, and a disaster for the future of many of these crops and the people they sustain. By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in a situation of absolute water shortage. Fully two-thirds of the world’s population will live in what FAO describes as a situation of water stress. Responses and Resources The importance of orphan crops in reaching the Millennium Development Goals is out of all proportion to the low levels of investment which they receive. By guaranteeing funding for the conservation and availability of these crops, the Global Crop Diversity Trust will ensure that collections of these crops have a good safe home as well as a future in the global effort to strengthen food security and alleviate poverty. Collections of breeding materials for orphan crops are often relatively small – fewer than 2000 types of bananas represent/contain the diversity in that crop, for example, compared to well over 100,000 for rice. Conservation costs should, therefore, be reasonable, while future returns to investment in this effort will, as a consequence, be tremendous. Moreover, as the article in Food Policy notes, modern technologies applied by breeders working with genetic resource collections may produce rapid productivity gains in orphan crops – gains that by definition will accrue to some of the poorest people on earth. The choice is clear. We can adopt these orphans and help them become even more productive citizens. Or, we can take them to the station, put them on a train, and wave good-bye. |
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The Trust has a new website, and we’re really excited about it! Take a look at: www.croptrust.org. And visit regularly. The website will be the Trust’s major communication’s tool and we intend to make it a dynamic one.
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