Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash
By AFP - Agence France Presse
The seed industry hopes innovation can sow the seeds of success
Agriculture can find solutions to combat the negative impacts of climate change on crops, but only if the sector can innovate, the head of the International Seed Federation told AFP.
“Farmers must constantly adapt” as climate change ‘brings new diseases to the fields’ and challenges the agricultural sector with water shortages, ISF Secretary General Michael Keller told AFP during a recent meeting of the federation in Geneva.
Meanwhile, “the world is permanently losing arable land” due to climate change, which causes excessive rainfall in some regions and desertification in others, he explained, also pointing to the increased use of concrete.
Faced with the climate crisis and food insecurity, the world needs to find ways to “increase productivity,” said Keller, for whom “the call is very clear: let's innovate, but let's also use all the existing tools in terms of selection methods.”
The ISF, which represents the main global seed companies, is particularly in favor of developing the so-called new breeding techniques known as NBTs.
These techniques alter the genetic makeup of plants, for example, using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which can edit the genes of animals, plants and micro-organisms with extreme precision by cutting into the DNA.
This means that there are no external additions, unlike genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and transgenics.
NBTs are a battleground between those who believe these biotechnologies are essential for tackling climate change and those who want them to remain strictly regulated, like GMOs, fearing what might happen when plants derived from them spread into the wild.
In June, the countries of the European Union gave up voting on a text that would deregulate these genetic biotechnologies due to a lack of support.
Meanwhile, in France, the food safety agency Anses recommended, in March, a “case by case” evaluation before putting anything on the market.
“We need to innovate,” and innovation needs to be done ‘faster and faster,’ said Keller, calling for new varieties to be developed in the next five years, rather than 10 to 15 years.
“The more selection methods we have at our fingertips, the more we will be able to bring new solutions to farmers,” he said.
Although biodiversity is “a priority for the seed sector,” Keller emphasized the importance of companies having access to plant genetic resources.
Earlier this month, the COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, approved the creation of a fund through which profits from the digitally sequenced genetic data of animals and plants will be shared with their communities of origin.
Companies that profit from this data will pay into the “Cali Fund.”
The 196 nations present at COP16 hope that the mechanism will raise billions of dollars to finance nature protection.
The measures are “extremely important” because they refer to “access and use of digital information, access to knowledge” and not to the genetic resource itself, Keller stressed.
However, he stressed the need for greater “clarity” and “predictability,” warning that there are still “many grey areas” about how the mechanism would work and how a company could prove that it “did not use” the information.
The digital sequencing of information on genetic resources - usually extracted from species found in poor countries - is used, among other things, to produce medicines and cosmetics that can earn their developers billions.
Few, if any, benefits from the data - usually downloaded from freely accessible online databases - reach the communities that discovered the usefulness of a species in the first place.
apo/rjm/nl/bc
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