t's dinner time in Sudan, and you might decide on a takeaway meal of foul beans--the staple diet of the country. If you live in a town, the chances are that, dotted around the souk (market), there will be foul-sellers standing beside great steel vats that rather resemble milk-churns (see cover photo).
      In these are the hot beans, carefully cooked and ready to eat. If money is short, you may decide on a plastic bowl full of plain foul, sprinkled perhaps with a little cumin. If the pocket will bear it, you might prefer a luxury foul. In this case, the vendor, having dispensed a few ladles of beans into the dish, will grate some cheese over the surface. He will follow this with a sliced egg or two and some salad. He will then take a soft-drink bottle, grasp it firmly by the neck and pulverize the ingredients. The resulting purée, eaten with bread, is an excellent meal.
It is also highly nutritious. Foul beans arefaba beans. They are a first-class source of protein, essential in countries where the

      But faba bean has an Achille's heel: it is seriously prone to disease, and yields can be highly unstable. As already mentioned in the earlier article (page 7), its chief enemies are rust, chocolate spot and ascochyta blight. Broomrape, a parasitic weed, is also a serious threat to it. A serious attack of just one of these can devastate the crop. Moreover, plant pathogens have the potential to adapt to new varieties that initially show resistance. Screening germplasm for resistance is, therefore, a never-ending process, as new genes for resistance are constantly needed.
     But researchers need plant genetic resources to work with, if they are to find sources of resistance. To this end, ICARDA is collaborating with two Australian organizations, the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and the Grain Research Development Corporation (GRDC).

poorer section of the population cannot afford meat.
     Moreover, they contain lysine, an animo-acid essential for human health and especially for growth. This can be obtained from meat and dairy products, but if these are not available, deficiency can occur, especially in cereal-based
diets like those of the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region. It is thus an important staple for the poor, but not only for them; in some of the better restaurants of Cairo and Damascus, cooking with foul is high art.
     Faba bean is an important part of the farming system, too. It is good for the soil and ideal for rotation with cereal; indeed the crop is so soil-friendly that, in some parts of the world where foul is not eaten, the crop is grown anyway and plowed under as green manure. It can also be a valuable source of animal feed.

     Reliable screening of resistance to chocolate spot and ascochyta blight is only possible by inoculating faba beans with these pathogens and growing them in nurseries in an environment in which the diseases will develop. With special funding from GRDC and ACIAR,  ICARDA has established a research site at the Mediterranean coast near the Syrian city of Lattakia. The mild winters and high humidity in this region help the development of diseases and viruses.
      ACIAR is part of Australia's overseas development program, and is also taking part in important work on faba bean with ICARDA and the Chinese national program. GRDC is a venture supported by Australian farmers through a levy on all agricultural production; this contribution is then matched by the Federal Government.
       Australian farmers need a rotation crop to fight falling wheat yields. Legumes are good for this, and ICARDA has done a lot of work on these rotations. The Australians are rotating wheat with faba bean, which they use for fodder. However, the full potential has not been reached because there are no locally-adapted faba bean varieties. GRDC is doing considerable, and far-sighted, research on this in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. It is possible that the ICARDA screening operation will eventually help this research. The products of GRDC's research will be available to everybody, not only Australian farmers.
       Meanwhile, at its research site on the Syrian coast, ICARDA is working on resistant varieties for the developing world. It is screening germplasm from many regions. Faba bean originated in West Asia and has been cultivated there for 3500 years. This makes the faba-bean gene-pool in WANA a rich one, but the diseases are so virulent and fast-mutating that sources of resistance must be found in unrelated germplasm. For example, previous work at ICARDA showed a high level of disease resistance in germplasm originating from the high-altitude (and high-rainfall) areas in the Andes of South America.  So ICARDA organized a new collection mission in Ecuador and a large number of samples collected there were tested at Lattakia. A high level of resistance to chocolate spot was found.
      The process does not end there, however.

The Ecuadorean material seemed also to have a good level of resistance to rust and ascochyta blight, but it tended to mature rather late for the growing environment in the WANA region. Therefore, individual selections were made from the material that matured earlier, but still had high level of resistance. Through intensive disease screening at Lattakia a number of highly-resistant lines were identified from other countries as well, especially Morocco, Spain, Portugal and Greece.
      The Ecuadorean material demonstrates both the problems and potential of working with faba bean. The crop has a very high degree of cross-pollination by bees; to keep them out, screenhouses with mesh have to be used to protect the breeding lines and keep them pure. However, because of cross-pollination before collection, the germplasm varies widely within a single accession. This applies to most of its characteristics, including disease resistance. Canadian researchers working on rust have identified both disease-resistant and susceptible strains within the same accession. This means that the charactistics you want may be found in a variety that, in general, does not have them. This is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it works.
      The genes we need, and thus the answers, will be found. It is a long process. For the researcher, collecting germplasm is only the beginning; the material collected must be evalu

ated. There are countless accessions in the world's genebanks that may contain genes that could prevent famine and raise rural incomes in the developing world. But we need to find them.
      Even so, the fight to protect faba bean demonstrates how international linkages within agricultural research can bring huge benefits. Through this work, researchers are learning from each other all over the world; it is about cross-pollination of intellects, as well as germplasm. But it is also an example of the benefits brought by the free ex-
change of genetic resources. Germplasm is being exchanged around the world from Spain to Egypt to Syria to Ecuador to China. The products will be used to benefit people of limited means. For ICARDA, it involves the man wielding the neck of a soft-drink bottle in the souk. We want better food security for his customers, and that is what germplasm exchange is all about.

Joop van Leur, formerly Barley
Pathologist at ICARDA, is now Senior
Plant Pathologist, New South Wales
Agriculture, Australia. Dr Larry
Robertson, previously ICARDA's Legume Germplasm Curator, is now Vegetable Crops Curator, USDA ARS PGRU, Cornell University, Collier Drive, Geneva, New York, USA. Mike Robbins was previously Science Writer/Editor at ICARDA.