Abstract
International agricultural research has historically been an example par excellence of open source approach to biological research. Beginning in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s, a looming global food crisis led to the development of a group of international agricultural research centers with a specific mandate to foster international exchange and crop improvement relevant to many countries. This formalization of a global biological commons in genetic resources was implemented through an elaborate system of international nurseries with a breeding hub, free sharing of germplasm, collaboration in information collection, the development of human resources, and an international collaborative network. This paper traces the history of the international wheat program with particular attention to how this truly open source system operated in practice and the impacts that it had on world poverty and hunger. The paper also highlights the challenges of maintaining and evolving such a system over the long term, both in terms of financing, as well the changing ‘rules of the game’ resulting from international agreements on intellectual property rights and biodiversity. Yet the open source approach is just as relevant today, as witnessed by current crises in food prices and looming crop diseases problem of global significance.
Highlights
International agricultural research has historically been an example par excellence of open source approaches to biological research
The origins of international crop breeding and the international agricultural research system date to 1940, when the US and Mexican governments requested the Rockefeller Foundation to support research on basic food crops, along with training of Mexican scientists in what became in the mid-1940s, the Oficina de Estudios Especiales, a special unit within the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture focusing on maize, wheat, beans and soil management (Bickel 1974)
The international wheat breeding system evolved through CIMMYT as the central hub and with the majority of entries in the nurseries being provided from CIMMYT crosses which were very extensive (about 8000 per year in the 1990s (Rajaram and van Ginkel 2001))
Summary
International agricultural research has historically been an example par excellence of open source approaches to biological research. Led by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the outcome of this effort was the development of a group of international agricultural research centers with a specific mandate to foster international exchange of materials and knowledge for crop improvement of relevance across many countries This formalization of a global biological commons in genetic resources was implemented through an elaborate system of cross-country research experiments known as international nurseries, a breeding hub, free sharing of germplasm, collection and characterization of exotic germplasm, generation and sharing of information, the development of a network of trained scientists, and widely shared goals. The open source approach that has been historically so successful in crop improvement research for the poor is just as relevant today, as witnessed by the recent global food crisis and looming crop disease problems of global significance
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