World Grain - September 2013 - 8

from the editor-in-chief

Synthetic hexaploid
Wheat may win

f there’s any issue facing the global wheat
industry that poses a seemingly insoluble
dilemma, it is how wheat production is
going to increase to meet expanding global
demand. Of all the ways of assessing needs,
hardly any says it more strikingly than the assertion that between now and the middle of
the 21st century, the world will have to raise
a quantity equal to the total produced in all
of the preceding 10,000 years that wheat has
been an essential food. In less dramatic terms,
the need is for increasing yields which have
been on a barely improving course for the
past decade or longer. With the area devoted
to wheat decreasing in major producing countries, the urgency is for another Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s that prevented
global famine in the wake of World War II.
Unlike that earlier period when scientists
like Norman Borlaug were able to focus on
boosting yields, current research must aim
for yield gains while also dealing with sustainability issues, global warming and mindless unscientific attacks on genetic modification or engineering that most respected researchers believe offer the greatest promise
of achieving the ultimate goal of increasing
yields. Countries comprising nearly entire
continents have rejected grains whose yields
have been modified by genetic engineering
for reasons that make absolutely no sense
based on their success in the United States
where such crops are grown without effect

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on the health of millions. The strong objections to GMO, even when acknowledged as
ridiculous, seem to have won the day even as
concerns mount about food security.
While research on GMO wheat continues
under strict limits aimed at avoiding the sort
of uproar that greeted the highly suspicious
finding of a few such plants in a single Oregon field, word has come from England of
progress toward significant yield gains by
old-fashioned breeding. As embarrassing as
it may be to see Cambridge-based scientists
separate their work from what is the advanced
techniques of genetic modification, it is
praiseworthy that the U.K. National Institute
of Agricultural Botany has revealed that new
research has produced wheat that in early tests
increased yield by as much as 30%. Dubbed
“Super Wheat” by the British media, the experimental plants have their origin in work
done by CIMMYT, the International Maize
and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico
that was founded with the Green Revolution
of more than a half a century ago.
According to the English Institute, which
not so incidentally proudly claims Queen
Elizabeth II as patron, it is a “Synthetic
Hexaploid Wheat breeding program that it
uses to recapture variations from the early
grasses where wheat originated and which
were lost through thousands of years of
domestication. It is these variations, when
blended with durum wheat being commer-

cially raised in Britain, which are credited
with boosting yields. The durum was crossed
with wild goat-grass “using traditional crossing techniques” (a swipe at GMO) combined
with tissue culture in the research laboratory
to guarantee seed germination. “The resulting hybrid plants,” the Institute said, “produce the ‘synthetic’ seed, which is then used
in crossing programs with current varieties.”
This is the way Dr. Phil Howell, senior
plant breeder, says the program works:
“Based on early-stage trials, we’re confident that the performance gains and level
of potentially valuable variation observed,
through the novel step of re-synthesizing the
original wheat plant, points to a major transformation in the wheat improvement process.” As positive as he is about the advantages of what the Institute has discovered,
he says that careful research means the new
wheat will not be available for commercial
production until 2019 “at the earliest.”
That long a wait has prompted pleas for
speedier action. Considering the multiple
frustrations that mark the off-and-on efforts to find acceptable genetically-modified
wheat, it now appears that something named
SHW for Synthetic Hexaploid Wheat may
win the day and provide the world with the
food it needs.

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WORLD GRAIN (ISSN 0745-8991) Volume 31, issue 9,

Morton I. Sosland
Editor-in-chief

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