Public versus private plant breeding: Quo vadis public breeding?

KLAUS W PAKENDORF, Department of Genetics, University of Stellenbosch

Public sector agricultural research in general and public plant breeding research in particular, are in trouble in both industrialised and in developing nations.

For a variety of reasons, budgets are stagnating in the public sector. In contrast, over the last 30 years, private sector agricultural investment has grown dramatically, and an increasing proportion of this investment has been directed to plant breeding (Heisy et al.
2002).

Public sector involvement in conventional plant breeding programmes has declined dramatically, and this is especially evident in countries like Australia and the UK, where public funded breeding programmes set the benchmark for many years, but are now successfully operating as private entities.

Two forces have been widely credited for driving this privatisation:

• Changes in science; and
• an increased intellectual property protection for plant varieties (IPP).

Changes in science

With the rapid increase of genetically engineered crops, the excitement over new areas such as genomics, and the constant parade of mergers and acquisitions within the so-called “life sciences” industry, many analysts assume that plant breeding has entered the new era of “creative destruction”, with innovation following upon innovation in rapid succession.

Intellectual property protection

Plant breeders’ rights legislation of 1960 (UPOV countries) and the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 (PVPA) in the USA, Australia and Canada 1990, concerned three major issues, such as:

Definition of a distinct variety:

• The rights of producers to save seed for own use.
• Research exemptions for use in other breeding programmes, as well as the time covered by the grant of the certificate.

Decline in student numbers

This has been compounded by the fact that the number of students entering universities to be trained as plant breeders, appear to be falling, as do the numbers of graduates available to the plant breeding profession. Due to this decline, the plant breeding profession has “greyed” considerably. This is especially evident in the public sector.

Squeezed between falling budgets and rising costs, public sector organisations have responded by scaling back their investments in human capacity building for agriculture, resulting in a shrinking pool of trained human capital to maintain current programmes, or for the private sector to capitalise upon.

Private companies have shown little inclination to invest in the lengthy and expensive process of educating plant breeders, (especially where minor crops are concerned) and have preferred to siphon-off trained staff from the public sector (Morris et al. 2006).

What are the solutions for the future?

Skills needed by plant breeders: P = G + E + GE

Where G represents the genetic component of variance, E the environmental component of variance and GXE the interaction between the genetic and the environmental components of variance.

Basically, the aim of plant breeding is to dissect P into various components so as to effectively and efficiently maximise genetic gain. Plant breeding is both an art and a science, where art encompasses careful observations of plant behaviour in the field and the choice of parents; and science, the knowledge of genetics, physiology, pathology, entomology, statistics, and latterly, genomics, transformation processes and marker assisted selection procedures are gaining popularity.

Emergence of new technologies

With the emergence of the “new” technologies, as announced by the unravelling of the genetic code by Watson and Crick in 1953, interest in the more basic sciences such as agronomy, pathology, soil science, entomology, etc has given way to more upstream and fashionable disciplines such as genomics, genetic transformation and the use of molecular markers.

These technologies have contributed toward a better understanding of the functioning of organisms, genetic inter-relationships of genetic processes thereby increasing the predictive ability of an anticipated outcome.

They have not only increased the expense account of breeding programmes, but have also opened the door for another breed of scientist who prefers to ply his/her trade in the laboratory rather than in the field.

Which measures must however be implemented to ensure that the current trend does not end in a complete demise of the conventional public sector plant breeding fraternity?

Future challenges of public sector breeding programmes

Unlike universities, which can make a reasonable case that human capacity building is a public good requiring public funding, public institutions will have a difficult time convincing policymakers that their activities cannot be picked up by the private sector, especially in view of the current lack of experienced plant breeders in certain public breeding programmes concerning various major crops.

To successfully make the argument, public breeding programmes will have to move upstream in the research pipeline and concentrate on basic germplasm improvement activities and methodological development work, leaving the private sector more applied types of research that lead to the development of commercial products, including finished cultivars with good adaptation.

If they are to move upstream in the research pipeline and still retain their relevance, the public breeding programmes will have to strengthen their links with private firms to ensure that their activities still maintain relevance for commercial breeding and producer demands.

They will also have to move closer to the universities in order to stay abreast of the latest technological advances, both with regards to methodology as well as equipment. This will not only mean developing more effective collaboration mechanisms, but also learning to deal more adroitly with IP dimensions in research. Issues relating to ownership and control will assume increased importance, and confidentiality requirements will play a more visible role in influencing the flow of technology and information.

For various reasons – among others, the lack of continuity within established breeding programmes – the decline within the public sector has progressed to such a level that a return to the status quo of say 20 years ago is improbable.

Simply injecting more resources in an effort to revive the old system will not work because the system that has functioned so well in the past is no longer appropriate. Changes in the distribution of institutional roles and responsibilities will therefore be needed to reverse current trends (Morris et al. 2006).

Literature

Heisey, P.W., Srcinivasan, C. S. and Thirtle, C. 2002. Privatisation of plant breeding in industrialised countries. Causes, consequences and public sector response. In: Beyerlee, D. and Echeverria, R.G. (Eds). Agricultural research policy in an era of privatisation: Experiences from the developing world. CABI, Wallingford, UK.
Morris Michael, Greg Edmeades and Eija Pehu. 2006. The global need for plant breeding capacity: What roles for the public and private sectors? Hort. Science Vol. 41(1), 30 - 39.