WILD RELATIVES

Bananas are one of the fruits for which wild relatives are being collected. This is a wild species from Yunnan, grown by myself. © Dr C Betts.

I am not talking about angry relations remonstrating about chlorinated chicken and the foolishness of Brexit, sympathise with them though I do. No, this is about something of more immediate and critical importance, not unconnected with climate change that has been the necessary focus of several of my news items. 

In 1983 when I was still in academe, I remember a book by Dr Norman Myers entitled A Wealth of Wild Species – Storehouse for Human Welfare. In his opening paragraph he said, “From morning coffee to evening nightcap we benefit in our daily lifestyles from the fellow species that share our One Earth home. … we utilize hundreds of products each day that owe their origin to wild animals and plants. … Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives of wild species, we may be saving our own.” 

Over the years this has been a subject of ongoing interest and concern for me and many scientists. It is good to know that seed- and gene-banks have been set up in many places around the world, one of the more notable for plants being the Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. However, there is so much more to do.

A particular issue is that the world’s food crops rely on a relatively small number of crop varieties with a narrow genetic profile that are sown or vegetatively reproduced over and over again, making them susceptible to diseases that can sweep through whole crops because of their genetic similarity and lack of resistance. Many of you will have read about threats to crops such as cocoa and rice but the problem is evident across a whole range of food crops. Step up to the plate the specialists in commercial botany who are searching the world for wild relatives of our food that could be used by plant breeders to introduce disease resistance or useful traits such as tolerance to drought or salty soils or other effects of climate change on the environment.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_Trust) have collected over twelve million seeds of four hundred key crop species’ wild relatives in some five thousand localities around the world since 2013. The crops of interest include cereals, pulses, legumes, tubers, oilseeds and many fruits. Many wild relatives with useful traits have been found, such as a carrot that can grow in saline conditions, a drought-resistant bean and a botrytis- (powdery mildew) resistant oat.  Another problem, though, is that wild crop relatives are often concentrated in rather small geographical regions in specific habitats and often these habitats are under threat from intensive agriculture, urbanisation and climate change. It is a race against time we cannot afford to lose. Gardeners and allotment holders can do their bit, too, by growing rarer varieties, which are sold by many specialist seed suppliers, to ensure that they are not lost to cultivation.

Betts Ecology promote biodiversity in all the site work we do, ensuring that wild species are protected and their populations enhanced in the greatest variety possible across all our sites, not just in the UK but on our land at my research office in France, too. They may not be crop relatives, but who knows what genes they may have that could be beneficial? It is another reason why Biodiversity Net Gain is such an important policy that we follow. 

 © Betts Ecology