Situation Analysis and Strategy for Replacing Cell Fusion Cultivars in Organic Systems

Summary

The report was prepared by the members of the IFOAM-Organics International Working Group on Replacing Cell Fusion Cultivars: Kirsten Arp, Diane Bowen (Chair), Bernd Horneburg, Andre Leu, Rodel Maghirang, John Navazio, Gebhard Rossmanith, Michael Sligh, Yiching Song, and with additional support from Monika Messmer.
History of the initiative
In 2002 the first IFOAM draft standards were set for organic plant breeding. They stated that only breeding techniques on plant level are compatible for organic principles.
This implies that from the process point of view, plant breeding techniques that operate on cell tissue or directly at DNA level violate the integrity of life. Respecting the concept of integrity of life also means that organic agriculture aims to support autonomy and selfregulative ability of the living farm-ecosystem. It implies that measures are designed in a way that supports life processes within the farm-ecosystem and does not try to deconstruct and reconstruct life in a test tube. From a biological point of view cells are the lowest entity of self-organized life, and working below that level, such as is the case with manmade protoplasts or cytoplasts, is not in line with the values of organic agriculture. The use of cytoplast delimits the target of transfer even further: the aim is mainly to combine certain traits, e.g. transfer a piece of mitochondrial DNA that conveys Cytoplasmic Male Sterility (CMS). This mimics the aims of other GM-based techniques. Moreover, most hybridization through protoplast fusion is a way to hybridize sexually incompatible species and thus enables to cross natural crossing barriers.