Towards resilience through systems-based plant breeding. A review

Abstract

How the growing world population can feed itself is a crucial, multi-dimensional problem that goes beyond sustainable development. Crop production will be affected by many changes in its climatic, agronomic, economic, and societal contexts. Therefore, breeders are challenged to produce cultivars that strengthen both ecological and societal resilience by striving for six international sustainability targets: food security, safety and quality; food and seed sovereignty; social justice; agrobiodiversity; ecosystem services; and climate robustness. Against this background, we review the state of the art in plant breeding by distinguishing four paradigmatic orientations that currently co-exist: community-based breeding, ecosystem-based breeding, trait-based breeding, and corporate-based breeding, analyzing differences among these orientations. Our main findings are: (1) all four orientations have significant value but none alone will achieve all six sustainability targets; (2) therefore, an overarching approach is needed: "systems-based breeding," an orientation with the potential to synergize the strengths of the ways of thinking in the current paradigmatic orientations; (3) achieving that requires specific knowledge development and integration, a multitude of suitable breeding strategies and tools, and entrepreneurship, but also a change in attitude based on corporate responsibility, circular economy and true-cost accounting, and fair and green policies. We conclude that systems-based breeding can create strong interactions between all system components. While seeds are part of the common good and the basis of agrobiodiversity, a diversity in breeding approaches, based on different entrepreneurial approaches, can also be considered part of the required agrobiodiversity. To enable systems-based breeding to play a major role in creating sustainable agriculture, a shared sense of urgency is needed to realize the required changes in breeding approaches, institutions, regulations and protocols. Based on this concept of systems-based breeding, there are opportunities for breeders to play an active role in the development of an ecologically and societally resilient, sustainable agriculture.

Keywords: Agrobiodiversity; Breeding strategies; Common good; Ecological resilience; Entrepreneurial models; Resource use efficiency; Seed systems; Social justice; Societal resilience; Sustainability.

Fig. 1

Ecological resilience in rice. The figure shows different types of phenotypic plasticity in response to water-deficit stress during the vegetative stage. Variety 1 shows a root system with a short root length under water deficit compared to the control, Variety 2 shows a longer root system under water deficit compared to the control, whereas Variety 3 shows equally long root systems for the water-deficit treatment and the control. Material and data from an experiment described by Kadam et al. (2017). Reproduced with kind permission from Dr. Niteen N. Kadam, International Rice Research Institute and Wageningen University & Research

Fig. 2

Societal resilience of rice. Chinese female farmers rank the quality of rice prepared from different cultivars based on their culturally determined preferences and allocating a certain number of maize kernels to indicate the rank of preference. Rice cultivars play an important role in local food and seed sovereignty. Picture by Edith T. Lammerts van Bueren

Fig. 3

Roles and positioning of the breeding and seed systems within their technical, economic, institutional and cultural context

Fig. 4

Four breeding orientations as functions of different positions between subjectivism and objectivism, and between holism and reductionism

Fig. 5

Representation of systems-based breeding as a fifth, overarching breeding orientation integrating the strengths of the four breeding orientations earlier described