'Plant Breeding: Sustaining the Future' Abstracts of the XVIth EUCARPIA Congress, Edinburgh, Scotland, 10-14 September 2001 PLANT BREEDING AND THE DECADE AHEAD R.B. FLAVELL, FRS Chief Scientific Officer, Ceres-Inc., Malibu, California, USA

Every country needs better plants for a variety of purposes.  Some, desperately so.  Will these needs be fulfilled in the coming years in the same ways as in the past few decades? Clearly not.  People, politics, companies and science will make things very different.  We have seen in the past ten years the growth of globalisation, awareness of needs, standards and legislation.  Yet many governments and teaching institutions have reduced their commitment to plant breeding, multinationals have assimilated smaller companies, and are now fusing to create even fewer larger companies.  In Europe and increasingly around the world, movements to ban the use of gmos and to have many so-called “healthy” foods have gained popularity and brought more public awareness to many aspects of plant breeding.  Consumer, health and environmental issues are now topical all around the world. The use of transgenes in crops has brought new debate and legislation about the ownership of genes and germplasm.  Granted patents are changing plant breeding opportunities and plant breeding institutions.

Against this set of fast-changing issues sustainability of plant breeding will continue to depend on the attitudes and decisions of governments, industries and the talent of plant breeders.

Understanding of the genetic base of our crops, genes, alleles and traits is growing rapidly.  The technologies for following every allele through a breeding programme and finding specific haplotypes have now arrived but need to become increasingly automated and available.  The leaders will get to know about almost every gene in several major crops in the next ten years, how these genes are controlled and combine to make important traits.  The knowledge will enable orphan crops to be tackled with more confidence.  Molecular genetics will surely increasingly dominate plant breeding and the marketplace as the decades go by.  Hundreds of thousands of increasingly complex transgenic plants will provide opportunities to commercialise new products for the rich and the poor.

Without doubt the science of plant breeding, politics, industrial decisions and people around the world will increasingly bring plant breeding into controversial debate.  This illustrates that people know that plant breeding is important and central to fulfilling the needs of the people.  Our plant breeding community can be thrilled that this science will be a centre-stage topic for the coming decades but the consequential responsibilities are substantial and need constant vigilance.