Plant Breeding Reviews, Volume 36

Jules Janick

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118345849
• eBook ISBN: 9781118358597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Botany
• Index: Biological Sciences

Plant Breeding Reviews presents state-of-the-art reviews on plant genetics and the breeding of all types of crops by both traditional means and molecular methods. Many of the crops widely grown today stem from a very narrow genetic base; understanding and preserving crop genetic resources is vital to the security of food systems worldwide. The emphasis of the series is on methodology, a fundamental understanding of crop genetics, and applications to major crops. It is a serial title that appears in the form of one or two volumes per year.

Chapter 1

Dedication: Rodomiro Ortiz Plant Breeder, Catalyst for Agricultural Development

Jonathan H. Crouch

Agrinovis Ltd. London, UK

I. Preamble

Rodomiro Ortiz stands in a field of plantains in the Niger delta surrounded by a small group of young Nigerian technicians and the air is charged with excitement. His face drips with sweat in the heavy humidity and his legs are spread wide to ensure nothing unsettles his decisiveness. This is selection time, Ortiz-style!

He is armed with a clipboard, pencil, and the all important short ruler while Josephine Okoro and Boniface Dumpe each shout out their designated data classes in rapid succession. And to one side, Mark Yamah waits to deliver the single swing of his machete that would mark the end of yet another genotype based on just one word from the boss: “cut”! And woe betide any one who gave the wrong data or if Mark misheard that heavy Spanglish pronunciation of the alternative command: “keep”! For there was no turning back once the machete was in flight, just a split second pause while gravity took hold and the 10 ft tall giant crashed to the ground. Not pausing for breath, they move straight on to the next, for they have at least another 200 genotypes to get through that day. Ortiz would drive his team through that field with the precision and timing of a military operation: at the end of it all, you could be forgiven for thinking that a hurricane had passed through. For breeding is a numbers game and Rodomiro was not about to compromise his experimental designs just because of the size of the plantain crop.

These were the early days of the Ortiz era in the Plantain and Banana Improvement Program (PBIP) of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) at Onne Station, southeast Nigeria. From this scene, anyone would have thought Rodomiro had been doing this all his life, but in fact this was the first season he had done selections on his own. And like so many of his reincarnations to come, he had hit the ground running, and the seismic waves of change were not far behind. I too was in that crowd alongside Josphine and Boniface, a fresh postdoc just landed in Africa looking for the impossible: a rigorous scientific environment, meaningful impacts for the poor, and a bit of adventure. For my luck, Rodomiro was dispensing it all by the truckload, and from the very first moment we met I was in awe of this intellectual giant and his swashbuckling taming of Musa breeding and genetics. Southeast Nigeria was a tough posting by anyone's standards but for me this baptism by fire into the world of international agriculture and tropical crop breeding could not have been more exhilarating. And Rodomiro's relentless night and day toil in that humid rain forest would soon bring him global recognition through his role in the team winning the King Baudouin Award in 1994 and through reaching the finals of the Prince Asturias Award in 1997 for his personal achievements.

So how did a Peruvian son of a civil servant, brother of two lawyers and an accountant find himself in a field of plantains in Nigeria? The story of how he got there is almost as incredible as the man himself, only surpassed by the career he carved for himself over the following two decades. Rodomiro was fascinated by mathematics, logic, and perfection from a very early age but drawn to the field of biology as a teenager and from there into genetics, statistics, and plant breeding. Driven to fight for his political ideology at university in ways few of us can imagine yet then motivated to spend the rest of his life trying to help resource-poor small-scale farmers across the developing world, especially in Africa. What Rodomiro has achieved in the last 20 years since finishing his Ph.D., few of us dare dream of achieving in our entire lifetime. And thus, it is fitting that he should receive the accolade of a dedicatory chapter at a time when we fully expect to see at least another 20 years of reaching ever new heights of achievement.

Rodomiro Ortiz is well known by so many across such a broad range of research topics, that his area of expertise almost defies definition. He has been involved in basic, strategic and applied research in 27 species although a large proportion of his publications have been associated with his primary passion for genetics, genetic resources, and crop improvement. Rodomiro has worked on cereals (maize, barley, wheat, sorghum, pearl millet), legumes (chickpea, groundnut, cowpea, soybean, pigeonpea, white lupin), Solanaceae (Capsicum pepper, potato, tomato), clonal crops (sweetpotato, cassava, yam, plantain, banana), fruits (blueberry, cranberry, lingonberry, sweet cherry), as well as Brassica, Napier grass, annatto, and quinoa.

Rodomiro's major research achievements range from the definition of core collections of genetic resources for eight different crop species, elucidating the genetic basis of more than 20 agronomic traits in Musa, determining meiotic behavior during interploidy crosses in three different genera, and, introgression of pest and disease resistance from wild species to cultivated germplasm in two different crop groups. In addition, he has developed biometrical models to dissect quantitative trait variation in polyploid species and evaluated the gene action underlying economically important traits in order to develop new techniques to improve breeding efficiency. Finally, he has formulated evolutionary crop breeding approaches using landraces and wild species for the genetic betterment of cultivated gene pools of Musa and tuber-bearing Solanum. These research activities have led to over 250 journal papers, including over 100 as first author and nearly 30 in Theoretical and Applied Genetics. In addition, he has authored over 100 book chapters, monographs and policy briefs, over 200 conference proceedings papers and abstracts, and over 150 newsletter and technical articles (including manuals and bulletins).

Rodomiro's breeding efforts have concentrated on the utilization of wild species and landraces for the development of elite progenitors and cultivars adapted to the environmental conditions in which they would be grown. This included selection for quality traits, disease and pest resistance, and efficient mineral nutrient uptake in addition to yield parameters. He has employed conventional, modified, and novel techniques for germplasm enhancement. Throughout the last decade he has pursued an active interest in the application of molecular biology and genetic transformation in crop improvement. This has led him to author many reviews on modern plant breeding techniques and to appear in many newspaper, radio, and television reports and interviews on the subject. He has become especially renowned for his simple and unbiased perspectives on the pros and cons of genetically modified (GM) food.

Alongside his research and breeding activities, he has held a range of senior management positions where he directed a diverse range of research programs focused on sexually and vegetatively propagated crops, in annual and perennial production systems including many of the most important food crops of the developing world: wheat, maize, sorghum, millet, cassava, yams, plantains, bananas, cowpea, soybean, chickpea, groundnut, and pigeonpea. This has led him to visit no less than 90 countries, managing projects in a large proportion, while developing strong collaborators and loyal friends in many. More recently he has also become a leading voice in systems-based agricultural research, particularly related to climate change and biofuels.

This deep and extensive firsthand experience of research and breeding across the developing world combined with his rigorous scientific process and dedication to institutional improvement, together with his huge global professional network has led to him being widely considered as one of the most important thought leaders and catalysts in international agricultural development for resource-poor small-scale farmers.

II. Early Years

A. Formative Experiences

Rodomiro Octavio Ortiz Ríos was born on 28 July 1958 in Lima, Peru, the first son of Juan Rodomiro Ortiz Bernardini and Otilia Soledad Ríos Higginson. Rodomiro grew up alongside two older sisters and a younger brother, all overachievers. San Antonio de Padua, a private Canadian primary school in Lima run by nuns and priests, was to put Rodomiro on a critically important path. He became fluent in English and was quickly attracted to mathematics. Rodomiro recalls “I enjoyed math at school because it was so logical, there was no way of making a mistake if you followed the right procedure.” The same sense of logic, precision, process, and order was also the appeal when he later discovered the field of genetics, and was to become a fundamental part of the Ortiz brand throughout his research and management careers.

At the age of 11, Rodomiro moved to “San Andres” secondary school established in Lima under the auspices of the Free Church of Scotland. The school had a partnership with a Scottish textile company that had expanded its operation into Peru. The school was founded by a Scottish missionary, John Mackay, with a reputation for almost military discipline but also for promoting the principles of democracy that appealed to his father. In addition, this was a school that produced leaders, former pupils going on to become famous intellectuals, scientists, artists, and investment bankers but also high-level ranking officers of the armed forces and even the 84th President of Peru.

A discussion of Rodomiro's formative years would not be complete without tracing the origin of his tendency to write using a small ruler. His mother recounts that Rodomiro's fixation with tidiness started when he was very young. This is clearly the origin of his infamous clean-desk policy but the straight writing habit had an additional driver. It stems from his desire to be the best student at junior school and his decision to adopt the approaches of the leading contenders. This epitomizes Rodomiro's approach to life; constantly on the lookout for ideas and new approaches for improvement of his own performance, which he would subsequently apply to helping those around him.

Mathematics and the competitive spirit were dominant themes in the Ortiz household. By the time he had started secondary school, his father was practicing math with him from 5 o'clock in the morning. Young Rodomiro also became interested in researching topics to feed his inquisitiveness through reading, often into the early hours. Thus, a pattern of late night and early morning studying was to emerge as a defining way of life.

On Easter Sunday 1971 shortly before his 13th birthday, Rodomiro made an unexpected yet emphatic decision that was to have a significant impact on his next decade. On the way to church that day, he had what he describes as his “religious crisis” and announced to his strongly Catholic family that he was going to stop attending church from that day. Rodomiro recounts that the next day his father took him aside and said “If you have decided not to follow any religion, then its important that you read the teachings of other great schools of thought.” And from that point began to feed him books from the great thinkers of philosophy, psychology, and politics, from Plato to Marx and Engels, and Freud to Gramsci. Much of this was highly topical in Peru at this time as the country was undergoing dramatic political changes throughout Rodomiro's teenage years. The coup of the late 1960s had delivered a military dictatorship with left-leaning policies that were leading to substantial changes across the country including nationalizing companies, driving land reform and giving rights to the workers. And thus was born Rodomiro's fascination with history and current affairs, something that would lead him into profound experiences during his university years and ultimately drive him to move to Africa.

Although Rodomiro's parents put no pressure on him regarding his choice of career, nevertheless, he seemed preoccupied during his early teenage years with what he was going to do with his life. However, once he had made the decision in his late teens to pursue a career in biology, his mother noticed that he became dramatically more committed to studying. Sadly at the end of his school years, his father had a major heart attack and Rodomiro spent many hours with him daily while he was recovering in hospital. His mother recalls from this time that Rodomiro always had two things with him in the hospital; a biology textbook (studying for the university entrance exam) and a football (soccer) magazine.

B. University in Peru

In April 1975, Rodomiro joined the Universidad Nacional Agraria at La Molina (UNALM) in Lima to study biology having recorded the second highest entrance exam mark from over 200 candidates. This feat is all the more impressive given that Rodomiro refused to attend special classes to prepare for the university entrance exam, preferring to do it his own way. This strong self-confidence in his ability to work things out himself has never deserted him since.

Two individuals had a particularly important role in his decision to specialize in genetics at university. First, Prof. Francisco Delgado de la Flor, an agronomist by training who had become the chancellor of another university in his early thirties and later returned to UNALM in the 1970s as Professor of Genetics and Horticulture and Head of the Vegetable Research Program (he was also twice elected in the 1990s as Chancellor of the university). Second, Prof. Emma Loza, Rodomiro's undergraduate advisor and cytogenetics lecturer, who had taken the cytogenetics course with Prof. Peloquin at the University of Wisconsin (UW), where Rodomiro would ultimately carry out his own Ph.D. research.

Throughout most of his undergraduate years, Rodomiro was President of the Centro de Desarrollo Social (CEDES) and a member of the Peruvian Local Committee of the World University Service (WUS, SUM), which were both nongovernment organizations (NGOs) mobilizing students to do social work. During this time, Rodomiro was also a member of the Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service (CCSVI) associated at that time with the United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO). His role as CEDES president gave him his first international trip in November 1980, traveling to India for a youth congress of voluntary organizations and the annual meeting of CEDES umbrella organization. During this trip, Rodomiro also took the opportunity to stop in Paris to visit o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contributers
• Chapter 1: Dedication: Rodomiro Ortiz Plant Breeder, Catalyst for Agricultural Development
• Chapter 2: Phenotyping, Genetic Dissection, and Breeding for Drought and Heat Tolerance in Common Wheat: Status and Prospects
• Chapter 3: Nutritionally Enhanced Staple Food Crops
• Chapter 4: Genetic Management of Virus Diseases in Peanut
• Chapter 5: Common Bean Breeding in the Tropics
• Chapter 6: New Approaches to Cassava Breeding
• Color Plates
• Subject Index
• Cumulative Subject Index
• Cumulative Contributor Index