This book is an evidence-based and, in places, a personal account of the development of scientific plant breeding over the past two hundred years. The work is informed by my background and experiences as a biologist who, while largely trained in the UK, has also worked extensively in the USA, Germany, Australia and, more recently, in the Far East. It is the story of how breeding evolved from an empirical endeavour, practised for millennia by farmers and amateur enthusiasts, to become the globalised corporate agribusiness enterprise of today. I was moved to write this account after spending over two decades working at the interface of academic plant science and its practical application in crop breeding. During this time I have witnessed the steady erosion of plant breeding as a worthwhile and respected aspect of plant science, especially in the public sector. One of my principal motives in writing the book is to raise the profile of plant breeding as a valued and useful profession. I also wish to highlight some of the many imbalances that now bedevil our approach to breeding, some of which have coloured today's often contentious discourse on agriculture and crop improvement in general.

There are many misapprehensions, among scientists and the general public alike, about the way that plant breeders go about their business. In particular, the supposedly revolutionary nature of the ‘new’ (actually now more than two decades old) technologies of genetic engineering has been exaggerated by virtually everybody involved in the debate, whether they be researchers, politicians, agbiotech companies or anti-GM (genetic manipulation) campaigners.

Introduction

By the 1970s, the public sector was the overwhelmingly dominant force in plant science research and crop breeding throughout the world. In countries like the USA, there had been over a century of such a tradition, and most other industrialised countries had also witnessed many decades of public sector led agricultural improvement. The public sector model was also being embraced with enthusiasm by most developing countries, and the newly established CGIAR network was steadily extending the public-good improvement paradigm across the world. So why is it that, especially since the mid-1980s, we have witnessed such a strong resurgence of private sector involvement in crop improvement? Why is it that the private sector agenda, and especially the agbiotech paradigm, seems to dominate so much of today's plant breeding research and development (R&D)?

Introduction

It is frequently opined in the popular and scienctific media alike that crop production may have serious difficulties in coping with projected increases in the global human population over the next fifty years. It has also become commonplace to hear statements, from biotech companies, politicians and even some public sector scientists, that this putative crisis in food production can only be fully resolved by the global deployment of transgenic crops. Of course, over the past few centuries, we have repeatedly heard various Malthusian predictions about imminent famine, all of which have proven to be misplaced. As we saw in Chapter 4, it was forecasts of future famine that prompted the USDA to begin its programme of worldwide germplasm collections in the late nineteenth century. The spectre of overpopulation was a recurring theme during the twentieth century, but the most egregious instances of misguided predictions of imminent apocalypse occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Introduction

For almost twenty years, the appearance of a large number of sometimes radical new transgenic crop traits has supposedly been just around the corner, but none of these ‘wonder products’ has yet made it to large-scale commercial cultivation. One of the commonest criticisms of the agbiotech industry is that a few companies precipitously commercialised a narrow set of relatively trivial input traits in the mid-1990s, rather than waiting to develop a wider range of consumer-friendly product traits. In this chapter, we survey the new generation of transgenic traits now being developed, their prospects for success, and some possible alternative non-transgenic strategies to generate the same traits in commercial and subsistence crops. We will consider two categories of traits, namely: input traits, which affect how the crop is grown without changing the nature of the harvested product; and output traits, which change the quality of the crop product itself, e.g. by altering starch, protein, vitamin or oil composition.

Input traits

Almost the entire current portfolio of commercial transgenic crop varieties contains modifications to either or both of just two input traits: herbicide tolerance and/or insect resistance. However, these two examples are far from the most important yield-limiting input traits in most farming systems around the world. More important yield traits relate to other types of biotic (from other living organisms) or abiotic (from the non-living part of their environment) stresses encountered by plants.

Introduction

In this chapter, we consider some of the challenges facing both public and private sector plant breeding, as we move into the post-privatisation era of the early twenty-first century. For example, given the increasingly parlous state of public sector breeding, should the private sector now be considered as a major future provider of breeding-related R&D? After all, this already happens in other key areas of the economy. Nearly all pharmaceuticals are researched, developed and marketed by private companies that often enjoy near-monopoly status in their supply to consumers. In richer countries, these expensive products are generally disseminated, cheaply or freely, via taxpayer funded healthcare systems. If the public is willing to subsidise private sector dominance of the provision of life-saving drugs, why should our food supply be any different? The answer is that the current pharmaceutical industry paradigm is proving deeply flawed, especially in supplying cost-effective drugs to poorer consumers.

A particular problem with the present organisation of the pharmaceutical industry is that cash-poor governments in many developing countries cannot subsidise sales of expensive drugs to the poor. This becomes a serious issue with a major disease like AIDS, where the cost of medication is beyond the reach of most sufferers and the state.

Introduction

Following the lead of the Americans in the late nineteenth century, dozens of specialised public sector agricultural research institutes were set up around the world during the early years of the twentieth century. In countries like Germany and France, state-run agricultural experimental units had been established as early as the 1850s, but these were largely desultory, uncoordinated affairs in comparison with the US Land Grant and State Agricultural Experiment Stations networks. Most of the new European agricultural research centres were relatively small and tended to specialise in local crops, often under the control of a regional administration. This meant that breeders in such centres were often less aware of scientific developments in the wider world, many of which might have had useful application to their own crops. Unlike the USA, where much of the post nineteenth century agriculture was starting with a clean slate on largely virgin land with new crops, most of the farming in Europe occurred in the context of centuries of local and regional traditions that complicated broader strategic management by the nation state.

One solution that was applied in the Netherlands was to establish a single national centre of crop innovation. This Dutch initiative occurred at about the same time the US system was finally being completed in the early twentieth century.

Introduction

The ability of the plant breeder to create new genetic variation was enormously increased in the mid twentieth century by the invention of tissue culture and the use of growth regulators. Attempts at wide crossing, as discussed in the previous chapter, were often frustrated by the incompatibility of genomes from relatively distant species. Embryo rescue could sometimes help, but one of the most crucial advances came with the development of chemically induced chromosome doubling, which has been the key to the success of many crop breeding programmes. As well as making possible much wider genetic crosses, chromosome doubling has enabled the use of powerful methods such as somatic hybridisation and haploid breeding, which have been especially useful in developing countries. In the past few decades, the technique of mass propagation has also been of considerable benefit in breeding programmes for tree crops, most of which are too long lived to be accessible to the sorts of approaches developed for the much shorter lived annual crops.

Introduction

In this book, we have surveyed the evolution of modern plant breeding, and its application in crop improvement, over the past two centuries. We have examined crop improvement from a variety of scientific and socio-economic perspectives and have seen the sometimes surprising ways in which these interact to affect the trajectory of agriculture. Overall, there is no doubt that scientific plant breeding has been an outstanding success, enabling farmers to feed the more than seven-fold increase in the global human population that has occurred since 1800. But we have also seen that all is not well with plant breeding, especially in the public sector. Over recent years, researchers and some science policymakers have started to realise what breeders had been aware of since the early 1990s, namely that plant breeding is sliding ever more deeply into crisis. One of the key aims of this book has been to highlight such concerns, to explain their provenance, and to lay out some of the options that might allow us to surmount these challenges in the years to come.

In this final chapter, we will first consider some emerging ideas from the USA that were published after much of the present book had been written.

Introduction – privatisation exported

The wave of privatisations of plant breeding programmes gradually spread from the UK to other industrialised countries after the mid-1980s. As we saw in Chapter 8, much of the canola breeding programme in Canada was privatised with impressive dispatch during this period. In the USA, the funding of public sector plant breeding research remained more-or-less constant during the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, at a time when funding in the UK was already in steep decline. It was only after the mid-1990s that the decline seen in most other industrial countries eventually spread, albeit in less virulent form, to the USA. For example, in a 1996 study, it was found that there had been a reduction of about 12 scientist-years in plant breeding research in the US SAES system from 1990–1994, and a corresponding growth of 160 scientist-years in the private plant breeding sector. In a recent review, breeder William Tracey of the University of Wisconsin at Madison has noted the decline in the status and role of plant breeders in the USA and depressingly opines that within a few years: ‘Plant breeders will exist as technicians for [genetic] engineering programs.’ However, on the plus side, it appears that public sector plant breeding research has survived in far better shape in the USA compared to other industrialised nations.

Introduction

We have seen that the major driving force behind the massive private sector expansion into crop development of the 1980s and 1990s was the development of transgenic crops. Unlike other types of crop, transgenic varieties could be protected via the utility patent route, which gave a much more powerful form of ownership than plant breeders' rights. Companies who wished to develop transgenic crops were further assisted by a relatively lax patenting regime, especially before 1995. During this period, many patents were granted that, even at the time, were recognised as being of inordinate breadth in the scope of their claims. Therefore, the emergence of the private sector as the dominant player in crop breeding was stimulated by the conjunction of new legislation and new technologies, the combination of which allowed companies to develop potentially lucrative business models in a hitherto rather unprofitable area of agricultural commerce. The much trumpeted entry of the private sector en masse into the marketplace for crop improvement came at a time when many governments in industrialised countries were seeking to shed much of their public sector enterprises via the mechanism of privatisation. We will examine this topic in more detail, especially in regard to UK plant breeding research, in the next chapter.

Introduction

In this and subsequent chapters of Parts and, we will follow the evolution of plant breeding research over the past two centuries. Many changes in the conduct of plant breeding have occurred in response to the increasing input of scientific knowledge. But it has also been deeply influenced by wider changes in the organisation of the societies and cultures in which such research activities are embedded. In the modern world, it seems positively invidious to make a distinction between those who discover new knowledge and those who apply it to create new and useful products, such as improved crops. Both are part of a single process of the acquisition and exploitation (for whatever purpose) of knowledge. They form a single continuum, the extreme points of which may appear quite distinct, but are in reality linked with each other by a series of tightly linked intermediate stages. The processes involved in the discovery and subsequent application of scientific knowledge in a subject such as plant biology have always been inextricably linked. It seems that these lessons may have been forgotten by some scientists, as their disciplines were professionalised and in some cases removed from an immediate context of societal relevance as the twentieth century progressed.

The purpose of this book is to examine the wider scientific and social contexts of modern plant breeding and agriculture. We will begin by examining the historical development of plant breeding over the past two centuries, before focusing on the dramatic changes of the last two decades. Perhaps the best-known recent development in plant breeding is the emergence of genetic engineering, with its attendant social and scientific controversies. But, as we shall see, GM crops and ‘agbiotech’ (agricultural biotechnology) are just one manifestation of a more extensive series of seismic changes that have profoundly altered the course of plant breeding since the 1980s. Today, in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, plant breeding and crop improvement are at an historic crossroads. On one hand, are the tried and tested breeding methods that underpinned the Green Revolution and enabled us to feed the expanding world populations in the twentieth century. More recently, however, governments across the world have largely dismantled their applied research infrastructures and have greatly reduced the capacity for public-good applications of newly emerging breeding technologies, including transgenesis. Much of this institutional restructuring occurred as part of the ideologically driven privatisation of public assets in the 1980s and 1990s. The resulting depletion of public sector breeding has left a void that was filled by a few private sector companies who applied a new paradigm of crop improvement based on transgenesis – and from this, the agbiotech revolution was born.