Agriculture and Human Values16: 91–92, 1999.

Book review

Participatory Plant Breeding: Proceedings of aWorkshop on Participation in Plant Breeding, 26–29July 1995edited by P. Eyzaguirre and M. IwanagaWageningen, The Netherlands. IPGRI, Rome, Italy,1996. ISBN 92-9043-269-1

JONATHAN ROBINSONAgricultural Research Centre of Finland, Institute ofCrop and Soil Science, Plant Breeding Section FIN-31600, Jokioinen, Finland (Phone: 358 3 418 8516;Fax: 358 3 418 8496; E-mail: jonathan.robinson@mtt.fi)

Jonathan Robinsonis a plant breeding researcher atthe Agricultural Research Centre of Finland and occa-sionally Professor of Plant and Forest Tree Breedingat the University of Helsinki. He has spent over tenyears in the tropics, including five years in southernand western Sudan. He has a broad interest in biologyand agriculture and his current research is in breedingcrops for resistance to pests and pathogens.

These proceedings contain sixteen contributions onparticipatory plant breeding (PPB) presented at aworkshop held in Wageningen, The Netherlands, in1995. The purpose of the workshop was to bringtogether plant breeders, genetic resource conservation-ists, and social scientists with a view to understandbetter how farmers could be more involved in theprocesses of plant breeding in less favorable environ-ments, and benefit, to a greater extent than has beenpossible to date, from plant breeding research. Theparticipatory approach has developed from, and tosome extent replaced, farming systems research (FSR),which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. The basictenet of the approach is that institutional plant breedinghas mainly addressed the requirements of farmers withaccess to resources, allowing modification of the envi-ronment to suit the genotype, rather than adapting thegenotype to suit the prevailing environment. Breedingcrops for a broad range of environments that have beenthus modified has been detrimental for the farmingsystems and ecosystems of many marginal environ-ments. Such an approach, exemplified by the Green

Revolution and its attendant genotypes and technolo-gies, is perceived to have been partly responsible forerosion of genetic resources, both wild and cultivated,reduced diversity of germplasm, and loss of associatedlocal knowledge.

Hardon provides a brief introduction to PPB andgenetic diversity, indicating that PPB includes a rangeof activities extending from decentralized breedingmanaged by professional plant breeders to farmerinvolvement in selection of germplasm at variouspoints in the breeding program. Adverse environ-ments include those affected by political instability,war and relief aid programs, in addition to thosewith unfavorable agroclimatic conditions; unfortu-nately the two often go together. Under such condi-tions, plant breeding and genetic resource conservationcease to be high on the list of priorities. Voss in thefollowing article points out that such areas containa disproportionate number of the world’s rural poor.Sperling contributes a section on participatory selec-tion of beans in Rwanda, and her publication on thisis referred to by most of the authors contributing tothese proceedings. Given the recent civil war in centralAfrica, and the continuing political instability in theregion, one wonders what remains of the efforts putinto PPB there, and indeed whether it has, or canever be, useful. The results of this, and the othercase studies presented, demonstrate that farmers can beusefully included in plant breeding, but a lot dependson particular circumstances.

Ceccarelli and others provide a section on cropimprovement in difficult environments and the contri-bution from international breeding programs. Theemphasis is on barley and work done at the Inter-national Center for Agricultural Research in the DryAreas (ICARDA) in Syria. A case is presented forbreeding for narrow adaptation, taking full account ofgenotype selection in stress-prone environments. Theysuggest that breeding for favorable and marginal envi-ronments requires separate objectives, germplasm andmethods and ultimately separate breeding programs.However, some type of classification will always benecessary, as there is a natural continuum from favor-able to marginal, and it will never be practicable todirect a breeding program to an environment that falls

92 BOOK REVIEW

below a certain critical size or production potential.The problem of changing physical environments is notreally addressed in these proceedings. Erosion anddegradation are gradual processes, like plant breed-ing itself, and it is highly unlikely that plant breedingefforts, PPB or otherwise, can keep pace with suchchanges. One of the principal problems concerning thenature of GE is that it is often inherently complex,cannot be adequately predicted, and cannot thereforebe taken into account in a breeding strategy. In this areaof plant breeding research, scientific papers, involv-ing relatively complex statistics, abound, but remainlargely inaccessible to practical plant breeders, whotend to deal with the problem through intuition. Idisagree with the stated assumptions of formal plantbreeding, especially that landraces are disease suscep-tible. Landraces, after all, owe their very existenceto having withstood disease outbreaks in the absenceof artificial control measures, and are therefore oftentolerant of the prevailing pests and diseases. Althoughrecognized as being low yielding, they are, none theless, stable yielders in the main.

The best way forward with PPB is undoubtedlyvia national agricultural research services (NARs), asindicated by Franzen and others in their section onvariety improvement in the informal sector. To theseends, most of the international agricultural researchorganizations have been co-operating with NARs for along time. Friis-Hansen correctly points out that merefarmer participation in plant breeding is no guaranteeagainst genetic erosion similar to that which, it isclaimed, follows release of conventional modern cropvarieties.

Better understanding of socio-economic issuesamong agricultural scientists is welcome, but descrip-tion and discussion of the problems alone will not

suffice. PPB is not an entirely new concept; therehas been considerable appreciation of socio-economicissues among agricultural scientists, and crop breedersin the tropics, for a long time. The bottom line is thatall agriculture is driven by considerations of produc-tion and profit, be the production aspect one of low butstable yields, and the profit aspect one of food security.

Trutmann stresses the requirement for participa-tory diagnosis, a continuing process and usually avery difficult one, but there must be some real actionin order that PPB works – diagnosis alone is notenough. I am grateful that Witcombe and Joshi makeit explicit that the intention of PPB is not to makeplant breeders redundant, as only the plant breedercan make crosses and understand the genetics thatoperate in the segregating generations. It is possiblethat a reader of these proceedings might think thatthere is little more to plant breeding than selection.Should molecular biology become a significant featureof plant breeding for difficult environments, and it isoften suggested to represent a potential second GreenRevolution, the balance will surely tilt further awayfrom farmer participation in favor of the researcher.

These proceedings contain useful and interestinginformation but a lot goes unsaid and unexplained,and for me, at least, the various sections do not reallyfit together. They differ in length, format and style,and contain a considerable amount of information incommon. While some of this is worth repeating, a lot isnot, but it is an inevitable consequence in proceedings.There is, moreover, a lot of text that carries little usefulinformation. I was left with the impression that morequestions were being raised than answers given, andI had the feeling at times that I was aboard the latestagricultural bandwagon, fueled by excessive wishfulthinking.