Changes required | Industry will urge more public-private-producer partnerships
Much uncertainty surrounds the future of wheat breeding in Canada.
However, a few things are becoming crystal clear, according to experts who discussed the topic during Crop Production Week in Saskatoon.
For starters, private companies will become more involved in developing and marketing new wheat varieties in Canada.
In addition, governments, seed companies and producer groups should be prepared to significantly increase investment in public and private wheat breeding programs.
Failure to do so will result in the marginalization of the Canadian wheat industry, a smaller share of global wheat markets and lower returns for Canadian wheat growers.
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“To sustain our share in the global wheat market at about 14 or 15 percent … we will have to increase our production by about 35 percent in Canada over the next 10 years,” said Rod Merryweather, a spokesperson for Bayer Crop Science.
“Without … innovation, I believe that wheat will ultimately become an orphan crop that we will use as a rotational tool.”
Merryweather said private sector companies are eager to invest in wheat breeding, but how quickly they enter the market will hinge on a few key factors.
To attract private sector investment, Canada must strengthen its existing plant breeders rights legislation and adopt provisions contained in UPOV 91, he said.
Among other things, the UPOV 91 agreement proposes that plant breeders’ rights be extended to 20 years from 15.
Merryweather also stressed the importance of public-private partnerships, which would allow private companies and publicly funded breeding programs to share information, genetic material and plant breeding expertise.
Garth Patterson, executive director of the Western Grains Research Foundation, agreed that investment is the key to maintaining a healthy wheat industry and increasing producer profits from wheat.
The best way to ensure adequate investment is to build partnerships that involve producers, government and private sector plant breeding companies.
“We think that Canada is falling behind in what research,” Patterson said. “In order for us to be sustainable in western Canadian crop production, we need oilseeds, cereals, pulses and special crops all to be profitable for producers. Otherwise, we get (deviations) in the rotation that can affect our sustainability.”
Patterson said Canada invests $20 million a year in wheat variety development, compared to an estimated $80 million in Australia.
Canada’s canola industry spends $65 to $80 million a year on varietal development.
Patterson said the WGRF would like to see Canada’s total investment in wheat breeding quadruple to $80 million a year, which would include investments by private companies, public funding and producer contributions through agencies such as the WGRF.
“We need to increase investment in wheat breeding,” he said.
“We’ve said that $80 to $100 million is needed annually in varietal development research and we think the best way to do that is through public-producer-private partnerships (because) certainly we don’t have the capacity as producers to increase our investment to that level.”
Patterson said the foundation has initiated discussion with government funding partners and private industry to determine how partnerships are likely to evolve.
The foundation is also in the process of revamping producer checkoffs, which could involve higher check-off rates or different collection mechanisms.
Decisions on new check-off programs that affect western Canadian cereal growers will be made over the next few years.
Curtis Pozniak, a wheat and durum breeder with the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre, said Canada’s public breeding programs have done an exceptional job developing new wheat varieties for prairie growers.
However, he acknowledged that securing adequate funding will be an increasingly difficult challenge, especially if Canadian programs hope to have access to the latest technologies available to plant breeders.
Pozniak said plant breeding technologies are advancing rapidly, along with costs and demands on public resources.
Technologies such as marker assisted breeding, precision breeding techniques and high-throughput phenotyping facilities are becoming more common.
Public programs that fail to stay abreast of new technologies and use new breeding tools will fall further behind their competitors.
Pozniak, originally from Rama, Sask., is one of Canada’s lead scientists in an international program aimed at sequencing the wheat genome.
The project will result in the development of an unlimited number of genetic markers that will allow breeders to identify useful genes and incorporate them into new wheat lines more quickly and efficiently.
Canada’s contribution to the program will be sequencing one of the genome’s 21 chromosomes.
Other critical work will include developing advanced bioinformatics programs and databases that enable breeders to manage the huge amount of data being generated.
Canada is already developing new bioinformatics tools that will allow breeders to analyze data more efficiently and develop new plant varieties more quickly using marker-assisted breeding.
“In the future, we’re going to need better integration of all this information that we’re generating,” Pozniak said.
“We have to tie all of this information together so that the breeder can interrogate the data and make the decisions in his breeding program.”
Given the cost and complexity of such initiatives, it is unlikely different players in the plant breeding industry could expect to have exclusive access to such tools.
Shared investment as well as shared access to both information and germplasm appears to be the model gaining the most traction among stakeholders.
Pozniak said Canada’s public breeding programs have done an outstanding job collecting the best wheat germplasm available from a variety of sources around the world.
Merryweather said access to germplasm by private breeders will be an important issue.
An environment that allows private companies to access public germplasm collections and new public cultivars on a commercial basis will be critical to the development of new wheat varieties that offer traits such as improved nutrient use and en-hanced resistance to drought, disease and insects, he added.
“I believe that it’s critical to have access to all germplasm on a global basis to create the best varieties possible.”
