The basic currency of agricultural progress, plant genetic material, is undervalued and under threat in Australia, the immediate past president of Bioversity International believes.
Tony Gregson, currently the chair of Plant Health Australia, said despite 15 reviews of Australia’s six gene banks since 1976, nothing has been done to stop the stagnation of an irreplaceable resource.
The collections are in danger largely because of lack of funding to provide the necessary maintenance and renewal of the plant material.
Dr Gregson understands that only the grains collections is in good shape, thanks in part to the fact that the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) is the only industry body to contribute towards maintaining the nation’s plant genetic resources.
On the other hand, Dr Gregson believes the pasture collections could disappear because of lack of funding from industry bodies and dwindling funding from governments.
“At stake is the future of our food security,” said Dr Gregson, who has a mixed winter crop and wool farm near Warracknabeal, Victoria.
“In those gene banks are genes that will be useful in the future, particularly given the pressures that are going to come upon us with climate change, water stress, pests and diseases.”
In 1996-97, the Australian chickpea crop was virtually wiped out by ascochyta blight.
Dr Gregson said that farmers can now grow ascochyta-resistant chickpeas because the national chickpea collection contained varieties with genetic resistance to the blight.
A more formidable threat is the UG99 wheat rust, named because it emerged in Uganda in 1999, which has the potential to wipe out the world’s wheat crops.
Overseas researchers have already developed UG99-resistant wheats, and Australia’s considerable wheat collections may have to be drawn upon if the rust emerges here.
Even if Australia’s collections were let go, it should ideally have a backup in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the “Doomsday Vault”, built underground near the Arctic Circle in Norway to protect millions of seeds from catastrophic disaster ranging from earthquakes to nuclear war.
Despite Australia providing significant funding to the Svalbard Vault, it currently has no germplasm in the facility.
Dr Gregson believes some of the material in Australian collections is irreplaceable, because it can be no longer accessed in the wild or is found nowhere else in the world.
“That’s the real tragedy: it’s not as though we can forget about this material for 10 or 20 years and then go out and put it all together again. That’s not going to be possible.”
There are two parts to a resolution of the issue, in Dr Gregson’s view.
One is to establish an adequate funding model for Australia’s PGRCs, with 50 per cent coming from government and 50pc from the industry whose interests are most at stake in each collection.
But Dr Gregson also wants to see construction of a national database cataloguing the contents of the PGRCs in an internationally-compatible format, as a “gateway for the global PGR network”.
Australia’s interests have long been served by the gene banks of other countries, he said; it’s time to give others access to our resources in kind, and open up two-way trade in a resource of inestimable value.
* Tony Gregson will be a key speaker at the Crawford Fund Conference on Biodiversity and Food Security in Canberra this week.
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