Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate.
- Walgate, Robert
- Date:
- [1990]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![CHAPTER 11 GENETIC RESOURCES Developing countries can claim to be rich in one thing at least: genetic resources. Robert May, a leading biomathematician, has demonstrated that tropical forests must contain around 30 million species of insect (of which only a million or so are even described by science, let alone investigated) [i]. Previous guesses had put the figure at only 3 million. The number of tropical forest micro-organisms — bacteria, viruses, and fungi — will be even greater than 30 million, because the number of environmental nooks and crannies — niches — that create species' differences rises as the scale gets smaller. These organisms provide a vast untapped source of potential biocontrol agents against insects, plant diseases and weeds. Even on the larger scale, many species of tropical trees and plants remain to be described and investigated, say botanists. And as for the ecological relationships of all these species and their genes — for example, the associations with insects and fungi that determine the productivity of a wild Brazil nut tree — essentially nothing is kлown. It is not only tropical forests that are rich in species and their genes. Famine-ridden Ethiopia is actually a Vavilov centre of diversity for cereal genes — one of several, mostly developing country, world centres of origin of useful crop genes, first described by Soviet botanist N. I. Vavilov. Only a small proportion of these genes, in tropical forests or the Vavilov centres, can be said to have been securely collected and stored. Most are still in the forest and the field: they are under increasing threat from the disappearance of virgin forest habitat and from the displacement of indigenous local crop varieties, in which there is much genetic variation, by improved varieties with a much more uniform genetic base. Indigenous genetic resources are potentially worth billions. Green Revolution genes added US$2 billion of value annually to wheat grown in Asia, and US$ 1.5 billion to rice. A wild Turkish wheat plant supplied genes giving disease resistance to a commercial variety now](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18035644_0170.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
