Farmers and Plant Breeding

Current Approaches and Perspectives

Ola Tveitereid Westengen, Tone Winge, Ola Tveitereid Westengen, Tone Winge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138580428
• eBook ISBN: 9780429017001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This book presents the history of, and current approaches to, farmer-breeder collaboration in plant breeding, situating this work in the context of sustainable food systems, as well as national and international policy and law regimes.

Plant breeding is essential to food production, climate-change adaptation and sustainable development. This book brings together experienced practitioners and researchers involved in collaborative breeding programmes across a diversity of crops and agro-ecologies around the world. Case studies include collaborative sorghum and pearl millet breeding for water-stressed environments in West Africa, participatory rice breeding for intensive rice farming in the Mekong Delta, and evolutionary participatory quinoa breeding for organic agriculture in North America. While outlining the challenges, the volume also highlights the positive impacts, such as yield increases, farmers' empowerment in the innovation and development processes, contributions to maintenance of crop genetic diversity and adaptation to climate change. This collection offers a range of perspectives on enabling conditions for farmer–breeder collaboration in plant breeding in relation to biodiversity agreements such as the Plant Treaty, trade agreements and related intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes, and national seed policies and laws.

Relevant to a wide audience, including practitioners with experience in plant breeding and management of crop genetic resources and those with a broader interest in agriculture and development, as well as students of international cooperation and development, this volume is a timely addition to the literature.

Part I

Introduction

1 New perspectives on farmer–breeder collaboration in plant breeding

Ola Tveitereid Westengen and Tone Winge

Adapting plant breeding: productivity, sustainability and empowerment

Crop improvement is essential for adapting agriculture to changing environmental conditions and human needs. Modern plant breeding has succeeded in developing higher-yielding varieties of staple crops, contributing substantially to the productivity increase of global agriculture – first in the modernization of agriculture in the Global North in the early twentieth century and later during the ‘Green Revolution’ underway in the Global South since the 1960s (Evenson and Gollin, 2003). Today, however, plant breeding faces a different and arguably more complex agricultural research and development agenda than during earlier waves of agricultural modernization.

In the last decade, sustainability science has produced compelling evidence of the need for agri-food systems research and development to address a broader suite of goals than traditionally. In addition to providing the genetic basis for continued productivity increase, crop research must also contribute to agri-food systems that improve the nutritional value and environmental and societal sustainability of food systems (Foley et al., 2011; Foresight, 2011; Godfray et al., 2010; Pingali, 2012; Pretty et al., 2018; Springmann et al., 2018; Willett et al., 2019). A more mundane but no less consequential framing of the objectives for agri-food system development is reflected in the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2: ‘End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture’ (UN, 2018). The SDGs provide new perspectives, as well as new metrics for gauging development. Here it is not only countries with low GDPs that face development and sustainability challenges, but also those with high GDPs and large ecological footprints.

In virtually all high-level calls for making food systems more sustainable, the development of new crop varieties features prominently as an important part of the strategy – but, with the overarching focus on system outcomes, the sustainability science literature has remained largely silent on the modalities of how these varieties are to be developed and disseminated. However, ideas and evidence on approaches to agricultural innovation are available from other academic and practice fields. Research on technology development and dissemination has shown that agricultural innovation consists of complex, non-linear processes embedded in social, institutional and economic processes, better conceptualized as ‘innovation systems’ (Hall et al., 2001; Klerkx et al., 2012; Thompson and Scoones, 2009).

Together, the food security, sustainability and innovation-system perspectives indicate three dimensions that plant breeding must relate to as part of the new agenda for sustainable agro-food system development: productivity, sustainability and empowerment. Thus, the starting point for this book is not whether plant breeding should play a key role in the necessary transformation of the food system, but how plant breeding can be organized to contribute to the development agenda of our times. We seek to showcase the diversity and achievements of types of plant breeding that involve farmers in the breeding process.

Ever since they were first described in the literature in the early 1990s (see Berg and Westengen, Chapter 2 in this volume), programmes referred to as ‘Participatory Plant Breeding’ (PPB), have had the objectives of releasing high-yielding varieties, along with enhancing sustainability and farmer empowerment. The contributions of PPB have since been widely recognized, including by institutions and actors associated with the conventional Green Revolution approach to plant breeding. For example, the 2007 World Development Report favourably described PPB as ‘a complementary institutional development’ to conventional crop improvement programmes; further noting: ‘decentralised and participatory approaches allow farmers to select and adapt technologies to local soil and rainfall patterns and to social and economic conditions, using indigenous knowledge as well’ (World Bank, 2007: 160).

Yet, a decade after the 2007–2008 food-price spikes which brought food security and agriculture back onto the international policy agenda, the Green Revolution model and the accompanying ‘feed the world’ narrative have continued to be the dominant agricultural development pathway promoted (Andersson and Sumberg, 2017; Clapp, 2017; Frison, 2016; Westengen and Banik, 2016). Do dominant actors today see farmer involvement as a luxury we cannot afford, now that population growth and climate change are requiring swift returns on investments from plant breeding? The cases presented in this book, diverse in their socio-economic and agro-ecological settings, firmly reject that premise. On the contrary, the chapters show that much is to be gained by these approaches across the agri-food system dimensions that we need to address in the coming decades.

This book is divided into four main parts. This first part presents the history of farmer involvement in plant breeding; the second part showcases the diversity of current plant-breeding programmes that promote farmer involvement. The third part focuses on overarching concerns related to programme sustainability, while the fourth and final part situates participatory plant-breeding approaches within national and international legal contexts. We present these parts and their chapters in further detail, after a brief overview of different approaches to farmer involvement and existing frameworks for distinguishing among them.

Farmer–breeder collaboration in plant breeding: definitions and differences

Various interrelated frameworks for categorizing and assessing plant-breeding approaches have been developed (Almekinders and Hardon, 2006; Ashby, 2009; Jones et al., 2014; Lilja and Ashby, 1999; Morris and Bellon, 2004; Sperling et al., 2001; Weltzien et al., 2003). Ashby (2009) has distinguished five categories, based on the division of decision-making between farmers and scientists, and to what extent co-production of new knowledge is promoted. Conventional plant breeding is classified as plant breeding without farmer participation: the decisions are taken solely by scientists. At the other end of the spectrum is what Ashby (2009) calls farmer experimentation, also known as farmer breeding (Morris and Bellon 2004): farmers make the decisions, without scientist participation. Almekinders and Hardon (2006) remind us that farmers have historically been the major plant breeders, and that it is actually a question of ‘bringing farmers back into breeding’. It is between these two opposing ends of the spectrum – conventional breeding and farmer breeding – that various types of farmer–breeder interaction are classified. Sperling et al. (2001) and Ashby (2009) operate with three major categories: consultative, collegial, and collaborative. In consultative plant breeding, scientists are the decision-makers, but there is organized communication with farmers about their opinions, varietal preferences and priorities. In collegial plant breeding, it is the other way around: farmers make the decisions, but are informed about the priorities and research hypotheses of scientists through organized communication. It is the last category, collaborative plant breeding, which best promotes co-production of knowledge, as ‘decision-making authority is shared between farmers and scientists based on organized communication between the two groups’ (Ashby, 2009: 655).

Farmer involvement can take place at various stages of the plant-breeding process. If varietal release/distribution is included among these (Ashby, 2009), three main stages emerge: design, testing and diffusion. In Sperling et al. (2001) the stages are more technically defined as follows: setting breeding targets; generating or accessing variation; selecting in segregating populations; variety testing and characterization; interaction with seed systems. One of the most common types of farmer involvement in plant breeding, Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS), focuses mainly on the variety testing stage.

In addition to the five categories and the stages of farmer involvement, Sperling et al. (2001) and Weltzien et al. (2003) distinguish among breeding programmes, in terms of the institutional context, the biosocial environment, the ‘degree’ or ‘nature’ of participation achieved, and the goals in question. It makes a difference whether a breeding programme is organized by a non-governmental organization (NGO) or an International Agricultural Research Centre (IARC); whether it is designed for poor farmers in low-potential areas or for better-off farmers in high-potential areas; and whether the main goal is productivity increase, maintenance of genetic diversity, or farmer empowerment. In addition, crop type and its reproduction biology and agroecology shape the options for farmer involvement.

It is also important to recognize that the term ‘participatory’ often is misused in development discourse. Issues of legitimacy, justice, power relationships and gender and other group differences are sometimes concealed when actors claim to use ‘participatory methods’ (Kapoor, 2002). If participatory plant breeding becomes merely an approach for testing varieties developed by professional breeders in order to gain legitimacy with regard to donor policies etc., it might more correctly be called ‘manipulative’, not ‘consultative’ (Jones et al., 2014).

Nevertheless, PPB remains the most commonly used term when referring to plant breeding programmes that involve some type of farmer–breeder collaboration – but its precise meaning must be outlined on a case-by-case basis. Comparing programmes that differ along all these axes can too easily become a matter of comparing apples and pears. Thus, in this volume we have deliberately not opted for one common terminology: instead, we attempt to showcase the diversity of the field by presenting perspectives and approaches on their own terms.

Current approaches to farmer–breeder collaboration

The case chapters in Part II describe programme contexts and the approaches taken, including objectives, types and stages of farmer participation, impacts and outcomes. The cases presented differ in their objectives for involving farmers in plant breeding – from production-oriented objectives such as higher adoption rates of high-yielding varieties, to enhanced in-situ conservation of crop diversity and farmer empowerment. The role of farmers also varies along that spectrum, from participation in varietal evaluation to active participation in all stages of the breeding process.

Together, the eight chapters in Part II cover a wide range of crops in various agro-ecological zones around the world. Although these cases represent merely a selection of all the plant breeding with farmer involvement being undertaken across the globe, they illustrate both the variety of approaches taken and the impressive results that are possible. Programmes and projects also vary in geographical reach: some operate in one country, or a part of one country, whereas others are regional in scope. Also with regard to their timelines, the cases presented vary greatly: some have been implemented for around two decades, whereas others have been initiated much more recently.

The regional initiatives are presented first. In Chapter 3, Weltzien et al. describe a long-term programme for farmer–breeder collaboration on sorghum and pearl-millet breeding in West Africa. The programme was initiated in 1998, and the chapter focuses on the efforts and results in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The authors argue that the long-term nature of variety development necessitates long-term collaborative efforts. They also explain that the long-term perspective of the programme in question required institutional collaboration with farmer cooperatives and other farmer organizations, which helped to ensure programme sustainability. Programme results include formally released varieties in all three countries, large-scale dissemination of seed, and enhanced varietal diversity in farmers’ fields.

In Chapter 4, Witcombe, Virk and Joshi report from programmes on maize and rice breeding in India and Nepal. Their chapter presents the pragmatic approach to farmer involvement which they call ‘highly client-oriented plant breeding’, which they see as related to the aim of widespread adoption. The focus is on the scientific argument for using few, but carefully chosen, crosses. Such an approach is central to participatory methods, according to these authors, and is linked to greater likelihood of success. The breeding programmes they describe have led to well-documented, high adoption rates of the resulting varieties, some of which have been officially released and are now widely cultivated.

Another programme with both regional outreach and long-standing experience is AfricaRice, with its PVS efforts. In Chapter 5, Tyack et al. explain how the poor results achieved by the Green Revolution in tropical Africa led AfricaRice to pursue a participatory approach to rice breeding from 1996. Together with its national partners, AfricaRice has conducted widespread PVS trials in member countries for the purpose of rapid multi-location evaluation and dissemination of new varieties. As a result of these regional PVS efforts, more than 100 varieties have been released during the last decade alone. Other results reported include increased yields, higher farmer incomes and reduced poverty.

Maize is an essential crop in Mexico, and in Chapter 6, Willcox et al. present various participatory approaches to maize breeding there. They focus on what they refer to as Community-Based Landrace Improvement and ‘the three-step method’, but other approaches to involving farmers – for example, in mass selection, limited backcrossing, and breeder-family formation and selection – are discussed as well. Their chapter also provides thought-provoking examples of how connecting with culinary markets in general, and chefs at high-end restaurants in particular, can provide useful pathways for improving the livelihoods of the small-scale cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Introduction
• PART II: Current approaches to farmer–breeder collaboration
• PART III: Overarching concerns and new perspectives
• PART IV: Collaborative approaches: international and national legal contexts
• Index