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Changing the system from
within: participatory plant
breeding and ABS in China
6
by JINGSONG LI, JANICE JIGGINS and YICHING SONG
Guangxi – centre of maize diversity
With the rapid loss of biodiversity worldwide, agricultural genetic resources are
increasingly under threat. Those in China
are no exception.
Guangxi is a mountainous area of
southwest China. Although economically
poor, Guangxi is agroecologically diverse
and one of the centres of maize genetic
diversity in China. However, a study in the
1990s revealed that the formal State seed
system was operating entirely separately
from farmers’ own seed systems, resulting
in inadequate variety development, poor
adoption of formally bred varieties by
farmers, and a decrease in both the genetic
base for formal breeding and genetic diversity in farmers’ fields (Song, 1998). This was
impacting on food security and agrobiodiversity. Since 2000, the opening up of the
domestic seed market has seen a rapid
expansion in the availability of commercial
seed, to a great extent marginalising farm-
ers’ systems for saving and exchanging seed
of local varieties. This has resulted in a
dramatic loss of genetic diversity in
farmer’s fields in the last decade, in favour
of modern varieties which are less resilient
to the increasingly harsh local climate (e.g.
drought).
China’s first participatory plant breeding (PPB) programme was initiated in
Guangxi and aims to address these challenges.1 This type of collaborative research
between farmers and plant breeders in
government institutions has never been
done before and is unique in China. The
programme not only aims to develop
improved crop varieties for farmers but
also to develop local agreements by which
farming communities can benefit from
sharing their genetic resources and related
traditional knowledge with breeding institutes. The programme has opened up space
for farmers to negotiate ABS agreements
and in the process strengthened the legiti-
1 Participatory plant breeding is an approach to seed development and improvement that
involves farmers and breeders in systematic procedures for jointly identifying desirable traits,
selecting promising lines, and evaluating the resulting varieties.