Investing in seed banks vital for future use

The National Farming

By BOSORINA ROBBY
THIS month saw government officials from the departments of Agriculture and Livestock, and National Planning and Monitoring and others embark on a fact-finding mission to
India with agricultural interests on the agenda.
DAL secretary Dr Vele Pat Ila’ava said the agricultural diversity and opportunity available in India was enough to encourage PNG to aim for such development.
“India transformed itself into a developed country on the back of agriculture. If they can do it, so can we. Agriculture has proven to be the change and so this trip has opened our eyes to the immense potential available to us.”
The delegation’s visit included a tour of the world’s second largest seed bank, the Indian Bureau of Plant Genetic Research Centre, which houses thousands of seeds and plant tissues from all over the world.
DAL Minister Benny Allan was pleasantly surprised and impressed to find samples of Papua New Guinean sweet potato (kaukau), sugarcane and taro preserved there for research.
“Our commodity boards currently have their own seed banks which stores varieties of their own commodity crop, such as the Kokonas Indastri Koporasen.
“We hope that India will help us set up a seed bank in a central location to preserve all our cash crops and other commodity varieties and more,” Allan said.
Rural farmers in Papua New Guinea already practice small-scale seed preservation mainly for the next year’s harvest, such as drying corn for seeds. However, seed preservation on the global level is mainly for crop diversity.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and other similar institutions, a seed bank is a type of gene bank where seeds of different crops and rare plant species are stored for future use.
Seed banks are created to maintain and protect biodiversity, in case seed reserves elsewhere are destroyed, and the seed bank is opened to provide seeds to farmers at defined quantities for growing plants.
Most of the seeds can be stored for centuries without damaging their genetic properties.
However, they should be replanted after a certain time period in order to avoid eventual DNA damage.
The seeds are frozen at temperatures below -4 degrees centigrade and stored in seed vaults. Seed banks primarily involve in selecting, collecting, and storing seed varieties. They also form seed exchange networks with government organizations, NGOs and community seed banks across the world. They also form ex situ storage facilities.
They help in seed exchange, on farm conversation with experts and farmers, training and capacity building for farmers and continuous monitoring of cultivation.
Aside from crop diversity, other reasons to store and preserve seeds: Climate change: Scientists are concerned that climate change will cause extreme weather conditions and bring new pests into some environments.
These events could cause certain species of plants to go extinct.
Natural disasters: Natural disasters can wreak havoc on a region’s ecosystem.
Disease: Disease quickly and easily wipes out crops.
Man-made disaster: Man-made disasters can be as devastating to plant life as natural disasters. An obvious example would be war.
Research: Indigenous people have used plants to cure sickness for centuries. One in every six wild plants is used for medicinal purposes.
There are about 1400 seed banks around the world, so which seeds get chosen for storage varies from location to location.
At these local and international seed banks, poisonous plants are also stored there. It may seem dangerous to bank the seeds of poisonous or invasive plants but there’s always the possibility of undiscovered
uses for a plant.
Difficult-to-store seeds may respond better to cryopreservation, or in-vitro storage. For example, the banana plant does not produce seeds, so alternative storage methods are necessary. In-vitro storage means that living plant tissues are stored, rather than seeds.
Scientists then place these livingtissues in liquid nitrogen – around minus 196 degrees Celsius – to ensure better long-term storage.
Benefits of Agro-biodiversity
Our food and livelihood security depends on the sustained management of diverse biological resources that are economically important.
The conservation of agro-biodiversity in crop production systems is inherently linked to sustainable use and preservation, since the particular plant species would have been cultivated and nurtured for centuries.
So local knowledge and culture are integral parts of agro-biodiversity management.
Further, biodiversity provides critical support for drug discovery and the availability of medicinal resources, since a major proportion of drugs are derived from biological sources.
Agro-biodiversity helps in various ways such as:

  • increase productivity, food security and economic returns
  • Reduce the pressure of agriculture on fragile areas, forests and endangered species
  • Make farming systems more stable and sustainable
  • Contribute to pest and disease management
  • Reduce the spread of diseases to individuals and nations
  • Improve human nutrition and provide sources of medicines
  • Conserve ecosystem structure and stability of species diversity
  • A vast amount of agricultural biodiversity is being lost, as farmers abandon locally developed, centuries old seeds for the new hybrids.

The UN’s Food & Agriculture Organisation estimates that 75 per cent of crop biodiversity has been lost from the world’s fields. India is reckoned to have had over 100,000 varieties of rice a century ago; it now has
only a few thousand.

  • It has been estimated that 37 per cent of all living species may vanish in the next century due to climate change. There are an estimated 8.7 million different living species on earth, of which 300,000 are plants.

Many of them may vanish due to climate changes, human activities or due to natural disasters before we can understand their importance.
Hence, it is important to not only know about biodiversity and to take action to conserve them. This is why seed banks are important.

  • Sources: fao.org, economist.com, telus.net