Scientists move to conserve East Africa's plant genetic resources

Crop scientists have embarked on a five-year project to conserve indigenous plant genetic resources in a move to improve food security across East Africa.

Plant genetic resources are diversity of seeds and planting material of traditional and modern varieties, crop wild relatives and other wild plant species which scientists can use in the development of improved crop varieties, resistant to pests and diseases as well as tolerant to changes in climatic conditions.

Dr. Fina Opio, the executive director at the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA) said the $8.5 million project funded by the Swedish International Development Corporation Agency, will see the scientists across East Africa including Somalia, Djibouti, and South Sudan, take forward efforts in collecting, store and sharing information on the available plant genetic resources.

“It will also enhance the utilisation of the conserved materials by completing the characterization, evaluation and documentation of the accessed materials. This will involve more work in ensuring that infrastructure for conservation is working under ideal conditions,” Dr. Opio said.

Dr. Opio said over 140,000 accessions (collections of plant materials from particular locations) of plants have so far been collected and conserved in the various national gene-banks in Uganda, Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, and Sudan.

Of these, over 27,000 accessions have been adequately characterised and 1,416 accessions evaluated for various agronomic and nutritional qualities, yield potential and for drought tolerance and thus ready to be taken-up by farmers.

This comes in a wake of devastating effects of climate change, social and political unrest, invasion of alien species, inadequate recognition of the value of indigenous and/or traditional knowledge systems and the expanding population pressure, threatening the existence of indigenous plant species viable for plant breeding in the region.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation, the world population is expected to rise from the current seven billion people to nine billion by 2050, putting on more pressure on land to feed the escalating population.

Whereas the indigenous planting materials have low yields per unit area compared with the improved varieties, modern plant breeders normally revert to traditional plants to get the genes that are useful for breeding programmes to address a particular agricultural problem.

Dr. Abebe Demissie Tefera, the managing director at the Ethiopian-based Climate and Natural Resources Management Consulting told The EastAfrican that east Africa harbors various crops wild relatives that exhibit a large gene pool that could help to tackle challenges of climate change, pests and diseases.

Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Eritrea, and Sudan, for instance, have a wide collection of genetic resources including that of cereals, legumes, oils crops, millets and forage species as well as those with high pharmaceutical values such as Prunus Africana, Warbugia ugandensis, and Fagara macrophilla.

Dr. Abebe said sorghum and millet are unusually drought tolerant whose potential can be harness to increase production in the north east African countries in response to the adverse of climate change.

“The wild relatives of these crops probably hold the key to food security and increased agricultural productivity in the region as sources of genes for adaptive traits in the wake of climate change,” Dr. Abebe said.

Early this year, the African Orphan Crops Consortium consisting of the African Union -New Partnership for Africa’s Development; Mars Incorporated; World Agroforestry Centre; Beijing Genomics Institute; Life Technologies Corporation; World Wildlife Fund; University of California, Davis; iPlant Collaborative and Biosciences Eastern and Central Africa-International Livestock Research Institute, released a list of a hundred ingenious crop species whose genomes it plans to sequence, assemble and annotate to improve nutrition on the continent.

The list, which includes the African eggplant, amaranth, guava and cassava, finger millet, sorghum, is being disseminated so that researchers around the world can contact the consortium with suggestions for research needs regarding the selected species.
The research is to being conducted at the Nairobi-based African Plant Breeding Academy hosted at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), with improved planting materials offered to smallholder farmers throughout Africa.

According to the consortium, more than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa consume orphan crops, thus boosting their main crop production and nutrition will help reduce hunger and malnutrition.

Globally, agriculture depends on the diversity of relatively few plant species, according to Dr. Abebe, adding that of the approximately 250, 000 identified and described plant species, some 7,000 are being used for food, with only 30 species providing about 90 per cent of the world’s calorie intake and only three species namely maize, wheat and rice supplying almost 60 per cent of the calories and protein in the human diet.

“In addition to being limited in terms of species diversity, the world’s genetic diversity is in danger of being lost. With the advent of modern agriculture, untold numbers of locally adapted traditional varieties have been replaced by the widespread use of genetically uniform high yielding modern varieties,” Dr. Abebe said.

Dr. John Mulumba, the head of Plant Genetics Resource Center in Entebbe told The EastAfrican that the seeds for Uganda’s indigenous crops are now available to farmers and scientists upon request.