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 ost people don't keep their savings at home. They deposit them in a bank--in agriculture's case that's a gene bank for saved seed.
Generally, those savings stay there until it's time to make the occasional withdrawal. Few of us forget what we've put in, or what we had planned to do with our savings. It isn't always so with seeds, however.
Sure, the seed bank categorizes and records very carefully what was collected, by whom, and where it came from. What isn't necessarily known in 10 or so years' time when a plant breeder comes along to make a withdrawal is how the plants grown from those seeds formed an integral part of the local environment from which they were collected. Information or local knowledge of how they were exploited may have been lost, reducing the opportunities to again make them serve a new purpose in modern variety development.
Gene banks will continue to serve their vital role ex situ but an alternative approach is to be developed in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region, thanks to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and its General Environment Facility (GEF). As a result of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the GEF was set up to fund projects in four basic areas, including biodiversity, identified as of particular importance by the Summit. Now, it has set up a "Conservation and Sustainable use of Dryland Agrobiodiversity Project" with the aim of conserving the building blocks of plant genetic resources on-site through cooperation at farm and village level.
In this way it is envisaged that local knowledge will be retained together with the long-established farmer-bred, local varieties (landraces) and their wild relatives which hold promise for use in future plant breeding crosses.
Currently, it is these very species and plants which are under threat from man; sometimes because farmers are improving their production by adopting new modern varieties which crowd out their predecessors. At other times, land reclamation destroys habitat or because livestock owners, either through ignorance or necessity, overgraze vulnerable land.
The rich diversity of plants in WANA makes it an ideal choice for a pioneering project aimed at retaining landraces and wild relatives of a number of staple crops, including cereals, legumes, and fruit trees. In situ conservation is a recent concept now to be elevated to a dynamic process of conservation with sustainable use of the genetic diversity in target environments, along with the related local knowledge.
GEF coordinator Ms Inger Andersen, of the UNDP, believes safeguarding a diverse and wide-ranging genetic base for food plants strengthens food security in the arid and semi-arid areas. The conservation of biodiversity in farmer-grown cereals and other crop varieties, as well as the progenitors and wild relatives of these food plants, is particularly important.
Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, and Syria are taking part in the Agrobiodiversity Project at national and local level, while the regional component is
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being implemented by ICARDA in cooperation with the Damascus-based Arab Center for Studies of the Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD) and the Rome-based International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI), which has a regional office at ICARDA headquarters in Syria.
Agriculture has its origins in the ICARDA region which is well known for its diverse natural flora. Sites have been chosen at Ajlun and Muwaggar in Jordan, Baalbeck and Aarsal in Lebanon, Hebron and Jenin in Palestine, and Slenfeh and Suweida in Syria. Farmers and local communities will be asked for help in identifying indigenous species, and encouraged to maintain the populations within the project sites.
This will be done using either field margins or buffer strips--closed off using previously-cleared stones--to form retaining habitats for wild relatives. Farmers will be encouraged to keep grazing livestock away from these strips at crucial stages such as flowering. Since the loss of any land, even for worthy causes, has a knock-on effect on income, the project will try to offset this with either improved crop production from the remaining land, or new alternatives such as beekeeping.
Cooperation by farmers is a vital part of the project, not just in gaining their assistance in conserving the wild relatives but also in continuing to grow a diversified selection of traditional landraces. These can be just as important to the plant breeder for crossing as the more primitive wild material.
Extension officers will carry out monitoring of this in situ conservation at the local level. It is hoped the project will provide a working model for the technique so it can then be adopted elsewhere in the world. In tandem with this conservation, the project will also gather information on the genetic base of 10 target crops and how they are being influenced by social and farming practices.
While each country will be responsible for administering and monitoring its own sites, ICARDA will provide the technical assistance to coordinate each national component and permit them to network with each other. Project monitoring will also be the responsibility of ICARDA which will adapt the project when necessary as new lessons are learned. As the technical backstop, ICARDA will also be supporting on-site training in farm conservation and the sustainable use of agrobiodiversity.
With the help of IPGRI, national scientists will be introduced to the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for building the project database.
A two-day meeting for the project stakeholders at ICARDA's Tel Hadya headquarters in May thrashed out how the central and nationally-based elements of the agrobiodiversity project will work together. Representatives from the participating countries saw in situ conservation in practice both at ICARDA and at the Yahmoul experimental station of the Syrian Agricultural Research Directorate. ICARDA is conducting a joint experiment at Yahmoul to conserve the wild relatives of wheat, barley and wild annual legumes.
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