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Barley research at SCRI receives massive boost
Editorial
Filed 30 May 05
©www.land-care.org.uk
The barley programme at the Scottish Crop Research
Institute (SCRI), led by Dr Robbie Waugh, has just won four competitive
research contracts worth over £3 million to extend their work
on the underlying genetic mechanisms that control yield, quality
and environmental sustainability of the crop. This funding will
enable the team to employ five additional scientists for the next
4 years.
Two separate grants awarded jointly by the Biotechnology
and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Scottish
Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department (SEERAD) (£404,000
and £500,000) will allow the SCRI team to address specific
areas of barley genetics which will increase knowledge about how
barley genes work and contribute further to the understanding of
the growth and functioning of barley plants.
An award of Euro 450,000 (c. £300,000) from
the EU Framework 6 program will look at the genetic processes underlying
disease resistance. This is part of a Euro 15M Integrated project
called BioExploit.
Most Scottish barley is used in the manufacture
of beer and whisky. Whisky is consistently the UK's largest export
in the food and drink sector, earning over £2.2 billion in
2004 and employing over 13,000 people in Scotland, mainly in rural
communities. About 30% of the arable land area of Scotland currently
grows barley.
Improving economically important characteristics
of barley such as yield, resistance to pests and diseases (which
dictates how much the crop will need to be sprayed to protect it)
and the amount of alcohol that can be extracted from it during the
process of making 'malt' whisky are key targets of commercial barley
breeders. Barley breeding routinely involves making a cross between
two different parent cultivars to generate a very large number of
daughter lines. During this process, the DNA of the parental lines
is shuffled to generate an almost infinite number of combinations,
only one of which is represented in each daughter line. The breeders
challenge is to identify a daughter line that is better than the
parents for one or more of the selected characters. Like us, the
genetic characteristics of individual barley cultivars is determined
by the specific combinations of genes that it contains. However,
as the barley DNA probably contains over 40,000 genes it is difficult
to identify which combinations are important for the crop's environmental,
grower and industry acceptance.
The £3M research funding will allow the
SCRI Barley Research Group to look for the genes that control the
characters that are important for improving barley production and
use. While this will be a stiff challenge, this project brings experimental
and analytical tools used in human and plant genetic studies to
identify and understand how natural gene variants influence desirable
plant characters. It will take advantage of local expertise in statistics,
and extensive plant materials and datasets available through UK
national plant evaluation trials.
Dr Waugh argues that once they have derived a
good understanding of what combinations of genes are required to
make a good barley variety, breeders will be able to look for even
better ones, tailored to meet both the industries' exact requirements
and improve the impact that growing the crop has on the environment.
Last year at least 90% of the barley used in Scotch
Whisky was from Scottish growers, although the percentage in previous
years was lower, much to the concern of Scottish arable farmers.
Improvement of varieties could potentially fill the gap, promote
the industry and invigorate the economy in rural areas of Scotland.
Unfortunately, other forces are acting counter to such a commendable
achievement.
In recent years growing barley for malting - or
indeed to sell as feed for livestock - has not been a profitable
business - even before the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy
(CAP) lead to decoupling of farm subsidies from production in the
UK. While the whiskey industry is indeed one of the premier industries
for Scotland, the price that farmers receive for the high quality
product does not meet the cost of production. It is likely that
2005 and onwards may see a a significant reduction in the amount
of malting - and indeed of feed - barley grown in Scotland.
It is understood that the malsters in Scotland
are under considerable pressure with the recent closure of a number
of plants. The farmers have long warned the whisky industry that
it will no longer be able to source sufficient malting barley from
Scotland to meet their needs, unless the price paid to farmers allows
growing it to be a profitable enterprise. To date the whisky industry
has avoided pressure that asks it to specify the country of origin
of the barley used in its production, thereby allowing them to buy
cheaper from abroad whenever they fancy. It would not be unreasonable
to expect bottle of Scotch to carry a label stating that the materials
involved in its production come from Scotland, but sadly this is
not generally the case.
So we have an example of the extraordinary chaos
that currently exists in Scottish farming, and indeed in UK farming
generally. Thus in Scotland we have:
-
a world renowned industry - Scotch whisky
- that makes masses of revenue for the UK Chancellor of the
Exchequer due to the extortionate taxes imposed on its sale,
-
huge grants from the EU and UK research councils to improve
the barley crop
- the price paid to farmers for this high quality
product does not meet the cost of production
It would therefore seem inevitable that the amount
of barley grown in Scotland will decline.
Is it not time that the politicians took more
interest in the economics of farming in Scotland, rather than concentrating
so much on the more romantic and populist subjects of "the
environment" with its "biodiversity" and "conservation"?
If they do not, then the research that has been so well funded at
SCRI will benefit other countries in preference to our own, and
the name "Scotch" will be even less plausible than it
is at the moment.
©www.land-care.org.uk
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