Cost-Benefit Ratios and the Purpose of Collections

The best stamp collections and the worst genebanks have a lot in common. Neither get used for the purpose for which they were intended.

Last year, America's biggest investment fund manager, Bill Gross, shelled out $3 million to acquire the one stamp he needed to complete his personal collection of 19th century U.S. postage stamps. He won't be pasting it on a postcard. Valuable stamps don't circulate.

Frozen in a genebank, seed collections are about as useful but considerably less valuable than Mr. Gross's stamps. Used in plant breeding programs, they have considerably more value. But this doesn't mean that it is easy to place a precise economic value on this genetic resource. The value it has is realized in the crop varieties planted in farmers' fields. It is not expressed inside a freezer. Either farmers have crop varieties that withstand pests, diseases, floods, droughts and heat waves, or they don't. Either they grow varieties that produce adequate yields, or they don't and perhaps people go hungry as a consequence. All these things depend on whether the requisite genetic traits exist and whether plant breeders have access to them, or not.

While not all the benefits of crop diversity can be reduced to monetary measurements, some can, and thus, with a bit of difficulty, it is possible to talk about the cost-benefit ratio of conserving crop diversity and making it available for use.

Like clay to a sculptor or water to a fireman, the value of genetic resources is best understood in relation to the result of its use.

A Miserable Looking Wheat

In 1948, Jack Harlan - plant explorer, archaeobotanist, geneticist, breeder, and all of 30 years old - strode into one of the more remote corners of the world, a Kurdish area of Turkey in Southeast Anatolia. There, understanding that looks can be deceiving, he collected a number of samples of different crops, including what he described as a "hopelessly useless" wheat. This particular one entered the U.S. genetic resources system as Plant Introduction No. 178383, its seeds dutifully stored in the genebank. Fifteen years later this miserable wheat rescued farmers in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. from disaster, when an outbreak of the disease 'stripe rust' threatened to decimate their wheat fields. It quickly entered the pedigrees of virtually all varieties grown there. The gain to productivity has been calculated at millions of dollars annually. One crop. One disease. One sample. A few seeds collected at small expense - Harlan traveled simply, often on donkey - and conserved in the genebank at an annual cost of less than a dollar. The cost benefit ratio: many thousands to one. The absolute monetary benefit: probably greater than the sum needed to conserve all wheat diversity in perpetuity.

Every crop has a similar story. Most crops have many. Consider a few examples of the returns on investment:

  • Every dollar spent on all wheat research at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, has generated $27 in benefits when measured only from the resistance it has produced for one disease (leaf rust) in one type of wheat (spring bread wheat). This is a benefit of $5.36 billion (in 1990 dollars).
  • Armineh Zohrabian and colleagues writing in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics calculated that the value of adding a single sample to the U.S. soybean collection simply to search for resistance to a single pest would likely exceed costs (collection, conservation and screening) 36-61 times over. The estimate is conservative, of course, because samples can be screened and used for multiple traits.
  • Similarly, Robert Evenson of Yale University and Douglas Gollin of Williams College traced the flow of genetic resources at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) into new varieties released and grown in developing countries. They estimated that adding an additional 1000 samples to IRRI's genebank would generate an annual stream of benefits to poor farmers of $325 million. Contrast this with the amount that would be needed in an endowment to conserve 1000 samples in perpetuity: $10,580. But, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is not in the stamp collection business. We also intend to endow the costs of periodic multiplication of the seed and distribution to researchers and breeders, forever. The total cost then comes to $61,770. In other words, a one-time expenditure of less than $100,000 ends up producing annual benefits of $325 million.

Counting the Uncountable

As stunning as these figures appear, they fail to capture the full benefit or value of crop diversity. One can calculate the impact on food production of growing a disease resistant crop variety as opposed to growing one that is susceptible. And one can place an economic value on the differential. But, not everything that counts can be counted, as Einstein once pointed out. The genetic resources in genebanks do not simply provide disease resistance, they underpin the ability of the crop to be a crop. What is the real value of wheat? Not some extra bushels of wheat, but wheat itself. How can one put a dollar figure on crop diversity's irreplaceable role in underpinning agriculture and human civilization? Perhaps it's best not to try. Instead, think of crop diversity as a "public good," as simply part of the infrastructure of human society. It's worth more than money.

From Civilization to the Environment. Lloyd Evans, plant physiologist, past president of the Australian Academy of Science, and author of Feeding the Ten Billion, notes that historically - since the dawn of agriculture - the easiest and most common way of producing more food was to cut down more trees and expand the amount of land under cultivation. Today, we understand this to be a particularly costly strategy, particularly when genetics can substitute for the chainsaw.

If, therefore, we seek to understand the true value of crop diversity, one thing we must do is consider agriculture's role in the larger ecosystem. Productive agricultural systems provide benefits to the environment: fewer trees cut down, less pesticide residue in soils, rivers and people.

These are only two, albeit huge, non-quantifiable benefits society reaps from having - and using - collections of crop genetic resources. There are still more.

Scientific knowledge itself is one. Genebank collections are the basis for a great deal of basic biological research - a survey of the journals Crop Science, Euphytica, Plant Breeding and Theoretical and Applied Genetics found that 23% of the articles were based on research conducted with materials from crop genebanks.

Finally, there is what economists would term the "insurance" value. Crop diversity collected, conserved and made available to plant breeders and researchers, functions as an insurance policy against future pests and diseases, the impact of climate change, and constraints to supplies of energy and water. It is easy enough to calculate the cost of this insurance premium - it's the bill for maintaining genebank collections of crop diversity. But, calculating the value of this service is simply impossible. The bargain is obvious.

Are genebanks biological stamp collections? Unfortunately, some are. But genetic resources are not stamps. Some people may get pleasure from knowing that thousands of distinct types of wheat are tucked away in a genebank, much as Bill Gross is doubtless happy simply knowing that his stamps are safe and sound in his collection.

However, the Trust is working to take collections far beyond "safe and sound." The greatest and most enduring value of crop diversity is derived when genebank collections are linked with research and plant breeding efforts. This mixture creates cost-benefit ratios that Mr. Gross, in his day job as America's biggest investment fund manager, would find absolutely breathtaking.

 
 
The Trust's 2005 Annual Report is now available on our website: www.croptrust.org

Ghana became the 23rd country to ratify an Establishment Agreement with the Trust. The Agreement signifies that Ghana officially recognizes the Trust as an international organization.

The Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources is now in the process of selecting four members for the Executive Board of the Trust in accordance with our Constitution. We expect this process to be completed later this year, or early in 2007, and for the Executive Board to hold its first meeting in April 2007. In the meantime, the Trust's interim board, chaired by Ambassador Fernando Gerbasi, will continue to serve.

Finally, and just to tempt you, we're expecting to make several major announcements in the coming days and weeks. Check our website for the latest news.


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