JOINING UP: The Social and Political Dimensions

Abstract

Although this book project focuses on crop development to meet the challenges posed by climate and climate change we need to recognise that climate is but one of several interlinked factors, which bear on crop productivity and food security. Population increase, demographic changes, resource depletion and loss of agricultural land all combine with climate change to produce a “perfect storm”.

We note that just as exploitation of resources is not evenly spread over the globe, neither is vulnerability to climate change. It is in general the most resource-poor countries that are most at risk and are least able to ameliorate the effects. The situation is further complicated by the considerable agro-sociological differences in respect of seed systems and crop husbandry between the industrial-scale farming systems of the global north and the small and diverse systems, which support livelihoods in the global south. Both represent agro-sociological capital but in very different ways and any breeding of crops in response to climate change needs to take this into account.

The range of issues considered extends to environmental justice, power and economic imbalances, differing economic statuses, different demographic structures as well as regulatory provisions and institutional policy. We acknowledge the need to engage the local and traditional knowledge and practices of those who already face extreme climatic challenges and have acquired adaptive capacity.

In the context of top-down institutional drivers for adaptive capacity building and bottom-up adaptive capacity acquired through experiential learning we examine the social implications of research and technology. Which properties of plants should we be looking at, where should the research be done and by whom? We need to consider too the possibility of new pathogens in a changing climate and their possible impact on traditional or new crops. The social acceptability of biotechnology approaches is considered as are problems in knowledge sharing and transfer.

Finally, we examine socio-political aspects of plant breeding for crop improvement. Who is making the decisions and who benefits? Can formal and informal seed systems work side by side or even be integrated together. Other forms of collaboration and especially farmer participatory plant breeding are then discussed.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

13.1 Introduction: Society and the Contexts of Change

13.1.1 Inexorable Change

“This different perspective is firmly embedded in the knowledge of specific, identifiable changes occurring in the natural and social worlds around us. These changes are so vast, so pervasive, and so important that they require our immediate attention. Scientific knowledge is urgently needed to provide the understanding for individuals and institutions to make informed policy and management decisions and to provide the basis for new technologies”—Luchenko 1998 presidential address to AAAS

The quotation above is taken from an address, which envisages a new form of compact between science and society but serves also to promote a view of a changing world of reticulated challenges that demand both clarity and concerted action.

Climatic stress is just a part of the challenge of inexorable global change. As we shall see, demographic change, population growth and resource depletion are inseparable from it. Furthermore, from the perspective of this book project, climate change is set in a dynamic discourse of institutional global imperatives concerning food security and in particular the Millennium Development Goals of freedom from poverty and hunger. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) considers climate change an additional challenge to hunger eradication—one that needs to be addressed as a crosscutting theme rather than a separate activity (FAO_adapt http://www.fao.org/climatechange/2759403ecd7bd225b93086e7dca3944de64307.pdf). Top-down global institutional calls for the development and diffusion of adaptive responses, of which crop breeding improvements are a part, are further complicated by a competing and proliferating set of climate change-related imperatives related to carbon mitigation. The latter institutional ambitions are linked to the reduction of the carbon release implicit in crop production and also to changes in land use, the enhancement of carbon sequestration through agronomic practice, or the wholesale switch from food crops to renewable energy crops. Beyond these immediately agrarian and humane settings in which agriculture is configured coincidently as victim and solution to climate change, further institutional agents converge. The list includes powerful influences from the governance of global trade, the management of biological diversity, intellectual property and benefit-sharing regimes, NGOs concerned with rural livelihoods, to research and development promotional and funding organisations, to biosecurity and regulatory authorities.

The social context of change plays out in terms not only of this extended set of global institutional drivers but also in terms of diverse vulnerabilities to the effects of change and further of disparities in the distribution of exposure to concomitant risks among the advantaged and disadvantaged peoples and communities of the planet. Manifest disparities in the distribution of environmental risk exposure and vulnerability are dominated by geographic location, poverty and demography as well as the climate per se and readers are directed to an extensive contemporary analysis by Gordon Walker, Environmental Justice (2012), which deconstructs the various impacts of these conspiring issues. Also we should note that different elements of the disruption caused by climate change will affect different countries to different extents. The Global Adaptation Institute has carried out a very interesting study comparing vulnerability to disruption with preparedness to deal with the disruption, producing for each country a “Global Adaptation Index”.¹ The most recent listing shows that the bottom five countries are all in Africa, namely Ethiopia, Chad, Burundi, Zimbabwe and at the very bottom, the Central African Republic. The top five are Denmark, Switzerland, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia (the USA and UK are 8th and 10th, respectively). This generalisation of course hides more specific detail. Different countries will experience different types of disruption, including drought, reduction in water supply, flooding, rise in sea level, reduction in food supply and so on. However, one obvious feature is that it is mostly the poorer countries that are suffering and will continue to suffer most from the effects of climate change.²

13.1.2 Climate Change

If we isolate climate change for a moment, its implications for crop production and rural livelihoods themselves map very unevenly across human populations. They tend to concentrate their impact where pre-existing vulnerabilities are the greatest—that is to say where resource depletion, demographic pressures and poverty are constantly worsening and the security of infrastructures declining. With severe vulnerabilities across regions and communities comes the further risk of self reinforcement and a spiralling threat to infrastructures and to sustainable livelihoods and even to governance and institutions.

To explore the social inequality, which we have elaborated above, and to construct a frame for the mapping of ecosocial diversity onto challenges to plant breeding, it serves to dissect the challenge of climate change into its three direct manifestations:

• The gradual and progressive changes forecast by global statistical projections and broadly attributed to atmospheric shifts in greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuel combustion. These are generally expressed as increases in mean temperatures and sea level rises but themselves are within the bounds of changes to which life on the planet has adapted in the past.

• Embedded within these overall trends are the periodic abrupt changes typical of phenomena like El Nino La Nina and other oscillations deriving from interactions of ocean currents and the land. These can give rise to alternating bouts of drought or flood. The classical prediction of the climate change savants is that such fluctuations will become more erratic and more widespread in their impact on the vulnerable (IPCC 2007).

• Thirdly, we have to take account of a predicted increasing frequency of extreme events of the kind recognised as environmental disasters. These include floods, protracted droughts and freezes, and cyclonic storms, which often leave a wake of lasting damage (IPCC 2012).

Since society in its broadest context functions as a collective, continuing endeavour to alleviate individual vulnerabilities, we prefer to elaborate our analysis of social factors in a positive frame i.e., as elements, sometimes grouped as social capital, which limit vulnerabilities.

We recognise three concepts, which constitute the counterpart of vulnerability. These are resistance, robustness and resilience. Although we shall argue for the distinctness of these categories of systems–properties in relation to confronting the challenges of climate change to food production [see Environmental Justice (Walker 2012)] and to agricultural systems and livelihoods, they do have features in common in some contexts (e.g., all three entail social capital as a marshalling principle for responsive capacity) and are used interchangeably by some analysts (Conway 2008; Fellmann 2012).

We use resistance to denote pre-existing capacity for adaptation to the range of environmental challenges (stresses) encountered within an agronomic system. These adaptations may be embodied in physiological plasticity (strain) or in life-cycle plasticity (timely avoidance) and can apply to all tiers of agronomic systems from growing crop stands to farming communities. In this sense resistance implies refractoriness to exposure. But, of course the role of the plant breeder or seed system is to ensure that adaptive potential is progressively enhanced against the expected trajectory of stresses resulting from climate change. While natural selection during breeding is a powerful ally of this endeavour during gradual environmental change, which should ensure success, other features of plant–environment interaction, in particular biotic stress, complicate this proposition. Shifts in climatic zones coupled to the international trade in plants and plant products may lead to a redistribution of disease vectors and the emergence of sudden and unexpected pathogen pressure and even to novel pathotypes (Brasier 2000). There is evidence on which we shall enlarge later, that such outbreaks are already happening in the world of silviculture Although this may be seen as largely an issue of phytosanitary controls it does raise issues for anticipatory identification and diffusion and introgression of disease resistance loci beyond the scope of the adaptive pace of natural selection. This constitutes the first of our examples of challenges to the plant breeder stemming from patterns of governance and human behaviour in concert with climate change.

Robustness is used to denote the ability to cope with damage or set-backs and relies on a degree of systemic redundancy or a diversity of alternative developmental pathways, which a system may draw upon. Robustness is particularly relevant to the management of environmental challenges stemming from instability or abrupt fluctuations such as alternating cycles of flood (water-logging) and drought beyond the innate adaptive potential of resistance. A major feature of such scenarios is working with uncertainty and choosing the best hedging strategies. The role of the plant breeder or seed system here is to develop, maintain and provide access to a diversity of varieties and crop types from which farmers can draw on the basis of their experiential knowledge of the dynamics of the local challenges to agronomy that they face. Breeding strategies, which might be appropriate to the challenge, are: the development of mixtures (Wolfe 1985),³ synthetics and hybrids, all of which constitute broadly adaptive assemblies of diversity, or the development of a set of derivatives of elite varieties with significant “clip on” traits designed to enhance adaptive potential to one or another of the climatic extremes.

The social capital enjoyed by farmer communities in the sharing and conservation of seed diversity, and in the exchange of acquired knowledge (social and individual learning) are a strong feature of robustness. We shall examine this proposition and its significance to breeding practices in the context of climatic instabilities in West Africa in Sect. 13.3 informed by the extensive studies of Edwin Nuijten (2005) in the Gambia and more broadly by studies of the rice cultures of the coastal states (Offei et al. 2009). Also, from Harwood’s study of the Rockefeller Mexican Agricultural Program we see how sharing of varieties between linked communities and the construction of synthetics from them can add a significant and robust dimension to yield improvement (Harwood 2012).

Resilience denotes the set of systems properties favourable to maintenance of a developmental trajectory attributable to recovery from incidences of serious damage or disruption such as might accrue during extreme climatic events (Lambin 2005). The frequency of such events is expected to increase according to current framings of climate change (Cruz et al. 2007) articulated by IPCC. The associated narrative is that during serious environmental disasters such as regional devastating floods, prolonged unseasonal episodes of freezing or frying temperatures, or sea water inundations during cyclones, resistance and robustness thresholds are overcome and crops destroyed, and agronomic affordances and supporting infrastructures temporarily disabled. Under such circumstances resilience may initially be dependent upon material reserves, but, subsequently recovery may be dependent upon external institutional interventions designed to assist the re-establishment of livelihoods and agriculture as the agro-ecosystem re-equilibrates. Re-equilibration may infer an altered set of conditions if, for instance, topsoil has been eroded or a legacy of salinity left behind, in which case access to new plant varieties and plant types specifically adapted to the new and challenging circumstances will be required. This raises a distinct set of challenges to the plant breeding systems. Types adapted to perform in the extreme conditions of damaged agro-ecosystems will have a limited and transient market and may not be attractive propositions for investment by commercial breeders.

As we observed for robustness, resilience may be configured as a system of learning though it is worth remarking that because of the regional nature of environmental disasters social learning is likely (instructional learning coupled to imitation) to be of greater prominence than individual or empirical learning.⁴

Analysis by agents of IPCC (Cruz et al. 2007) of the causes and consequences of the recent flood disaster in the Indus Valley of Pakistan for instance demonstrates that vulnerability was exacerbated by demographic change linked to the urbanisation of the flood plain.

Similar considerations of robustness and resilience apply to disruption and loss of infrastructures and agricultural resources during civil conflict, from which we may also learn. A particular example is the loss of indigenous rice varieties and breeding materials during the civil war in Sierra Leone. The studies reported in Richards et al. (2009), Richards and Ruivenkamp (1997) and Longley (1997) showed that the farmers were quickly able to assess the value of new varieties they were offered and, recognising the new circumstances in which they found themselves, did not always go back to the types they were growing previously. This illustrates that individual experiential learning can have a part to play even in resilience.

The forgoing discourse has been elaborated in order to introduce some of the challenges for plant breeding in a changing world and adaptive measures introduced to reduce vulnerability have features in common whether viewed across the technical exigencies of plant breeding or the ecosocial dimensions of sustainable communities of agricultural production.

13.1.3 Technological Change

We now move on briefly to consider the third element of change within which plant breeding challenges are elaborated, that of technology and opportunism. This will lead us at a later stage to examine more closely how the socio-technical settings of breeding map onto the ecosocial dimensions of robustness and resilience. As the many technical articles in the two volumes attest the scope of application of new techniques for mobilising and introgressing valuable alleles from adapted ecotypes into highly tuned idiotypes is continuously advancing. This raises issues relating to the ownership of traits as well as the means by which they are accessed as material resources of breeding in its many contexts. It also raises questions, though patchily distributed and often voiced by external advocates of particular agronomic persuasions, of the acceptability of some technical approaches in particular the transgenic assembly of novel traits (aka GM). Of course there is an institutional dimension to this issue manifest in the Cartegena Protocol, a spinoff of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), which sets conditions for the management and trans-boundary movement of modified organisms and the distribution of liabilities.

The final dimension of the advance of technology in crop plant improvement to which we will draw attention in this introduction lies in the distribution and support of capacities and competencies. Here we include the set of capacities, from fundamental research on traits and adaptation, to knowledge of advanced germplasm, to plant breeding skills and training, to agronomy and the matching of varieties to agronomic and cultural circumstances. Commercial breeding companies are at liberty to locate their investment in these capacities as best suits their perceptions of the eventual market opportunities. The support for these capacities in the public sector of the formal seed system is dependent on many distributed institutional decisions concerning the allocation of resources and the prioritisation and recognition of the need for each element. It has been noted that public sector breeding in general has latterly been in decline (Murphy 2007) linked to a lack of trained capacity (human resource) for distributed plant breeding. A recent report by the Royal Society of London (Reaping the Benefits 2009), while emphasising the potential of current public investment in molecular plant science also recognised a systemic weakness in capacity for crop physiology, phenotypic evaluation and the translation of advanced knowledge into benefits at the field level. As we shall see in the next section these lacunae are recognised as significant to institutional goals for adaptive capacity relative to resilience and robustness, and should not be taken merely as consequences of misguided policy decisions driven by the hegemony of elite science, however compelling that may seem. External pressures from economic limitations, educational opportunities and demographic shifts have had a part to play.

13.1.4 Sociological Groundings

As a coda to this introductory sector in which we have tried to position social considerations in the discourse on climate change and adaptation via plant breeding, we are bound to observe that climate change and its social issues has attracted little attention from practicing social scientists (Langenhove 2012). This is so despite the critical importance of this subject to human welfare and social continuity. Keywords associated with climate change are found in just 1.6 % of the 10,000 social science papers published.

However, we are fortunate that a small group of agrarian sociologists and anthropologists have focused their gaze on breeding technologies and seed systems. Their studies extend across a diversity of social settings where the impacts of climate change are of pressing significance or where farmers, for one reason or another (poverty, lack of access to inputs, or the adoption of the organic persuasion) are unable to intervene in order to moderate their agro-ecosystem. This group of analysts have contributed both to the conventional literature but also to reviews and policy investigations on behalf of global institutions such as FAO. We have drawn heavily on the work of this community especially in Sect. 13.3. The other group of sociologists we have drawn upon are those who work with theories of resilience and robustness, for example Fellmann (2012) and Lambin (2005).

13.1.5 The Institutional Challenge

Against the broadly shared imperative of enhancing resistance robustness and resilience of communities and agricultural systems we are now ready to ask how decisions on priorities for crop improvement through breeding are made including how, where and by whom and by what criteria?

We anticipate at this stage that where considerations entailing technological affordances are salient then top-down policies and decisions made by institutions (including commercial and public sector breeding undertakings and those international agencies whose mandate includes agricultural development, food security, the sustainability of ecosystems, or trade and infrastructure) will prevail. Correspondingly, we assume that bottom-up choices made by farmers and farmer communities actively or passively (through practice) based on observation and experience will prevail under local circumstances where livelihoods are at stake.

Within this dichotomy our attention is drawn to an additional underlying tension between the broad imperatives of systems sustainability versus the ambient pressures on productivity in relation to market supply and demand, as well as the immediate motive of sustaining livelihoods.

Institutional top-down imperatives intended to translate into schemes to support the enhancement of robustness and resilience are generally reckoned to be configured through the elaboration of enablements (adaptive capacity), motivational incentives, and information (Lambin 2005). The expectation is that these will feed in to the diversity of agricultural settings and act as transformative principles where adaptive systems are likely to push close to or beyond their tipping points, either by the environmental stresses of climate change acting alone or in concert with social demographic or economic factors.

Against this expectation we will next examine the positions and modalities adopted by major global institutions in promoting and distributing adaptive strategies, supporting responsive capacities while recognising relevant knowledge systems and social practices.

13.2 Institutions, Demography and Trade

13.2.1 Institutions and Adaptation

Beyond the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change an array of powerful national and international institutions have actively pursued the imperative of their mandates to monitor the threats to global food security, local food sufficiency and effective, sustainable use of agro-ecological resources, posed by climate change. In numerous published reports and exhortations adaptation and mitigation are the clarion calls. Let us take as a first example the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN. The manifesto for its framework program, appropriately entitled FAO-Adapt, recognises the diversity of circumstances under which the impacts of climate change will play out and looks to building robustness and resilience through participatory development of local capacity and through institutional agility (http://www.fao.org/climatechange/27594-03ecd7bd225b93086e7dca3944de64307.pdf). This ambition carries an intrinsic, socially oriented recognition of human rights and justice as well as of disparities of exposure to environmental risks. It also carries the expectation of participative development of adaptive capacity:

Through its long experience in people-centred work on agriculture, rural development and climate change, FAO recognises that adaptation work also calls for demand-driven, location-specific approaches and requires participatory modalities that consider gender-specific vulnerabilities, needs and capabilities as well as the priorities of indigenous people and vulnerable communities.

FAO-Adapt promotes an ecosystem approach alongside the above “people centred-activity-distributed”, social systems/institutionally oriented strategy, with attention paid to resource management and balancing food production demands against ecosystem capacity.

Among its many active adaptive themes focussed on agricultural productivity is the declared ambition to:

Promote the breeding and conservation of crops, trees, livestock and fish adapted to changed climate conditions. Support the development and dissemination of technologies and practices and enhance local knowledge to improve the adaptive capacity of production and management systems and value chains in agriculture, forestry and fisheries.

Against this tier of ambition, GIPB, the Global Partnership for Plant Breeding and Capacity Building, which is facilitated by FAO, takes account of breeding priorities and draws attention to the need for better use of plant genetic resources (not surprisingly given the FAO undertaking under ITPGRFA). The link between breeding and germplasm is expressed by a further body under the auspices of the FAO. The Intergovernmental Technical Working Group on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITWGPRFA) in its report Strengthening Plant Breeding Capacities (http://typo3.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/agphome/documents/PGR/ITWG/ITWG5/ITWG5_INF4FINALUpton.pdf) commented for instance:

The Working Group also noted with satisfaction the achievements of the FAO-led Global Partnership Initiative on Plant Breeding Capacity Building, highlighting the importance of plant breeding to address climate change and the need for capacity development and long-term national strategies for strengthening linkages between the conservation of plant germplasm, crop improvement, and the dissemination of quality seeds and planting materials.

Significantly in Part VII of this report subtitled Charting the Course for Re-invigorating Plant Breeding, the intergovernmental panel assert and this is a key assertion, since the role of social linkages and of client farmers is clearly acknowledged:

The development of successful new crop varieties fundamentally depends on well-defined partnerships among multiple institutions and the client farmers, who in turn are attuned to consumer interests … (and) … sustainability of the system. When all these elements are in place, the payoff is very high in terms of income generation for smallholder farmers, benefits for the environment, and food security for society as a whole. The time is opportune to develop “best practices” to anchor policy recommendations for the establishment of results-oriented breeding programmes.

This acknowledgement is all the more poignant as it makes the link between policy and best practice and introduces people in communities, societies and cultures as the interface of translation between policy and practice and outcomes. We shall return to these operational linkages and farmer engagement in Sect. 13.3 in the context of building adaptive capacity through plant breeding. But in the meantime we should take note of the absolute shortfall in breeding capacity as well as the need for reorientation as a general bottleneck in the translation of policy to outcomes.

The erosion of plant breeding capacity and cognate skills has been remarked upon by other institutions too, notably, because of its frontline role in training, the Wageningen Plant Breeding Business School, pointing to the low status of agriculture relative to the expectations of educated cadres who might be expected to train as specialists in the profession:

This is due to demographic development, broadened education possibilities, but also to the poor image of agriculture in general.⁵

The shortfall is also recognised in reports authored by expert analysts from major Policy Oriented Donor organisations like the World Bank, which articulate the need for training initiatives across the world, initiatives which include tuition in the full portfolio of field, laboratory and commercial (including IP) skills (Morris et al. 2006). However, the report makes little mention of the skills needed to link and converge with farmers and to draw on knowledge derived from experiential learning in informal settings. This global shortfall in distributed breeding capacity implies a continuing dependence on a narrow portfolio of varieties broadly adapted to high input systems and the international seed market.

Plant breeding is nested within seed systems, which will be explored in detail in the next section, but it is worth introducing them here in the context of institutional policy and capacity. Formal seed systems involve trained and resourced plant breeders operating in centralised private or public sector institutions and providing broadly adapted seed for distribution to remote locations. The informal system involves farmers embedded in their society often as coincidental but none the less effective breeders who produce locally adapted unregulated seed for themselves and their communities. Despite their recognition of the importance of social and farmer linkages as discussed above the ITWGPGRFA in their report on Strengthening Seed Systems (Gap Analysis of the Seed Sector 2011) adopts the position that, in areas where the informal sector is predominant it should be strengthened by acquiring the capacities of the formal and that the public sector be enabled in the direction of the private system. The report recommends, for instance the modification of seed legislation to accommodate the informal. It also recommends strengthening farmer’s capacities in seed multiplication in order to improve the quality of seed produced in the informal sector, as well as support for the emergence of local private sector enterprises. Clearly the institutionalised regulated market-oriented formal model is what is aspired to, and perhaps not surprisingly so since the formal sector is rather better placed to make use of the genetic resources in the ex situ collections of the FAO undertaking. But we should not forget that ITWGPRFA also recommends an increase of farmers’ participation in crop improvement activities in order to ensure that new varieties are appropriate to farmer practices and experiences. Perhaps the intention then is not to disenfranchise the informal sector completely. The significance of this cooperation between formal and informal sectors will be explored in the next part of this account.

Erosion of breeding capacity is also evident within the networks of public sector breeding establishments embodied in national and international agricultural research centres (Harwood 2012; Murphy 2007). This corresponds to a gradual withdrawal of funding from the sector and it remains to be seen whether the encouragement of the emergence of a new and less centralised private sector can fill the gap.

The World Bank has recently sponsored, together with other institutions including FAO, UNDP and UNEP, an extensive assessment involving inputs from 400 experts, of the challenges to agricultural development that lie ahead. The following quote from the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report of 2008 sets the tone:

The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown.

The IAASTD report has attracted some notoriety for its prioritisation of integrative approaches drawing upon traditional technologies, over advanced technologies oriented toward production and yield.⁶ In fact, industrial contributors withdrew from participation when this stance started to emerge. The tension between the imperatives of production, aligned with supply and demand and commodity markets on the one hand, and of integration, which align with sustainability, livelihoods and the socio-ecological factors that surround farmers and farming practice on the other, forms an undercurrent to our thesis. So in the elaboration of our arguments it is encouraging that at least one group of experts have articulated the need for a more broadly negotiated approach to development, which takes account of the inequities and institutional barriers to participation.

In a further paper prepared for the FAO/OECD workshop on Building Resilience for Adaptation to Climate Change in the Agricultural Sector, Fellmann (2012) provides a discussion of frameworks for assessing vulnerability to climate change. He represents vulnerability in terms of three components, exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Exposure, as Walker (2012) explains in his book Environmental Justice, is influenced by socio-demographic accidents of time and location linked to disparities of wealth/poverty, age and gender. Sensitivity is the counter part of our concept of resistance and relates to the ability of varieties or systems, thanks to their innate or acquired qualities, to exhibit refractoriness in the face of environmental perturbations and challenges. Adaptive capacity represents the two components, robustness and resilience (recovery, resurgence) of the framework we have elected to work with. Fellmann (2012) goes on to distinguish between outcome vulnerability and contextual vulnerability. He positions the former as an endpoint (future) interpretation and the latter as a starting point or current interpretation. The former is based on physical predictions and focused on technological solutions to adaptation and mitigation, while the latter is based on the dissection of susceptibilities related to socio-economic factors and focuses on building adaptive capacity through the exploration of alternative pathways of development. He is then able to deconstruct the contextual and the endpoint interpretations against the functioning of agricultural systems as a means of exploring the nature and location of power and inequity issues which constrain robustness and resilience. Plant varieties can then constitute a bridge between the end point and contextual interpretations. It will be interesting to see if this analytical framework is taken up by the lead institutions in focusing their policies more sharply on the social issues governing adaptive capacity.

13.2.2 Institutions and Research

Although The Coordinating Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and its constituent Centres represent only a small fraction, and a declining one (Harwood 2012) of the overall global agricultural research on climate change, their high status coupled to their proximity to major donors and policy makers coupled to their ability to link to the cutting edge of science renders them very influential.

The CGIAR together with the Platform for Rural development has supported the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change (CSACC) in constructing a report for policy makers (including UNFCCC) (Beddington et al. 2012), which includes the following set of recommendations for action:

• “Integrate food security and sustainable agriculture into global and national policies

• Significantly raise the level of global investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems in the next decade

• Sustainably intensify agricultural production while reducing GHG emissions and other negative environmental impacts of agriculture

• Develop specific programmes and policies to assist populations and sectors that are most vulnerable to climate changes and food insecurity

• Reshape food access and consumption patterns to ensure basic nutritional needs are met and to foster healthy and sustainable eating patterns worldwide

• Reduce loss and waste in food systems, targeting infrastructure, farming practices, processing, distribution and household habits

• Create comprehensive, shared, integrated information systems that encompass human and ecological dimensions”

While the list contains few novel insights, it is significant in linking contexts with objectives in a clear and concise way and as such it provides a helpful checklist for mapping proposed solutions onto situated outcomes. Interestingly in relation to the convergence of food systems and plant breeding we can perhaps abstract an indicator that post-harvest losses and the nutritional content of staples are valid targets for improvement alongside the obvious environmental stress-linked productivity goals, in the response to climate change.

Commensurate with the above set of broad principles, CGIAR has promoted a dedicated 10-year consortium research program entitled Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), the goal of which is to identify appropriate policy and technical interventions to improve food security. It employs a food systems approach (Gregory et al. 2005), which supports integrative considerations beyond the simply commodity production oriented to the support of livelihoods and environmental goals in vulnerable settings. It has set up 36 benchmark sites across the world in which to collect integrated data concerning impacts and responses to climate change and its research is organised around:

“Adaptation to Progressive Climate Change; Adaptation through Managing Climate Risk; Pro-poor Climate Change Mitigation and Integration for Decision-Making” (http://ccafs.cgiar.org/our-work/research-themes/pro-poor-mitigation)

This alignment of a food systems approach with recognition of regional diversity appears to us to have considerable merit in bringing together scientific and local knowledge and could provide a touchstone for the mapping of adaptive solutions onto local issues.

In the forgoing analysis we have surveyed and portrayed the changing institutional environment drawing upon policy positions, commentaries and programs articulated by some of the major global agencies. The institutions overlap considerably in their coverage and present varying degrees of recognition of the diversity of socio-economic factors, which influence the development of adaptive capacity, as well as some of the bottlenecks, like the absolute shortage of plant breeders.

Overall, we note a continuing alignment with production-oriented solutions but with contextual and integrative approaches starting to gain traction as we have witnessed with the CGIAR CAFFS program.

13.2.3 Institutions and Mitigation

Before moving on, in the context of technology and the opportunities for its deployment in support of breeding for climate resilience, we should devote some attention to the other element of the clarion call, that of mitigation of the carbon footprint of agriculture. In general the call for mitigative practices points us towards plant breeding targets related to input use efficiencies. One might cite, for instance, water (irrigation) use efficiency, NPK fertiliser use efficiency and reduced pesticide deployment as valuable features of plant ideotypes conceived with carbon input costs and environmental impact in mind.

Beyond this an example of the way in which FAO addresses mitigation relates to grasslands management and carbon sequestration.⁷ Grazed grasslands constitute the majority (70 %) of agricultural lands and 26 % of the land area of the planet and are especially at risk of degradation through mismanagement or failure to adapt to climate change. Pastures lie under a variety of land tenure provisions and management regimes and this is all-important to the adaptive capacity of communities also, especially when we consider instances where degradation and overgrazing present classical examples of the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968).

The attempt to promote synergies between adaptive and mitigative strategies exists against a tension between initiatives for intensive management and replanting of rangelands, cerrado, etc. with genetically improved varieties, and initiatives for the reconstruction of sustainable evolved ecosystems containing diverse native species. Besides this, uncertainty about land tenure among smallholders and weak institutions are key issues that discourage potential participants from adopting carbon-sequestering practices (Grieg-Gran et al. 2005).

Nevertheless, in a supportive document prepared for the FAO by Abberton⁸ it is argued that in general, breeding approaches to increasing the efficiency of grassland agriculture can be characterised as:

• 1. Accessible: through seed without other inputs

• 2. Providing lasting and cumulative impacts

• 3. Bringing other benefits, for example, varieties contributing to improved animal performance

• 4. Easy to use and relatively inexpensive to the farmer

• 5. Appropriate in the long term, representing sustainable “genetic” rather than “input” based solutions. Otherwise mitigation will not present an incentive for investment especially where social factors such as land tenure and poverty conspire with climate change.

The major challenges of tropical improved grasslands—uptake of improved germplasm, encouragement of on-farm diversity, and development of more sustainable production—mean that at the moment adoption of breeding programs aimed specifically at climate change mitigation is not a priority.

Plant properties such as digestibility and nutritional content favourable to the reduction of ruminant methane production, making nitrogen and phosphorous utilisation both in plants and animals more efficient, improving carbon sequestration through development of deep rooting systems are however, valid goals.

As in temperate systems the depth of deposition of C is important: the deeper the deposit, the longer the turn over time. In this context it is interesting that the forage grass Brachiaria, which we will consider further in Sect. 13.3 deposits C to a depth of 1 m due to its deep roots (Mannetje 2007).

Pasturelands will be a territory in which we shall examine the potential of a novel hybrid plant breeding technology to contribute to robustness in the face of flux and diversity in the ecosocial system in Sect. 13.3.

The issues raised above concerning land management and allocation are significant in relation to other aspects of mitigation in particular the issues of biofuel production. Breeding questions relating to the improvement of energy crops are significant in relation to the socially oriented issues of where and by whom should such crops be grown. The recent Nuffield Council on Bioethics report (2011) laid great emphasis on the rights of farmers not to have their livelihoods threatened by the sequestration of land and resources for subsistence under the mandates for bio-ethanol and biodiesel incorporation into transport fuels.

13.2.4 Agencies and Technologies

The FAO/International Atomic Energy Agency Joint Program supports projects on mutation-based breeding across Africa, Asia and South America, as a manifestation of the peaceful and nonthreatening use of nuclear technologies, which was established after the Second World War. It has now adopted climate change under its banner Enhancing Crop Varieties for Increased Adaptability to Climate Change Conditions as its driving imperative for the promotion of breeding goals, for which mutation breeding is seen as appropriate. As an example: the technical cooperation project, “Improving Food Crops in Latin America Through Induced Mutation”, supports the increase of food production in drought-affected areas through the development and dissemination of drought-tolerant mutant lines of food crops (e.g., legumes, cereals, pseudo-cereals, and fruit trees) that have been traditionally cultivated in marginal and semi-arid areas.

The program also expresses concern, as we see below, over the emergence of new pathogens and the need to generate novel variation to provide resistance and, of course prioritises programs of mutation as a means of acquiring it.

This very interesting and well-established motivational initiative represents an example of the provision of resources, including a dedicated laboratory and information support system and project funding by UN Agencies in support of a particular technical solution. It is all the more interesting for its ideological foundations as a counter movement to weaponry.

13.2.5 Demographic Change

Demography, which for our purposes we regard as the structural account of populations and of people as agents in locations, has to be included in the discourse on adaptation and mitigation. As remarked earlier, people in situ in agricultural settings are the only means of integrating policies, adaptive materials and sustainable practices into livelihoods and productivity. Put more simply: technical solutions to adaptation and mitigation have people inside them. This is seen as a Durkheimian (Durkheim 1912) view of a secular belief in a set of ethical principles based on human action and interaction, which appeals to a set of human rights to safety, sustenance and livelihoods on which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are founded. In this context it is worth noting that the World Bank in aligning with the Millennium Development Goals of:

the reduction of hunger and poverty, the improvement of rural livelihoods and human health, and facilitating equitable, socially, environmentally and economically sustainable development.

States that:

Meeting these goals has to be placed in the context of a rapidly changing world of urbanisation, growing inequities, human migration, globalisation, changing dietary preferences, climate change, environmental degradation, …

The latter set of factors is linked in a complex multitude of ways well beyond our capacity for simultaneous commentary. However, urbanisation, inequities especially in relation to exposure to the risks of climate change, migration, and changing dietary preferences, can be seen as exerting powerful influences over our concepts of robustness and resilient trajectories in agriculture and are significant concomitants of demographic change. As an example, we can link migration and urbanisation in the context of the movement of young people in general and males in particular from rural agrarian settings into cities. Besides the general dilution of rural social capital, which this accords, the new urban environment will elicit many changes and shifts in behaviour. A notable one is dietary consumption. We are witnessing an upward shift in the demand for meat and animal products in Asia, which in turn puts pressure on production and thence onto pastures and their carrying capacity. Meanwhile back in the rural setting the corresponding shift is towards an aging population of farmers and household managers who are having to adapt their practices and take on extended roles as the holders of local knowledge.

As a further instance we saw in Sect. 13.1 that the infrastructural proliferations associated with accommodation of urban populations on the flood plains of agronomic systems have exaggerated the severity of flood events and their challenge to resilience.

Migration from land to cities is a trend, which started long ago but was accelerated by industrialisation. It has continued in turn to provoke and be precipitated by changes in agricultural technology and land tenure. However, nowadays the trend links to a change in the age profile of rural communities and farmers the significance of which is that the tacit knowledge, which supports robust practice and the deployment and custodianship of seed systems, is invested in an age and gender-biased subpopulation. This lends urgency to the proposition, which we shall explore in Sect. 13.3, that experience and materials of agriculture in climatically marginal zones embody the adaptive capacity and robustness which has accumulated in agrarian communities and which are important to informing the trajectory of plant breeding.

While discussing people and locations, age and gender it is critical to remember that demographic pressures have the tendency to push those with the least financial assets into the zones of self-sustaining exposure to environmental risk at the periphery. This reflects their lack of a voice and, even in democratic systems their lack of negotiating power. As we have emphasised from the start poverty and exposure form a self-sustaining trap, which compounds with voicelessness: Those who are poorly resourced are least able to achieve rights of recognition; those who are not recognised are discriminated against in the allocation of and access to resources (Walker 2012).

We have noted the loss of a cadre of young people with the agricultural experience, which might make them into good breeders that has been attributed to demographic change. This is mirrored by a growth from the urban elite of a cadre of decision-makers with little knowledge of rural realities (Lambin 2005).

13.2.6 Trade and Exchange

The dominant and persistent economic model of growth and consumption into which we are locked tends to favour considerations of production, intensification, markets and distribution over sustainable livelihoods and food systems. A clear illustration of this is the effects which remote decisions on economic priorities can have on investment cycles and commodity prices. For instance, mandates placed on biofuel incorporation and therefore on production and trading have been seen to push agricultural food commodity prices up (Gallagher Review 2008) due to an anticipated unmet demand. Competing markets will inevitably lead to exaggerated cycles of supply and demand which are likely to create a lose–lose situation for smallholders. These fluctuations will likely be exaggerated further by the oscillations of climate change and other oscillations in investment cycles as investors shift their capital.

One of the positive consequences of the discourse over climate change mitigation and carbon trading is that it may have helped the world as we saw in the IAASTD evaluation, to start to take notice of integrative imperatives rather than the production-oriented ones that have driven us this far.

Nevertheless, trade across a heterogeneous planet is an essential function of feeding people. But while trade separates production and consumption as processes and communities of action, it links them materially. Material exchange and relocation of agricultural products raises very diverse sets of issues of which we shall highlight three in relation to our interests in building resistance, robustness and resilience in the face of climate change. One relates to the knowledge embodied in the material, another to disease agents or pests inadvertently co-exported with objects traded across agro-ecological zones and the third to the trading of genetically modified materials.

13.2.6.1 Exchange of Material and Knowledge

The institutional arrangements whereby global trade is conducted, (and here WTO is very much in mind), accord very different status to formalised knowledge i.e., that which can be commodified as intellectual property, and other informal kinds collectively referred to as traditional and by inference of less value. The enforcement of intellectual property rights linked to breeding tools and valuable adaptive traits can restrict international trade in those agricultural products which embody the corresponding genes and enabling technologies (Hughes 2002). In contrast, the knowledge embodied in locally adapted seeds of farmers and sharing communities in the informal system is respected only in relation to the more diffuse concept of biodiversity.

This asymmetry is the subject of criticism in relation to the provision of TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property System), whereby (trade) participating countries are required to subscribe to appropriate systems of IP protection including patents and plant variety rights.⁹ These formal legal provisions align with the competitive market-oriented practices of the developed west. This coercive mechanism with its asymmetric prioritisation of knowledge raises issues for plant breeding and material exchanges (Louwaars 2007) and has supported the emergence of the counter-concept of farmer’s rights and links to the concept of biopiracy developed within the framework of biodiversity and its regional sovereignty as assigned under the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) (IPGRI 1999). Formalised systems of exchange have been developed according to the principles of CBD, which provide for informed consent on the part of the donor of in situ material and material transfer agreements (MTOs) governing material from ex situ collections under the ITPGRFA and the FAO undertaking. A principle of benefit sharing is attached to these arrangements. As De Jonge (2009) points out, this is founded on a pragmatic ethic rather than an ethic of distributive justice (fare shares for all), which is to say that it is intended to induce participation with a promise of a return rather than to match the rights assigned to those of the formal system who might exploit the material. Hence, we see a clear disparity between breeder’s rights and the notion of farmer’s rights. De Jonge in his in depth inquiry into the principles of fair and equitable benefit sharing Plants Genes and Justice (2009) highlights the difficulty of administering any system of benefit sharing which involves a material return given the very diverse nature of the materials and embodied knowledge that might be transferred, as well as the diverse and potentially indirect benefits that might accrue. An alternative suggestion is that benefit sharing could be grounded rather in the ethic of participative justice by which the voices of the custodians of in situ material and wherever possible the originators of ex situ material are heard during the process of translating their embodied knowledge into distributed benefit. This suggestion has some merit as a pragmatic principle also. As Hughes and Deibel (2007) asserted, the formal and informal systems and their associated communities can all gain by cross-participation and the mutual sharing of breeding materials, a solution, which we shall explore in the form of participatory plant breeding in Sect. 13.3.

Nevertheless, the disparity of rights (Louwaars 2007) continues to raise issues both in relation to access to valuable genetic variation (varieties and traits) as inputs, as well as to the identity and status of the products of cooperation between formal and informal systems. The disparity is particularly manifest when we compare the material natures of varieties in the formal and informal systems. Under the formal system the identity of a variety is established within a legal framework based on its distinctness, uniformity and stability (DUS) as demonstrated under precise growing conditions. Strict application of DUS in variety registration and the assignment of proprietary rights is a feature of seed administration in those countries which subscribe to the UPOV convention. Adherence to the DUS principle is understandable given the competitive nature of private sector breeding and even for the public sector where breeders are expected to mitigate their costs via the recovery of royalties. In contrast informal varieties are likely to contain a degree of heterogeneity due to spontaneous gene flow (Nuijtens 2005) as well as adaptive phenotypic plasticity representing the marshalling of on-going adaptive capacity on the part of the breeder. It is also possible that irregularities of naming further complicate the picture as does the decentralised ownership of systems of sharing. The identity of ecotypes relates more to the reality of situated performance and farmer knowledge than to administrative constructions the like of DUS.

So breeder’s rights assigned under IP regimes and farmer’s rights conceptualised under CBD connote at the moment a barrier to cooperation between formal and informal systems and further offer little incentive to informal systems to commit their working material to ex situ collections. Louwaars (2007) reports that public sector research centres in the developing world have drawn more extensively on the accessions than has the private sector, questioning the proposition that ex situ collections constitute more of a resource for speculative trait browsing than for adaptive diversification. At the same time it seems that acquisitions of material from the ex situ collections has latterly shown a downward trend consistent with the expected burdens of negotiating material transfer agreements and a perceived general disincentive to invest in breeding within the ambient rights regimes (Kingston 2007).

Perhaps we can look to those Civil Society organisations (NGOs) more concerned with negotiating integrative adaptive outcomes than with manicuring their own advocacy, to establish local safeguards within cooperative programs to provide the missing reassurance and to ease the log-jamb of rights. The Community Biodiversity Development and Conservation Network (CBDC)¹⁰ for instance seem well placed to do this and through past programs has firsthand experience of the tensions involved (see Manicad 1996).

13.2.6.2 Emergent Pathologies

We will next examine the implications of the international trade in plant materials in the light of patterns of agronomic practice, social behaviours and biosecurity provisions in relation to emergent pathogens and their distribution. International trade and traffic in plant material has been going on for some time and it might be expected that phytosanitary oversight should take care of it these days. But this ignores the subtleties of emergent pathogens, which exist in equilibrium as saprophytes with their hosts in one set of climatic and agronomic conditions and then emerge as new threats when transposed to new cultures, cultural systems and emergent (changing) environments. The material trade may not even involve the vulnerable crop itself but other live-traded carrier/co-host species imported for local cultural purposes such as ornamental gardening (the cultural pursuit of leisure and the exotic). New pathogens may emerge from hybridisation between indigenous and casually introduced lines once geographic and climatic isolations have been compromised (Brasier 2000).

There are some salient lessons to be drawn from silviculture and its emergent pathogens of which there has been a recent upsurge paralleling the burgeoning international trade in plants (Ingram 2005; Brasier 2008). The names, sudden oak death and Dutch elm disease resonate with the issue. The threat is to indigenous species and woodland as much as to exotic ornamentals or timber plantations and it appears that the provisions of the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement of the WTO are inadequate and may even be contributory to the problem. This gives space for the re-conceptualisation of plant disease as a phenomenon of disruptive human practices (monocultures, prospecting, vegetative propagation, promotional trade arrangements, spiritual high-ground of the well-maintained garden with a woody landscape) rather more than one of microbial mal-adaption and virulence (Döring et al. 2012). The classical approach to restricting exposure to disease risk has been the deployment of resistance genes derived from wild relatives (aliens) (Smilde et al. 2005) or resistant cultivars. Climate changes and international plant trade conspire to bring a new challenge to this approach especially for crops with long breeding cycles and where the perennial timber crop stands for the next 50 years are already planted. There is a case for reconsideration of the common binary host–parasite model of crop disease along with its associated gene for gene resistance breeding strategies and to give prominence to the other agents, which are implicated. We include here cultural and entrained agricultural practices, vectors and other agencies of transmission as well as climate, geography and the dynamics of adopted crop types. This paints a fuzzy picture of culture/climate conspiracy but we are confident that genomics will take its place alongside the supportive tools of crop science agronomy and social analysis in unravelling the complex interactions and in rationalising collaborative design of integrative strategies minimising emergent diseases and their impacts. Plant breeders, private or public and resistance (R) genes cannot do it on their own.

Whatever else we learn from experiences of silviculture certainly it is clear that trade-related biosecurity will need an upgrade of provisions under the SPA regardless of how much this may be contested by competing interests in maintaining the status quo. The promotion of agroforestry as a means of stabilising vulnerable production systems reinforces this imperative.¹¹

In the context of institutional drivers and recognition of the issue of emergent pathogens, it is worth noting the IAEA funded a project, responding to the Trans-boundary Threat of Wheat Black Stem Rust (Ug99).¹² This aims to promote the use of technology packages integrating mutation induction and efficiency enhancing bio- and molecular technologies for developing wheat varieties that are resistant to Ug99, a virulent race of the fungus causing the trans-boundary spread wheat black stem rust disease. According to surveys, this disease is destroying up to 80 % of affected crops, in some areas almost all. Some 90 % of commercial varieties fail to resist this new virulent race. Global warming may send stem rust into parts of the world where it was never seen before.¹³

This apocalyptic warning is coupled by the FAO/IAEA joint program to a set of centralised transformative technologies but carries no enquiry as to causality beyond the binary host parasite model. Our suggestion, based on the arguments above would be that as a principle the broader context of causality be considered alongside the deployment of such resistance mechanisms generated through novel genetic variation.

In relation to the general proposition introduced above the prospect of mutation coupled to TILLING should the golden promise be fulfilled, has been articulated as an extreme adaptation to salinity for rice for planting and recovery resilience following the damaging Japanese Tsunami (Abe et al. 2012). This emphasises the role of the formal public sector in relation to the response to disasters.

13.2.6.3 Genetically Modified Crops and Crop Products

It has been a part of our general argument that people and their local social groupings tend to be side-lined in the discussion of solutions to the challenges of climate change, relative to the imperatives of technical momentum. People and their patterns of consumption and pressure on global equilibriums are recognised as a part of the cause of climate change and also as a part of the solution, if we assume that those damaging behaviours can be reversed. But people and their interactions with technology tend to be an afterthought when new and potentially transformative technologies are being introduced as solutions to socially situated challenges (Feenberg 2005). Smith and Stirling (2008) have argued for new approaches in this regard, which recognise the negotiability of the links between transformations acting at the techno-social level and their implications for socio-environmental practices. This is particularly relevant to securing public buy-in to the products of adaptively capacitated agriculture as much as to mitigation via behaviour change.

In the case of crop-focused GM technologies, however, what is popularly represented as the public voice, has acquired significant agency. Peoples’ misgivings concerning the application of genetic manipulation technologies to the production and to the nature of their food have been the subject of much high profile commentary (e.g., Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1999; Hughes and Bryant 2002) and numerous attitudinal surveys (e.g., AEBC GM Nation 2003; Getliffe 2012) and consultations. They have further been translated into oppositional movements and calls for moratoria on the further introduction of plant varieties carrying novel traits into agricultural practice. This has been the case particularly in the states of the European Union. The institutional response has been to impose regulatory oversight and to appoint national competent authorities to manage the perceived risks of environmental release and consumer concerns over food safety. These provisions extend to the international dimension under the CBD where the terms of the Cartegena Protocol govern the transfer of live GMOs between states and accords liability for adverse consequences.

The regulatory environment poses an on-going significant hurdle to the development of novel traits and adaptive capacity by the plant breeding community (especially in Europe and Australasia) and also to international trade in seed. Interestingly, in relation to the intellectual property constraints linked to the deployment of transgenic traits, it is anticipated that the proprietary IP embodied in regulatory dossiers will, as the corresponding patents expire, pose the most enduring barrier to distributed decentralised access to GM technologies.

Nevertheless, GM-bred varieties of crops have been widely adopted across the globe (and in fact, in one EU country, Spain, where BT-maize has gained significant market penetrance). Most recent figures indicate that crops bred by GM technology are grown on about 160 million hectares of land spread across 29 countries (ISAAA 2012).¹⁴ It is also claimed that 90 % (15 million) of the farmers growing these crops are resource-poor, husbanding small parcels of land in less-developed countries (ISAAA 2012). However, we need to say that the range of GM-bred traits currently in use in commercial farming and horticulture is very limited and none are aimed specifically at adapting crops to the effects of climate change. Nevertheless, the recent creation of salt-tolerant durum wheat in Australia (Munns et al. 2011) and of drought-tolerant soybean in Argentina (Samuel 2012),¹⁵ plus several other drought-tolerant crops in the R and D pipeline all point the way to traits that facilitate greater crop adaptation.

The example of salt-tolerant durum wheat in Australia is very pertinent here and thus merits further discussion. The scientists who undertook this work decided, because of the complex regulatory framework around and sensitivities about GM technology, to use non-GM techniques. By use of complex, and we need to say, highly un-natural methods, they forced a hybridisation between a salt-tolerant einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) and Triticum durum and then carried out several generations of backcrossing to T. durum. Overall, the project took 15 years but the irony is that the gene that confers salt-tolerance in T. monococcum has been identified and could have more easily been introgressed into T. durum by GM methodology. As the authors say in a commentary on their work, if we are to breed crops for a changing climate, we do not have the time to wait a further 15 years for the next advance. As an aside, we note that this case exemplifies the self-contradictory position that governments have got themselves into because of over-zealous responses to those campaigning against GM crops. “Conventionally” bred salt-tolerant wheat, once it is registered as a new variety, can be put straight onto the track to commercialisation. GM salt-tolerant wheat, carrying the same gene, would be beset by a mass of essentially inhibitory regulations.

It is indeed possible that as the pressures for greater crop adaptation increase and benefits accrue to those states and agricultural systems, which have embraced GM, opinion leaders and activists in Europe and Australasia will shift their position and reassure the public. We are already starting to witness some softening of and even backing away from extreme positions (e.g., Lynas 2011).¹⁶ However, until such changes of mind become more widespread, the international seed market will remain tricky territory for navigation by plant breeders working on adaptive traits.

13.3 Breeding and Seed Systems

13.3.1 The Social Context of Plant Breeding: Who Breeds for Whom and Who Chooses for Whom?

The world of breeding constituencies is commonly split along the lines of the binary categories of formal and informal seed systems as contrasting representations of how breeding practices are determined and conducted and how the resulting seed and its value distributed and integrated into social practice. This distinction extends also to the contrasting ways in which traits and germplasm are evaluated, accessed and deployed. It can also be associated with the ways in which adaptation and the risks associated with climate change are perceived and experienced. Of course, as with all binary distinctions there is a risk of oversimplification and of allowing categories to determine rather than to reflect or account for differences, but in practice the formal/informal dichotomy has provided a reliable framing for the discourse on who breeds for whom and how choices are made. It also provides a convenient means of disaggregating and explaining the complex of influences inherent in global change discussed above. Furthermore, as we expect to demonstrate with examples from different agricultural scenarios, the convergence of the knowledge systems and practices and materials intrinsic to the formal and informal systems offers a reasonable way forward towards crop adaptation linking the capacities of the two kinds of communities (Louwaars 2007; Richards et al. 2009; Offei et al. 2009). In order to pursue the question of how the formal and informal seed systems, or at least representative examples of them, might cooperate in developing adaptive capacity as pillars to support robustness and resilience in socio/agricultural systems, it is first necessary to explore their distinguishing features in terms of both their practices but also their motivations and knowledge flows. To extend this investigation we shall highlight some examples of Public Private Partnerships, Participatory Plant Breeding and Participatory Varietal Selection as an interface of practice between the formal and informal systems. Differentiation of the formal and informal systems is based on the writings of Louwaars (2007).

13.3.1.1 Formal Seed Systems

Formal seed systems are characterised by centralised breeding operations often embedded within national or transnational companies or institutions (e.g., Monsanto, Pioneer, CGIAR centres), which face outward to global competitive markets and function within institutionalised seed certification and variety registration provisions. The most well recognised players tend to focus on the high tonnage crops of international trade and economies and classically represent a few-to-many configuration with a few varieties pushed into many production niches with an emphasis on broad adaptability and intensively managed agronomic inputs for the realisation of high yield potential.

Formal systems tend to be oriented around pedigree selection and F₁ hybrid breeding systems, exploiting existing elite germplasm coupled to the systematic introgression of adaptive performance traits and product quality traits and supported by best technologies of marker-assisted selection and trait identification. This restricts the genetic base (narrow variation) of the set of varieties, which reach the field and produce revenues, attract elite status and act as inputs to subsequent rounds of breeding. It has been estimated for example by Powell¹⁷ that just ten wheat varieties represent and contain all of the genetic diversity present in the entire UK wheat crop. The large investment implicit in these established approaches is redeemed by large sales’ volumes and seed price margins, which reflect to some degree, the value added through potential advances in performance. A considerable portion of this investment is devoted to the process of capturing that value within the governance systems of seed marketing, distribution and accreditation. We have already looked in Sect. 13.2.6.1 at the national and international regimes such as the UPOV Convention, which trap the added value of crop plant varieties as a form of intellectual property, in terms of the influence this has on the exchange of traits and knowledge. At this stage we shall point to the path dependence which compliance with national laws and requirements for distinctness uniformity and stability¹⁸ places on breeding practice and the concept of what constitutes a plant variety i.e., a fixed entity, which will behave predictably under precisely defined trial conditions. It is reasonable to ask how within these confines considerations of robustness and resilience of an agro-ecological system map within such a system where, for instance, functionally adaptive morphological plasticity would disqualify a variety from recognition.

The institutions themselves are hierarchical and their strategy driven in a top-down way in particular by the marketing arm as much as by what the breeders themselves think they can achieve technically. The visionary ideotype towards which traits are introgressed and selections are made resides at the core of breeding strategy. It depends upon the assumptions of genetic essentialism i.e., that alleles at loci determine traits and then manifest in the same way or procure the expected phenotype when transferred from one genetic background to another. Fortunately this works some of the time, sufficient to let us feel as if we have a capacity for design and prediction.

However, the recently elaborated principle of transgressive variation (Maas et al. 2010) suggests that adaptive traits managed within and between subpopulations can behave unexpectedly. This deepens the game. Arguably it calls for a closer consideration of individual trait interactions with background germplasm and probably more basic research on adaptive trait associated loci and their epistatic relationships.

The idealised business model elaborated above exists in association with a collection of smaller agents representing what is normally known as the ag-biotech sector. Here the focus is on identifying and modularising and mobilising traits as tradable knowledge flows.

They are often founded as spin offs from academic research centres. If really successful they are likely to be absorbed in to the larger breeding institutions or to sell or licence traits and technology packages. Few have the resources or experience to participate directly in the formal seed system. These relationships are based on commercial exchange, which is founded in the technology transfer paradigm and the formalities of intellectual property rights. A representative instance is Performance Plants (http://www.performanceplants.com/), a company which practices trait development with a focus on temperature, drought and water use efficiency adaptation.

Links to agronomy can be eroded though the centralisation of formalised plant breeding, though the nesting of the large scale breeding companies in the agrochemical sector is a strong feature of the formal system. This may help to explain the trait and gene locus orientation of the formal seed system. It is customary for the ag-industry to view single bio-agents as providing solutions. This fits very well also with the assumptions of the single additive transgene approach to modulating adaptation.

However, the ongoing disconnect between formal breeding and the experiences of practical agronomy at the farmer level has been widely noted. First the Seed, Kloppenburg’s (Kloppenburg 1988) particularly insightful account of the commercialisation of F₁ hybrid maize breeding and seed management practices. He posits a division of labour as a turning point at which the cross-informing of farmers and breeders morphed into the one-way process of promoting hybrids marketing.

Knowledge among professional breeders is for the most part formalised and its transfer and deployment is instructional, which is to say that it is rules-based, prescriptive and supported by expertise which is taught, formulaic and professionally legitimised. This is augmented by entrenched and convergent evaluative norms and regulations, which as we saw above add to costs of maintaining competitive viability of the system. At the same time we have to appreciate that even in the formal seed system, and this is very much asserted by practicing breeders, tacit skills and knowledge acquired over years of close personal and physical engagement are important just as we shall see they are in the informal seed systems. However, both the fields of knowledge application and the modes of acquisition of tacit knowledge are very different across the formal and informal sectors.

This account of the formal seed sector, by concentrating on concepts and approaches and prescriptive governance suggests a rather more uniform collection of agents than actually exists in the world. There is in fact a wide diversity of breeding operations within the formal sector, differentiated by scale and locality, the focus on crop types as indicated by the contents of this book project (major grains versus specialist or orphan crops), narrow or broad portfolio but generically split into the categories of public and private sector. Although it may seem that the private sector has the power to make its own decisions on its breeding goals, because of the focus on ideotypes and traits it is restricted by the access to the knowledge and access to the genetic correlates of appropriate traits. We were reminded above that traits knowledge is elaborated in research institutions and specialist biotechnology ventures. Arguably then the funding agencies, which support research, as well as the investors who maintain the small specialist companies play a significant though potentially detached role in determining what goals breeders of the formal sector are able to include in the design of their ideotypes. This implies a distributed, delocated and pragmatically driven decision-making system; though of course we can locate many exceptions.

A very interesting exception is the private breeding centre called the Land Institute,¹⁹ which is driven by a mission. That 30-year mission is to develop a set of perennial varieties of the major grain crops. In relation to the agro-ecological challenges of climate change the benefit of the perennial habit may lie agro-ecologically in the ability to stabilise the crop, ground cover and terrain during floods and droughts plus, from the social perspective, in the avoidance of having to seed and establish a rooted crop each year under uncertain conditions. Although their approach may seem to fly in the face of the adaptive capacity of varietal diversity, it is possible that interplanting of differently adapted perennials may provide a degree of compensatory plasticity to a crop stand. No perennial varieties have yet been released from the institute but it will be interesting to follow their performance as a response to climate change.

As we deliberated in Sect. 13.2, there is a general orientation of institutions around the assumption that the solution to adaptive capacity building lies in the proliferation of formal seed systems of the public or private persuasion in those regions which lack them and that national policies should be turned towards establishing appropriate governance and to promoting this ambition. This was well articulated by the ITWGPGRFA in their report on Strengthening Seed Systems (Gap Analysis of the Seed Sector 2011). Also perhaps the successes attributed to the green revolution varieties can be quoted in support of this proposition. We would like to suggest that judgement be suspended while we give some air first to Harwood’s take on the costs of ignoring smallholders in the development of breeding policy and also have a chance to examine informal seed systems and the continuing contribution they can make (Harwood 2012).

13.3.1.2 Informal Seed Systems

In contrast to the centralisation of formal systems, informal seed systems are characterised by distributed nodes in a network of breeding activities, which are inward facing in so much as they embody the sharing of seed and knowledge between the members of the network, who are practicing farmers dispersed in communities.

They are further characterised by experimentation and non-instructive learning (Richards et al. 2009). Breeding and selection takes place across the set of ambient environments in which the seed will ultimately be cultivated which is to say that there is a close integration of the production, consumption and experiential learning functions of networks.

There is a tendency to regard the informal system disparagingly because of its low technology status and want of formalised process, empowered voices and systematisation. However, sociological studies warn us against falling into this trap. It is clear that farmer/breeders experiment effectively in evaluating the suitability of new seeds to their agro-ecological circumstances (Richards et al. 2009; Richards 2010; Mokuwa et al. 2012). They are clearly also enabled by their experience to recognise novel types produced by out crossing which appear in their cultivated material and to advance the selection of segregating progeny to develop varieties better viewed as ecotypes, which is to say they are adapted to local ecological but also cultural circumstances (Nuijten et al. 2009).

There is a further tendency to regard seed material in informal systems just as a reservoir of ecotypic variation and only as of value for the downloading of adaptive traits for introgression in ideotypes of the formal system.

Against this a strength of the informal system resides in its many-to-many configuration. Which is to say that many different seed varieties (agro-biodiversity) are available to be deployed in different locations dependent on socio-ecological circumstances in space and time. The many-to-many configuration portrays unfathomable complexity but in this case one which is kept within bounds by the scale of the networks and by the tacit knowledge of its members. Almekinders (2001) in her account of the management of crop genetic diversity at the community level makes the point that this position is under pressure worldwide and the loss of crop diversity is of great concern. Support for the maintenance of in situ diversity is founded on the premise that improving farmers’ use of diversity contributes to their sustainable livelihood and thus to their ability to contribute to its maintenance. Almekinders (2001) provides an extensive analysis of the community processes, which are not constrained by the requirements of seed registration and the strictures of DUS, which means that there is scope for internal diversity (redundancy) and plasticity.

Choices made by farmers are intimately immersed in the agro-ecology of their terrain. They are also embedded in and adapted to cultural norms and needs of the local food system, especially when under the stewardship of women who at once breed, grow, harvest, store, cook and feed their families.

Formal and informal seed systems coexist all over the world but informal seed systems actually predominate over formal provisions in certain parts of central Europe, in South America and also in Sub-Saharan West Africa where they account for more than 70 % of the seed planted. Edwin Nuijten (2005) has made a systematic study of the social and agricultural practices as well as the dynamics of seed selection and adaptive diversity within The Gambia. This coastal region is notable for its climatic instabilities, floods and droughts coupled to the North Atlantic Oscillation, against which farmers exist under a severe challenge both to their own adaptive capacity and that of their chosen crops. The study is particularly poignant since it represents the technical and social context in which farmers are already facing the forms of climate instability, which are predicted to proliferate under the commonly adopted models of climate change.

Skilled both as a plant breeder and social anthropologist, Nuijtens is able to assess how the dynamics and sources of genetic variation (gene flow) map across the agrarian communities and contribute to robustness in terms of the adaptive choices farmers were able to make. He concludes that recurrent mass-selection by farmers (to farm is to select he asserts succinctly) plays a smaller than expected role in sustaining gene flow and varietal diversity. But against this seed exchange between farmers coupled to the ability to recognise and propagate novel variation (off types), as it crops up though cross-pollination, is significant and arguably represents an informal verisimilitude of what formal breeders do, but in this case, intimately linked to social conservation of varietal diversity (Mokuwa et al. 2012). Observations of the choices farmers make to switch varieties and move to alternate types during climatic fluctuations reinforce the value of the corresponding reservoir of shared materials and the knowledge, which goes with them, and the way this can support robustness both at the level of plant and socio-ecological adaptation.

A significant observation of farmer selection of off-types in action has been illuminated by molecular genomic analysis of rice varieties in the extended region of West Africa (Nuijten et al. 2009) around The Gambia. The possibility of past hybridisation between indigenous varieties (O. glaberrima) and introduced varieties of O. sativa var. japonica or indica was first observed by Jusu (1999) as intermediate types in farmers’ material in Sierra Leone and was all the more likely to be the case given social practices of seed exchanges and farming practices of interplanting, despite the botanical assumption that the species were incompatible. Some 80 amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers were used to construct a relational map of the distribution of DNA polymorphisms across a collection of local farmer varieties. Within the collection there was a significant subset containing an intermediate distribution between japonica and glaberrima-specific polymorphisms, clearly indicating a past hybridisation event in the derivation of these varieties. Whatever construction we place on this example of the management of variation, fortunate accident, or playful experiment or acute observation linked to an understanding of what might constitute a valuable option for the future, it is clear that farmers’ practice within the informal seed sector needs to be taken seriously when we look forward to mobilising the best of breeding practices to secure robustness and resilience in the face of climate change.

In this regard it is notable that the formal seed system, in this case the public sector represented by WARDA (West African Rice Development Association now the West African Rice Centre) has recently (recent in terms of varietal time lines) produced a set of varieties based on laboratory-based hybridisation between African and Asian rice (WARDA 2001) as a means of combining high yield potential with adaptation. New Rice for Africa (NERICA) varieties are now being distributed in the region and according to some evaluative reports, under appropriate managements are beginning to gain traction with farmers and to deliver yield and income benefits (Diagne et al. 2010). However, according to a critical study by GRAIN²⁰ uptake of NERICA by farmers in the absence of external inducements from aid agencies and pressures from private sector initiatives, has been slight despite the significant investment placed behind their promotion, multiplication, and distribution by donors (BMG, World Bank Rockefeller Japan UNDP). The problem does not lie with hybridity, as we have seen above, it is common in informal varieties. Perhaps the problem lies with the commodity-based approach adopted by WARDA. WARDA acting as a formal agent set its own breeding targets based on its perception of yield components for upland rice with the ambition, according to the project leader, not of replacing informal varieties but of persuading farmers to integrate Nericas into their variety portfolios. The chosen traits included drought tolerance, heat tolerance, short straw and early flowering, but did not draw upon the voices or experience of farmers. Farmers and the informal seed systems were only brought into the equation when invited to view local demonstration plots in what was termed “participatory variety selection” (PVS). Small surprise then that there was no strong fit with robust farmer practice. A seemingly small example highlighted in the GRAIN critique is highly illustrative. The above-mentioned early flowering trait, though buffered from bird predation in large crop stands renders a variety as selectively prone to predation when interplanted in mixed stands of small-holder’s plots. However, despite these subtleties the top-down campaign to install Nericas as Africa’s green revolution continues while some might feel inclined to join Harwood (2012) in asking what the formal seed system has learned from the previous ones.

13.3.1.3 Convergence of Formal and Informal Systems

Nuijten (2005), from his studies in the Gambia and more broadly in West Africa, makes the conclusion that the formal seed system does in fact have much to learn from the social practices of seed sharing and the learning processes reflected in farmer selection and maintenance of robust adaptability. At the same time he recognises the capacity of the formal sector to access wider variation and to organise more extended and targeted seed dissemination in support of socio-ecological resilience during extreme events and environmental disasters. He envisions a coexistence of the formal and informal systems reinforced by cooperative practice and knowledge sharing.

Though more concerned with the way in which culture, economics and politics shape technologies Puente-Rodriguez (2008, 2010) makes similar types of observations from his ethnographic studies of potato cultures and seed distribution in marginal agro-ecosystems of the Bolivian Andes.

The region embodies an extended diversity of varieties with some communities maintaining and cultivating 60 varieties and more of the 5 cultivated species of the region. The varieties add not only agronomic diversity and robustness but also to dietary and cultural richness in terms of flavours, appearance and occasions of use, to the extent that communities regard them as cultural objects rather than material resources. At the same time communities share seed and there is a traditional periodic traffic from high to lower elevations for the provision of fresh virus-free seed. Demographic, institutional and economic changes offer to transform this scenario. There is significant migration away from agricultural communities and there is pressure to grow and send to market particular varieties of the formal seed system. These pressures, claims Puente-Rodriguez, are supportive of the generalisable correlates that informal systems persist within low input agronomies and that the injection of varieties from the formal system erodes the broad varietal base of the informal. Furthermore, he notes that the formal seed sector jeopardises an opportunity to engage peasants and their material.

In trying to assess the potential of genomics to sustain the robustness of peasant varieties he develops the notion of territoriality, a concept ascribed to Deleuze and Guatari (2005), which describes the de-location of power and decision-making capacity from practitioners (deterritorialisation) as centralised technologies make their mark.

As his example he takes a genomic initiative called Whipala Genomics, which by using genomic molecular marker technology seeks to support identities for the diversity of peasant varieties in order to develop market recognition for them. But the key point is that the initiative is territorialised within the peasant communities. The potential of molecular marker technologies to untangle the complexities of varietal naming and distinctness in communities of sharing where varieties with the same name may be different and vice versa, for reasons of language and cultural history across sharing communities has been remarked upon by others (Nuijtens 2005; Richards et al. 2009). This represents an interesting departure for the interaction of the advanced technologies of the formal seed system with the informal system in that it places (reterritorialises) the driving imperative with the agricultural community and the context of its needs to stabilise its material (on-farm conservation) and cultural objects in sustenance of its robust adaptive capacity.

13.3.1.4 Participatory Plant Breeding

In further exploration of the location of decision making over seed management and breeding trajectories we will next examine an example of closely integrated cooperation between the formal and informal systems in southern China. Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB) emerged as a concept back in the 1980s arguably as a response to the perceived failure of the previous green revolution to engage with small holders, low-input systems, and marginal environments (Bentley 1994). It was recognised as a part of a general movement in farmer participatory research. Since then numerous examples of models for PPB involving varying degrees of participation have been elaborated. Participatory variety evaluation as we saw above involves a minimal participation at the output end of the operation in which farmers’ voices are unheard except as a distant feed-back that may go unheard if the momentum of donor-backed policy is sufficient. At the other extreme fully participatory plant breeding engages farmers at all stages, extending to the inclusion of informal seed as a germplasm resource in crosses as well as in selections, seed distribution, and multiplication. It has attracted its detractors (a temporary fad which ignores the complexities of negotiating across the breeder farmer divide) and its promotors (Witcombe et al. 1996; Weltzien et al. 2000)²¹ some of who point to the potential of fully integrated PPB to support farmers’ rights to a share in the benefits of the deployment of their adaptive traits (Halewood et al. 2006).²² The FAO have sponsored a comprehensive volume (Plant Breeding and Farmer Participation 2009) which systematically specifies and rationalises best practices in PPB. Of particular relevance to the argument concerning the location of decision making regarding the selection of targets for plant improvement Chap. 4 by Weltzien and Christinck (2009) is dedicated to Methodologies for Priority Setting. The chapter sets out the issues to be taken into account in priority setting as well as listing the diverse stakeholders both institutional and social who need to be brought into participation. The authors also engage the discourse concerning the relative merits and significance of focusing on the goals of broad adaptation versus local adaptation. We infer from the above FAO initiative a growing enthusiasm for constructive convergence of the formal and informal seed systems at institutional level, which we regard as critical to capacity building for robustness and resilience from crops to communities of practice.

In the aforementioned review Halewood and colleagues provide a helpfully concise and accessible account of the practices of PPB pointing to successful examples from around the world and notably to the burgeoning engagement of the CGIAR-mandated breeding centres as anchors of the formal end of the practice and often women farmers as anchors of the informal. They highlight the case of a study of maize varieties in the southern provinces of China in particular Guangxi, which provides an encouraging example of farmers and formal breeders working together and learning from each other’s experiences of exposures to environmental, demographic, and economic challenges. In a series of edited papers Song and Vernooy (2010) provide an in depth account, based on action research at the regional and community level of a PPB program aimed at developing a diversity of adapted maize varieties suitable to adaptive agricultural systems whilst being acceptable to local taste preferences. The action was built on the findings of an impact study (Song 1998), which showed that introduced maize germplasm from CIMMYT produced formal varieties, which were too narrowly based and unsuitable for local adoption. It was also founded on recognition of demographic change and the stresses imposed by migration to the cities of young people and male farmers as well as the fluctuations of climate change and the need for a diverse and robust varietal portfolio. Within this scenario, the participatory approach, besides empowering women’s voices and engaging the best of formal and informal knowledge, stakeholders and practices has produced a set of well regarded and efficiently distributed varieties and has reinforced local farmer organisation and decision-making capacity. In short, it has supported robust adaptive capacity the influence of which has passed up to national policy level.

This initiative represents a notable continuity with other examples of the mobilisation of peasant skills in China, which argue for the bottom-up approach, in particular the case of rice and locally produced and distributed hybrids as studied by Shen (2010).

The role of NGOs²³ in linking the formal and informal sectors should not go unremarked. An initiative which has led to widespread cooperation is the CBDC (Community Biodiversity and Development Conservation) network that has witnessed the integration of inputs from diverse actors informal and formal as well as NGOs in projects. Biodiversity International is also a significant factor in participatory programs.

Also, the resources of long-standing donors to the cause of food security like the Rockefeller Foundation have been directed to initiatives like AGRA, which includes:

research and development of new seed varieties that are better able to resist drought. For example in May, through our grantees, more than a dozen varieties of four crop species were released—cassava, peanut, cowpea and sorghum—most of them coming from Uganda, and the result of original breeding that made use of local germplasm, plus specific traits contributed by material from the Consultative Group institutions.²⁴

This is a working example of elite materials contributed by the formal sector combined with those of the informal against an established target for climatic adaptation. But it is not clear from Rockefeller’s own account the degree to which the meaning of drought was assessed in relation to local patterns of water deficit or how that integrated with farmer practice.

13.3.2 Broader Sectoral Collaborations

An interesting and slightly unusual set of collaborative links relative to the context of robustness and also mitigation was embodied in an initiative for the development of allopolyploid (interspecific hybrid) wide hybrids derived from diverse accessions of Brachiaria species. The varieties, the first of which were named Mulato I and II were stabilised by an apomictic breeding system common in the genus, which potentially supports a high degree of internal genetic diversity within selections. The hybrid cultivars of this tropical forage grass have been commercially released and have passed into widespread cultivation as the preferred planting material for pastures in Central and South America and South-East Asia. The cultivars combine resistance to insect predation with drought tolerance, high dry matter productivity, palatability and good nutritional content relative to established Brachiaria cultivars. The breeding system and supporting technology required to achieve this was developed by Miles (Argel et al. 2007)²⁵ and his collaborators at the CGIAR centre CIAT in Colombia in partnership with EMBRAPA and a Japanese donor. EMBRAPA, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, constitutes a network of 38 research centres as well as transnational cooperative programs with the goal of supporting smallholders through innovation with a focus on mitigation of environmental impacts.

Early economic models envisaging the cultivation of these hybrids on 2.5–5 % of the pasture areas of Central and South American beef- and milk-producing countries predict best scenario benefits of up to 40 % of the production value, accruing both to consumers (via increased availability and price drop) and producers (as improved efficiency and overall productivity). Seed production and distribution and its influence on the rate of adoption emerge as a potential bottleneck to achieving these gains. CIAT as the holder of proprietary formal rights has selected a Public Private Partnership (PPP) via licensing to a single commercial partner (Gruppo Papalotla, Mexico) to address this issue. However, Papalotla have sponsored the decentralised multiplication of seed to feed local markets, notably in SE Asia (Hare et al. 2007).

It is not clear yet what production gains might be achieved on more marginal or less intensively managed and species-diverse pasturelands or whether the cultivars might contribute to achieving sustainable protective ground cover in more vulnerable scenarios. It is claimed however, that the cultivars are compatible with leguminous forages so perhaps they will support and have a role in species-diverse grazing. As mentioned in Sect. 13.2 there is some tension between the proponents of intensive management of pasturelands and the advocates of reestablishment of diverse native locally adapted species as a means of supporting robust occupancy of rangelands. Stipa Natural Grasses Association²⁶ presents arguments for the latter approach but at the same time agrees that practices of grazing management modified to be more imitative of migratory herd behaviours may be required.

Nevertheless, against this complicated interplay of practices, climate mitigation imperatives and breeding innovation the Mulato introduction constitutes a very interesting experiment on two grounds. The first as discussed above relates to whether hybrid polyploid apomicts will deliver robustness across a range of agricultural settings and practices sufficient to support livelihoods and to promote carbon sequestration over time. The second is more subtle and relates to recent discoveries of heritable epigenetic markings linked to adaptation. It appears that selective silencing of particular alleles (allelic exclusion) may moderate the relationship between genotype and phenotype in hybrids, contributing to adaptive plasticity (Guo et al. 2004; Hegarty et al. 2008). It also appears that experiences of stress response may be carried forward from one generation to the next and effectively pre-adapt to a subsequent challenge (Luna et al. 2012). This raises the intriguing possibility that the locality of seed multiplication may influence adaptive capacity, in which case we have uncovered an interesting rationale for decentralised or even in situ seed multiplication.

To put the question another way, how much robustness resides in epigenetic plasticity, or to what degree have breeders denied themselves an opportunity for enhanced adaptive potential by centralised practices and the imperatives of DUS?

13.3.3 Formal–Informal Cooperation and Resilience in the Face of Climatic Disasters

The scenarios explored above reveal contrasting locations of knowledge and materials as well as patterns of cooperation between formal and informal seed systems. Our intent was to illustrate the ways in which robust adaptive capacity, both material and epistemological, acquired close to impacts of climatic stress can be marshalled alongside the technological capacity, material resources and professional practices of the formal seed system. In this argument we have yet to look at adaptive capacity in relation to resilience in the face of disasters precipitated by extreme climatic events (IPCC 2012).

Looking at agricultural systems we can anticipate that the need for external support will depend upon the extent to which basic seed reserves are destroyed and seed supplies lost along with growing crops during the event.

There have been some attempts by academic observers in support of aid agencies to link past instances of restorative intervention to appropriate and less appropriate practices in relation to seed relief. An annotated bibliography of the accumulated literature has been assembled by Rubyogo, Sperling and Remmington (2004).²⁷ The literature includes several accounts of post-disaster recovery in particular that following Hurricane Mitch in Honduras where it was noted by Barbentane (2001) that coordination between local communities and external agencies was lacking and the easy path of supplying broadly adapted seed was resorted to. The emergent message seems to be that careful assessment of the nature both of the local culture and its seed systems as well as the impact of the disaster is critical and that the rush to replace lost varieties with broadly adapted high-yielding varieties from the formal sector can be counterproductive.

Longley et al. (2003) note that farmers rarely lose their reserve seed during natural disasters and that even where they are lost, seed relief is only a part of re-establishing livelihoods, which can be all the more difficult if unsuitable varieties are presented. There is an imperative under these circumstances to source material as close as possible to that which was lost. As observed by also by Nuijtens (2005) and (Longly and Richards 1999; Richards 2006) the formal seed system and its associated infrastructure may be able to provide appropriate relief by identifying and acquiring such varieties in neighbouring territories and then by multiplying up and distributing seed for farmer evaluation. In the extreme it may even be that seed is accessed from ex situ collections of the FAO undertaking. With respect to plant breeding and genomics it is interesting to note that molecular marker technologies may provide a reference framework for the reinstatement of lost varieties and variation following disasters. Resilience may thus be instrumentally augmented by anticipatory molecular categorisation of the pool of variation which accords robustness to the local agricultural system.

However, as remarked previously, under circumstances where lasting damage is inflicted on the agro-ecosystem as well as the techno-social system we might expect that novel and extreme adaptations might be required. The formal seed systems are best placed to provide these but it is arguable that farmer knowledge, tacit skills and experimentation are still important to integration of such material into robust farming practice.

13.3.4 Concluding Considerations

We are drawn to the view that bringing together the institutionalised and the socialised capacities of plant breeding in their formal and informal settings will be the test against which our best efforts to adapt and to mitigate will be judged. This will require redistribution of the loci of decision making concerning appropriate portfolios of varieties in order to generate a robust adaptive capacity and to support resilience in extremis. It will also require a sensitive levelling of the playing field with respect to the privilege accorded to diverse provenances of knowledge and material property rights in order to maximise opportunities for cooperation. This will in turn require significant institutional and regulatory readjustments (see UNEP 2012).

Genomics will have a part to play in all of this by providing support for establishing material identities and for transforming collectively prioritised breeding goals into a larger and more diverse set of accessible varieties than hitherto conceived.

Coda

Technologies for food security have to be robust and self-explanatory enough to withstand a good kicking in use. We need malleable components that adapt themselves to the needs and purposes of users, not entire ready-made systems. Perhaps, in fact, we need a technology revolution that emerges from the needs and purposes of the users themselves. This amounts to call for a food security revolution from within. Richards (2010).