Lately, I’ve been studying how the European seed market works and how it is regulated. While searching for material on this topic, I found people and groups that are challenging this market with groundbreaking concepts and ideas, such as diversity breeding and open source seed licenses.

These concepts are groundbreaking in a sense that they challenge and bid to redefine the basis on which today’s seed market is build. I try to collect, reference and discuss them in a series of articles, with diversity breeding first.

Diversity Breeding

One of the concept that strikes me the most is the one of diversity breeding. It is a groundbreaking concept because it would be the exact opposite of plant breeding as we intended it until today.

And for this reason, it’s challenging: a plant breed is easy to grow when it behaves in a uniform and expected way. But uniformity don’t agree much with biodiversity, how can we balance the two?

One small note on why biological diversity is so important: a diverse ecosystem is more resilient and more prepared to face threats and changes, such as epidemics or climate change. An inbred and uniform system is vulnerable to those threats.

The struggle between breeding and biodiversity

Breeding almost inevitably reduces biological diversity because it’s a selective process. When we breed for a new variety, we start from a (hopefully) large number of individual with a diverse gene pool, and we cross plants until we select and collect all the traits that we want into a single plant, excluding the ones that we don’t want. The selected variety will be produced in large scale, thus biodiversity will be reduced.

Selectivity, exclusivity and uniformity are the opposite of diversity, which often comes with complexity and unpredictability.

Policies and tecnology can cause diversity bottlenecks

The conflicted relationship between diversity and breeding is discussed by Niels Louwaars in this interesting article. According to Niels Louwaars the challenges that we face when we try to find a balance between breeding and biodiversity are technological but also regulatory or political. Each challenge might lead to a diversity bottleneck

Some bottleneck that he describes are technological:

• Indeed the domestication process, the most ancient form of breeding, is a diversity bottleneck, since it selects few traits and reproduce them on a big scale.
• Dispersal is another, since domesticated varieties that have been moved around the world, often lose the chance to cross with wild counterparts,
• On paper, GMO and genome editing could improve diversity, allowing to introduce new traits quickly into cultivated varieties. In practice, though, many question can be raised, such as, is the throughput of the genetic modification process high enough? And many more.

Others bottlenecks at the policy level:

• Efficiency in breeding causes great bottleneck, since efficiency is often achieved minimizing the number of breeders and breeding station.
• Strict rules for registering new varieties can cause bottlenecks, since they might block diversity oriented breeding processes that do not achieve standards of uniformity.
• Registering a variety could be a bottleneck itself, since it might sequester genes from the pools available to breeders.

The whole article is detailed and engaging. Likewise, other works of Niels Louwaars are a goldmine when trying to understand breeding and agricultural policies and their effects

The article closes on a worrying remark. Is it possible that the policies that aim at improving biological diversity in our crops, are having an opposite effect?

Niels Louwaars warns that complex policies and complex laws affects smaller breeding initiatives the most. And small breeding companies and initiatives are among the drivers of biological diversity in the farms.

Multiline Breeding

One practical idea that was tested to introduce controlled pockets of biodiversity into agriculture was multiline breeding. Instead of providing to the farmers seeds of one single pure variety, multiline varieties contain a mix seeds from many selected varieties. Those varieties must have similar properties (for example for wheat: height, maturation time, seed size, seed shape) but should be resistant to different pests and diseases.

Multiline breeding was aimed at patching diversity’s technological bottlenecks.

The risks of single line varieties

The concept was developed first on oat and later on wheat at CIMMYT, under the supervision of Norman Borlaug himself. Borlaug considered the Father of the green revolution, and is the person charged with exporting intensive agriculture from the US to South America, to India and to South East Asia, and thus also with spreading systematic single line breeding and the associated decrease in biodiversity. He was probably well aware that the benefits of a uniform and predictable single line varieties come with risks, for example risks of invasions of pests and disease.

If a field is cultivated with plants that are genetically similar (or almost identical) to each other, those plants have the same properties of pest resistance and susceptibility, once a pest, a rust or a disease evolves a way to infect one plant, the whole field is vulnerable. Given time, the whole field could be invaded at epidemic levels. Multiline varieties introduce diversity in the field: different plants in the are susceptible to different pests, and resistant to other. This level of diversity might prevent the disease from spreading or at least slow it down.

Difficult planning and implementation

Though, the diversity introduced in a multiline variety is highly planned and highly controlled. Meaning that those multiline seed blends are difficult and expensive to plan, to prepare and to maintain. Especially because they are highly susceptible to genetic drift across generations, when farmers want to reuse their seeds.

Organic Breeding

Silly me, I didn’t know that organic farming was not only about growing plants, but also about breeding. But after doing some reading, it definitely makes sense.

I’m not fond of some of the dogmas of organic agriculture, but when I read the position papers by IFOAM on plant breeding and on the seed market I could not help but wonder that, at least on paper, they got the long term thinking and planning on breeding right.

Practical dogmas?

Also, I could not help to wonder that maybe their dogmas have been practical choices. Organic agriculture bans categorically synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and refuses to use GMOs. I personally think that strict and categorical rules make for bad rules. Yes, pesticides and fertilizers damage the environment, our health and they are not sustainable on the long term, but maybe a very informed and parsimonious use of pesticides and fertilizers, instead of a categorical ban, could be beneficial.

The question on GMO is more complex: genetic modification and genome editing are powerful techniques and they could do great good or great damage. Like for all powerful techniques, a very cautious approach is completely justified. So, for both bans, I tend to disagree, but they could have been a practical decision if one judges that right now and in the current political landscape it is too hard and too unlikely to regulate synthetic pesticides, fertilizers and GMO reasonably.

Diversity through local initiatives and small systems

Regarding diversity breeding, while organic breeding does not find big solutions on how to introduce diversity into breeding technology itself, it achieves diversity mainly by supporting local and small size breeding initiatives, which could carry benefits at many levels, and could break many policy and regulation bottlenecks.

On the position paper on the use of organic seeds and reproductive materials I found many points that make organic breeding is diversity oriented.

First, an organic variety must be adapted to grow with little help. Thus organic breeders must avoid seed varieties that do well in average everywhere but could need massive amount of fertilizers and pesticides to thrive. They need to breed seed best adapted to the local condition, to the micro-climate and to the pest typical of one area, where the variety is planted. This encourages diversity in breeding by producing many varieties adapted to the local challenges.

Legal support and ban on patents

Then, organic groups pledges to provide legal support for the farm saved seeds. In rural communities, seeds that have been used and domesticated there should have developed a great source of biological diversity and adaptation. I have to admit that I know almost nothing about the figures farm saved seeds: how common is the practice of saving seeds among small farmers, where does those varieties come from, and how to recognize legally their status, in a way that is useful and respectful to farmers and consumers.

Organic breeding strongly opposes patenting of living organism or of their components. As seen above, patenting or other forms of exclusivity on plant varieties could cause diversity bottlenecks, because it subtract genetic traits from the common domain. As a substitute they suggest to pay and share the burden for local testing and propagation of new and old varieties.

Since breeding is often a very upstream process, I’m not sure that the costs of breeding could be shared by the market chain in a reasonable and effective way, without some form of patent. To avoid patenting of plant varieties, a good solution could be to support breeding with state funds. (Like it has been done widely in the past, and still now, to a lesser extent.)

For now, GMOs are not compatible

The position paper on organic breeding is mostly a crackdown on GMOs, on which I don’t completely agree. Especially since it contains statements on alleged risk to health that GMOs should pose. To be clear: to assume that genetically modified plants pose, by themselves, any direct threat to human health, is against any kind of evidence and against any kind of reasonable doubt.

Though, again, I think that a great caution on introducing Genetic Modification techniques into the seed market is totally justified, especially since GMO’s alleged benefits to agriculture feel at best like an overstatement. Thus I totally agree on IFOAM’s call for transparency in GMO documentation. And I also have to agree that GMO do not sound compatible with the decentralized breeding and propagation actions proposed and supported by IFOAM itself, at least at this moment.

A gentle approach

Organic farming groups might have found a way to gently reconciliate agriculture and biological diversity. Their method doesn’t come without doubts, for example: will organic breeding and farming it ever be applicable to overpopulated countries, maybe countries at risk of famine; but their manifesto contain great concepts, that we all can take inspiration from.

Indeed, decentralized breeding, propagation and testing, and encouraged reusing and sharing of seeds and varieties, could favour biological diversity in the field. Those are great policies by the organic farmer associations. Especially when combined with added value through certification and some form compatible legal protection.

Forms of legal protection that encourage biodiversity in breeding are indeed what I plan to discuss in the second part of this article, where I want to explore Public Domain Licenses for plant varieties.