Seed science in the 21st century: its role in emerging economies

Abstract

Emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and other countries) are expected to play a major role in the global economy during the 21st century. Some of these countries have exceptional soil and climate characteristics that determine evident advantages for food production. These features, combined with a rapid adoption of technologies generated by industrialized economies (i.e. transgenic crops and others), have been instrumental to fast expansion of agricultural production in recent years. For such reasons, some of these economies are strongly based on production of food commodities (agriculture represents 18.3, 12.6, 9.4 and 8.1% of the gross domestic product of India, China, Argentina and Brazil, respectively) and have a great share in global food production. Despite the mentioned characteristics that make agricultural activity so efficient in these countries, generation of new technologies in order to guarantee the systems’ sustainability and add value to agricultural production (by means of, for example, royalties or technologies generated with local criteria) relies on research carried out in areas such as crop science, biotechnology, ecology, plant breeding and, of course, seed science. However, the amount of local research carried out in these countries appears not to be in agreement with the importance that agricultural production has in their economies. For example, Argentina produces 16.20% of the soybean produced in the world but only 2% of the scientific literature related to this crop in its many aspects. This imbalance between the weight that agricultural production has on these economies and generation of knowledge in the related disciplines, threatens the sustainability of these economic models and, therefore, of global food production. Seed science, then, is called on to play a major role in these emerging economies, through the different approaches (i.e. ecological, physiological, agronomical and molecular) that the discipline has to offer. Here we provide four examples in which seed science (through any of the four approaches mentioned above): (1) has identified subtle but crucial components of newly adopted production systems; (2) has proposed means for their adjustment in order to secure the sustainability of those systems; and (3) might help to add value to agricultural production through the development of new germplasm displaying specific features (e.g. timing of dormancy release adjusted to industrial necessities).