FOCUS
Seed
Special
Maart 2014
22
Public versus private plant breeding:
Quo vadis
public breeding?
P
ublic sector agricultural research in
general and public plant breeding
research in particular, are in trouble
in both industrialised and in devel-
oping nations.
For a variety of reasons, budgets are stag-
nating 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 suc-
cessfully operating as private entities.
Two forces have been widely credited for
driving this privatisation:
Changes in science; and
an increased intellectual property pro-
tection for plant varieties (IPP).
Changes in science
With the rapid increase of genetically en-
gineered 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 en-
tered 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 certifi-
cate.
Decline in student numbers
This has been compounded by the fact that
the number of students entering universi-
ties 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 pro-
fession 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 in-
vestments 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 inclina-
tion to invest in the lengthy and expensive
process of educating plant breeders, (espe-
cially 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 compo-
nent of variance and GXE the interaction
between the genetic and the environmental
components of variance.
Basically, the aim of plant breeding is to dis-
sect P into various components so as to effec-
tively 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, entomol-
ogy, statistics, and latterly, genomics, trans-
formation processes and marker assisted
selection procedures are gaining popularity.
Emergence of new
technologies
With the emergence of the “new” technolo-
gies, 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 up-
stream and fashionable disciplines such as
genomics, genetic transformation and the
use of molecular markers.
These technologies have contributed to-
ward a better understanding of the function-
ing 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 imple-
mented to ensure that the current trend does
not end in a complete demise of the conven-
tional public sector plant breeding fraternity?
Future challenges of
public sector breeding
programmes
Unlike universities, which can make a rea-
sonable 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 ex-
perienced 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 improve-
ment activities and methodological de-
velopment 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
KLAUS W PAKENDORF,
Department of Genetics, University of Stellenbosch
