The historical motivation behind the current effort to breed for micronutrient-dense staple foods within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) system has its origins in the earlier emergence of an important institution. During the late 1920s and early 1930s several influential scientists and leading educators within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and at Cornell University became convinced that agricultural production practices and soil quality could influence the nutritional health of animals and people, and that soil quality and agricultural practices had important consequences on human health. To study these relationships, funds to build a new laboratory were sought from the U.S. Congress whose charter would focus on this vision. In 1939, construction of the U.S. Plant, Soil and Nutrition Laboratory (PSNL; funded by the USDA, Agricultural Research Service and located on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, NY) was completed with a mission to improve the nutritional quality of food and feed crops by studying the processes that control the cycling of nutrients through the soil-plant-animal-human food chain. The opening of this unique laboratory brought together several disciplines (including soil science, plant science and human and animal nutrition) that had, heretofore, never been linked directly within a single laboratory. For over 60 years now scientists at the PSNL have been studying the soil-plant-animal/human food system to determine how agricultural practices and soil quality can be changed in ways that will improve nutrient output of agricultural systems to enhance human health. From the beginning, the power of manipulating the genetic makeup of important food and feed crops with regards to nutritional value was apparent. Much of the research conducted at PSNL has been directed at determining the processes that control the accumulation of micronutrients in food crops and in defining ways to enhance their concentration and value in edible portions of these crops via genetic manipulation and through changing cultural practices. It wasn’t until the 1990's that the importance of this effort was recognized by several sectors within the agriculture and nutrition communities. With this historical brief in mind, the following excerpt discusses the early history of the current CGIAR initiative to breed for micronutrient-dense staple food crops. It was taken from a recent publication authored by Drs. Howarth Bouis, Robin Graham and Ross Welch.

The primary objective of plant breeding at agricultural research stations all over the world is to improve farm productivity, usually by developing crops with higher yields. In crossing varieties with various traits, scientists also monitor and attempt to maintain consumer characteristics such as taste, cooking qualities, and appearance. This is because such characteristics have a bearing on market price and so on profitability, which motivates farmers to adopt improved varieties.

Enhanced nutrient content has only infrequently been a breeding objective. During the breeding process, the nutritional qualities for human consumption (which, unnoticed, may improve, worsen, or change little) of improved crops are ignored for the most part. This is because it is presumed (i) that nutrient enhanced crops will be lower-yielding and so must command a higher price to be profitable, (ii) that consumers for the most part are unwilling to pay a premium for higher nutrient content of a specific food, even if the problem of reliably marketing the product as nutrient-enhanced could be solved, and (iii) an additional breeding objective of higher nutrient content will slow down the development of varieties with higher yields.

Such views were reinforced within the CGIAR by previous experience with breeding for high-quality protein maize (QPM). In the early 1970s, a major breeding program was begun at CIMMYT to produce QPMs. At the time, nutritionists had identified quality protein (lysine) as a key limiting nutrient to better nutrition in developing countries. Although there is now new and successful work on QPM varieties which has built on previous research (and which will be reported on by S.K. Vasal of CIMMYT at the conference), the QPM breeding project is considered by many scientists within the CGIAR to have been a major misallocation of resources. A primary problem was that the original genetic material that contained high concentrations of lysine was low-yielding. It took some time to develop varieties that were both high-lysine and high-yielding. However, the high-lysine, high-yielding varieties never matched the best-yielding, highest-profit maize varieties, so that farmer adoption was a major constraint. Moreover, because most nutritionists have long since concluded that quality protein is not a key limiting nutrient to better nutrition, impetus to further breeding for nutritional objectives was diminished.

With this as background, with funding from the USAID Office of Nutrition, IFPRI in 1993 was commissioned to take the lead in identifying activities which the CGIAR might undertake to join other international and national organizations in the fight against micronutrient malnutrition. When the idea of breeding for micronutrient content was first broached with individual scientists within the CGIAR in visits to Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, Syria, and Taiwan in 1993, the suggestion was generally met with skepticism. Notwithstanding the fact that there was virtually no institutional knowledge of genotype variation in micronutrient content of crop varieties developed by the CGIAR centers, the presumption among most of those scientists was either that there again would be a trade-off between plant yield and nutritional value or that, at best, there would be no correlation with yield and that adding an additional breeding objective (nutritional quality) would slow down the overriding breeding objectives of higher and more stable crop yields. It probably did not help matters that the subject was introduced by an economist (one of the authors) with limited knowledge of plant physiology and plant breeding and no formal training in human nutrition.

In the course of these discussions, one scientist recommended a visit to the U. S. Plant, Soil, and Nutrition Laboratory (PSNL), run by the USDA-ARS and located on the Cornell University campus, a visit which was to fundamentally change the direction of the CGIAR Micronutrients Project. The PSNL, established in the 1930s, has been charged with looking at the linkages between minerals in soils and the nutrition of plants, animals, and humans in the United States.

During that initial visit, Ross Welch of PSNL provided information about research conducted by Robin Graham of the Waite Agricultural Research Institute at the University of Adelaide in Australia to improve plant nutrition by breeding for crops that have improved efficiency in the uptake of trace minerals from "deficient" soils, and which load high amounts of these minerals into plant seeds. (Note added: Actually, at that time, Dr. Graham’s primary focus was on improving micronutrient efficiency to increase plant productivity on micronutrient-poor soils, while Dr. Welch’s efforts were directed at increasing the content and value of these nutrients in plant seeds to improve nutritional quality).

From the point of view of the Waite-PSNL collaboration, collaboration with the CGIAR presented the possibility to apply this work to the much more serious mineral deficiency problems found in developing countries. From the point of view of the CGIAR centers, the Waite-PSNL collaboration represented a wealth of scientific information and experience previously untapped for possibly improving the productivity of CGIAR released crop varieties, in addition to potential benefits for human nutrition.

After subsequent lectures by Robin Graham at CIAT, CIMMYT, and IRRI, attitudes toward the micronutrient-dense-seed plant breeding strategy among a core group of CGIAR plant breeders changed dramatically. In January 1994 an organizational workshop was held (supported under the original funding from the Office of Nutriton of USAID), bringing together scientists from many disciplines from inside and outside the CGIAR, and practitioners from several organizations involved in combating micronutrient malnutrition in developing countries. (Note added: Drs. Graham and Welch developed the agenda for plant-related items addressed at this first organizational workshop and also authored the IFPRI Working Paper on this subject titled Breeding for Staple Food Crops with High Micronutrient Density, Agricultural Strategies for Micronutrients, Working Paper 3, 1996).

The major outcome of that workshop was the development and endorsement of a coordinated five-year plan to develop the genetic material and breeding tools necessary for release to national breeding programs. Since the organizational workshop, the research strategy has been presented and discussed at a number of international fora. The strategy — and findings from research under the CGIAR micronutrients project -- has been the subject of a special issue of Field Crops Research (Graham and Welch, editors, 1999, volume 60) and a forthcoming article in Advances in Agronomy (Graham, Welch and Bouis authors).

Beginning in 1996, major funding for the project has come from DANIDA, approximately U.S$1.2 million over four years, presently extending to mid-2000. Supplementary funding has also been provided by USAID for research on rice and by ACIAR to support the collaboration of the Waite Agricultural Research Institute at the University of Adelaide.

 

Positive findings from the research conducted over the past four years in this project have demonstrated that it is possible to develop micronutrient enriched staple food crops through traditional plant breeding techniques. Currently, there is great interest in pursuing this strategy to improve the micronutrient output of agricultural systems.

Clearly, without the efforts of scientists at the PSNL and at the University of Adelaide, the plant breeding effort currently underway would still not have been embraced as an important goal by the CGIAR network.