Plant Breeding Through History

Plant breeding has been practiced for thousands of years. It can be considered a coevolutionary process between humans and edible plants. People caused changes in the plants that were used for agriculture and, in turn, those new plant types allowed changes in human populations to take place.

There are three ways plants are bred: a) open pollination, b) hybrid cross-pollination, c) direct DNA modification. Farmers have been breeding plants to improve quality, increase yields, increase tolerance to climate change and drought, improve resistance to viruses, insects and herbicides and to ensure the harvested crops can be stored for longer periods of time.



Open pollination occurs naturally. This means that open pollinated seeds are produced from natural, sometimes random pollination by wind, birds or insects. This means that plants are naturally varied. These plants bear seeds that produce plants identical to the parent plant. These plants are genetically diverse and can be more adaptable to local growing conditions. While the first way is through external means (birds, insects, water, wind), the second way is self-pollination, which occurs when the male and female parts are contained in the same plant. Older strains of open pollinated plants are known as heirlooms and they have been saved and passed down through generations. Farmers were able to select and save seeds from the best plants in their orchard to grow them the following season.

Hybrid seeds refer to plant variety developed through specific controlled cross of two parent plants. Plant breeders direct the process to control the outcome. It is possible to cross the genetic materials of two different, but related plants to produce new, desirable traits in the plant. Hybrid plants can be developed to be durable in the face of climate change, be resistant to disease and pests. While open-pollination can take six to ten generations, using the method of controlled genetic crossing, plant breeders can now produce hybrid seeds that combines the desired traits of two pure parent lines in the first generation. The resulting hybrid has higher yields and the fruits are bigger making it desirable for most farmers. With hybridization, a new world of food crops arrived on our tables - from grapefruit to cantaloupes to seedless watermelons.

However, with these innovations control over seeds have shifted from farmers and communities to a few powerful multinational corporations. Most hybrid seeds are patented by the companies that produce them. According to Seminis, one of the companies that sell hybrid seeds in Armenia, they do so to protect their intellectual property rights: “On average, it takes Seminis vegetable breeders between eight to twelve years to develop and commercialize a new seed variety...Obtaining patents and PVP certificates are ways for us to protect our time, ideas and investments spent to develop those products.”

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) technology requires sophisticated and very expensive lab techniques. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), GMOs are defined as organisms (plant, animals or microorganisms) where the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in ways that does not nor ever could occur in nature. The technology is also called modern biotechnology or gene technology or genetic engineering. “It allows selected individual genes to be transferred from one organism into another, also between non-related species.”

According to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the term genetically modified organism means an organism in which the genetic material has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally through fertilization and/or nature recombination. GMOs may be plants, animals or micro-organisms, such as bacteria, parasites and fungi.

According to the Genetic Literacy Project, eighteen million farmers in 28 nations around the world (20 developing; eight industrialized nations) cultivate GMO crops on nearly 182 million hectares. Almost 200 billion hectares have been planted since GMO crops were approved in 1996. GMOs released for commercial agriculture production include (according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO]) but are not limited to pest resistant cotton, maize, canola (mainly Bt or Bacillus thuringiensis), herbicide glyphosate resistant soybean, cotton and viral disease resistant potatoes, papaya and squash.