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What are the vegetables AVRDC is working
on? Have they been released in India?
The organization works on many vegetables
like the mung bean, onion, tomato, chilli pepper and egg plant among others.
Many of these vegetables are important from the Indian perspective. A large
number of varieties developed by the Center have been released in India.
Namdhari Seeds, for example, has just released some of our material. The mung
beans are very popular in India, especially in Punjab and Rajasthan and we are
now popularizing it in Bihar as well, as it is resistant to the yellow mosaic
virus, which is a huge problem in these parts. The Center has just developed a
resistant chilli pepper variety against a disease, which produces spots on the
pepper and destroys the whole vegetable .We found two sources of resistance in
wild pepper species and brought them by wide crossing and back crossing into
cultivated chilli material and are now in the process of releasing the resistant
germplasm to the seed companies. The Center has developed yellow leaf curl virus
resistant tomatoes, which have already been distributed. This is a huge viral
problem in India transmitted by the white flies to the tomatoes. These are some
of our products and there are a couple of others on which we are currently
working.
Transgenic
crops are being developed by various global public and private consortiums. What
are your concerns in this arena?
The biggest concern is whether it is safe
for humans to eat these transgenic products. Will they have any impact on humans
at all? What is their impact on the environment? Will they kill unintended
insects? Will the genes move into the wild species? For example, in Canada it
was found that in mustard some traits had moved from the cultivated species into
its wild counterparts, with the result that some wild plants had picked up four
different types of resistance with four different herbicides through promiscuous
outcrossing. Hence, we have to very carefully evaluate if transgenics can cause
some environmental damage. I believe that if a transgenic is released anywhere,
it is released everywhere in the world.
Next, how durable is the resistance due to
the genetic modification that has been made? Will it have a big impact on
reducing pesticides in the environment? Will it help the farmers in saving
money? These are some of my primary concerns.
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