By Romila Boodram
Have you ever wondered about the future of agriculture as global warming continues to threaten the growth of crops? Climate change can disrupt food availability, reduce access to food, and affect food quality.
With that said, the Government of Guyana, through the National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute (NAREI) has been storing specimens of our traditional crops in the gene bank rightfully called, Germplasm Conservation in the event of possible climate anomalies caused by global warming.

Currently, there are copies of plantain, sweet potato, banana, and pineapple in the lab.
Germplasm conservation is a live information source for all the genes present in the respective plant, which can be conserved for long periods and regenerated whenever required. It is the most successful method to preserve the genetic traits of endangered and commercially valuable species.

If you are having a hard time understanding germplasm conservation, think about the movie, Jurassic Park where scientists clone dinosaurs by extracting pre-historic blood from mosquitoes fossilised in amber. These mosquitoes landed on trees and got stuck in tree sap which hardened over years. Germplasm is something similar but with plants.

NAREI’s Research scientist, Samantha Weever explained that the institute started preserving traditional crops like cassava, plantain, banana, and sweet potato in 2014 to safeguard crops against potential climate threats.
“What we do in the lab is using medium to short-term growth medium to have plants stored in-vitro.

What that does is it protects a particular variety against possible climate threats. Also, let’s say a researcher wants to do work on a variety for breeding purposes, we have copies of that plant variety in the lab,” Weever explained.
She lamented that researchers would go out into the country, collect accession (parts of the plant), and take them back to the lab where their shoot tips or the nodal segments are placed in a growth medium or conservation medium to ensure they are kept in vitro. At this stage, chemicals are used to retard the growth to allow long-term storage.

After the specimens are kept in a conservation medium for three to six months, they are then removed and transferred to a regeneration medium to ensure that the plant is not affected by that long-term storage. So, they are taken to the field, planted, and monitored periodically to ensure there is no variation from the mother plant.

“If there is no variation, we take them back into the lab for further storage. We not only multiply for production but we also have to maintain the gene banks of these varieties that are used for breeding purposes or transboundary exchange,” Weever explained.

The Sunday Chronicle has been told that once the specimens are planted in the field and it is found that there was no variation from the mother plant then segments of that plant can then be taken back to the lab for longer storage. “If it is found that after the six months, there is no variation then we can extend the storage of that plant to up to a year,” the researcher noted.

Once the 12-month storage period is completed for that plant, it will then be taken back to the field to determine whether the crop was affected by such long-term storage. The cycle would then be continued.

Recently, Agriculture Minister, Zulfikar Mustapha spoke to a group of farmers from Sand Hill, Region Three, and emphasised the effect of climate change on agriculture. He told the gathering when Guyana used to experience five to six inches of rainfall in two and three months, we are now getting it in two hours.
He urged the farmers to move towards a more modern way of farming and encouraged them to take advantage of shade houses.