Seeds aren't worth saving?
Seed banks under threat - Science Show - 2 October 2010
Audio file at link ^^^^
Transcript
Robyn Williams:Here on The Science Show we are always worried about banks, with good reason. But as Ella Finkel reported in last Friday's journal Science, it's our own seed banks we should watch out for.
Elizabeth Finkel: In case you didn't know, 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. But Australia doesn't have much to celebrate. In fact, 2010 might be remembered as the year yet another one of Australia's seed banks bit the dust. Most of us treasure biodiversity. We revel in the knowledge that there are thousands of varieties of apples or potatoes. Though of course, we've only ever seen a tiny number of them. While there are 30,000 edible species, just three provide 60% of the world's calories: wheat, rice and corn. Still we still need to hold on to the rest.
When diseases overwhelm commercial crops, breeders turn to their wild cousins to borrow resistance genes. Take the rust epidemic now threatening the world's wheat supply. It's the genes of Asian wheatgrass that are girding the loins of commercial wheat. And in the future as we run out of prime farming land, it is the hardy bush tuckers that we might have to tuck into. These unfarmed species are at risk as cities, rangelands and fast-spreading golf courses take over their habitats. By way of insurance, they need to be preserved in seed banks.
That's the idea behind Svalbard, the doomsday seed vault built into the permafrost on a Norwegian island a thousand kilometres from the North Pole. It is managed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and Australia is an avid supporter, having pledged $21.3 million to the cause.
But the doomsday vault is only part of the story. It is a back-up for the world's seed banks. And it is the seed banks that keep the global seed trade up and running. Without that trade, we'd all be sunk. For instance, in the 1980s, America's barley was hammered by a plague of barley yellow dwarf virus. Ethiopia's barley came to the rescue. To keep up a healthy world seed trade, seed banks have to actively regenerate and test their stocks. Many developing countries have trouble finding the funds to do that. And, it turns out, so too does Australia.
Not so long ago, Australia boasted six functioning seed banks across the states. They were supported by state funds as well as the rural research and development corporations, mostly the Grains Research and Development Corporation. Two years ago, the Grains Corp restricted funding to its core business; the commercial grain crops. That left some very important collections out in the cold, like the livestock forages (things like clover and lucerne), and Australia's wild relatives of crops.
The consequence? Seed banks have had to mothball those collections, ceasing the work of seed regeneration. That means their collections are slowly dying. Seeds have a finite lifetime of years to decades. The worst casualty has been the Adelaide bank which specialises in lucerne collected over decades from some of the worlds' most remote regions, collected by people like Geoff Auricht, the passionate curator, who passed away a few weeks ago from a brain tumour at the age of 49.
Two years ago, Auricht had to shut the banks' doors. 95% of his collection is held in no other bank. In some cases these seeds can no longer be found in their endemic countries due to warfare or habitat loss. That's been the case for Azerbaijan. But when they asked for some of their seed back, the Adelaide bank had to decline. That put Australia in breach of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. What happens when Australia needs to borrow wheat seed from Azerbaijan to help out with a new pest?
Queensland's seed bank, located in Biloela, stopped regenerating forages two years ago. Biloela boasted the best collection of tropical forages in the world, a result of six decades of collection from South America, South East Asia, and Africa. Biloela has also had to refuse requests from countries that originally allowed their seed to be collected, like Turkey and Papua New Guinea.
Another Biloela collection to be mothballed is the wild Vignas, the hardy legumes whose tasty tubers provided Aborigines with bush tucker. Professor Bob Lawn at James Cook University in Townsville collected many of them over decades. His students are making genetic maps of them, laying the groundwork for future breeding programs. Lawn sees these plants as the genetic resources for the future, for a hotter, drier Australia with saltier soils.
Now the Biloela bank is slated to close down entirely. Plans are underway to transfer the seeds to banks in Victoria and NSW. The Grains Corp will pay for the regeneration of the commercial crop varieties, like mung beans, but the forages, wild legumes and other unloved species like wild tobacco will be sitting in cold rooms and slowly dying, and so too the expert breeders who know how to regenerate them. Without salaries, they are disappearing.
Normally mild-manned agricultural scientists are panicking. They raised the alarm at a conference in Canberra last month. They warned that our banks were a crucial resource for Australian agriculture, both as insurance for the future and to trade with other countries under the terms of the international treaty. Without that trade we, a nation whose agriculture depends on exotic seed, are in trouble.
There have been 16 reviews of how to manage and fund our seed banks. The federal government even signed off on one of them. Nothing has happened. Now the Productivity Commission has just reviewed the rural research and development corporations. It proposed a new entity, Rural Research Australia that would target public good, addressing things like land, water and energy research. Perhaps seed banks might get a guernsey here?
If you have an opinion on the value of seed banks, the review is accepting comments till November 26th.
Robyn Williams: Dr Ella Finkel wrote about seed banks last week for the journal Science. She is also contributing editor of Cosmos magazine, which I see published on Friday something about the discovery of America by Aborigines from Australia. More about that next time.
