The Skolkovo Foundation’s biomedicine cluster is to study the creation of a genetics centre that would guarantee Russia’s agricultural independence, after the foundation’s council approved the plan’s development.
Skolkovo vice president and head of the biomed cluster Kirill Kaem presented the initiative to members of the board at a meeting on Thursday evening after discussing the idea with the agriculture ministry and major corporations working in the field of genetic selection.
“In terms of grain production, in areas with decent land, the country is now perfectly competitive, and in terms of poultry production, Russia has made a giant leap,” Kaem told Sk.ru.
“But at the same time, all this success in the production of meat, poultry, to some extent vegetables and horticultural produce (but not in grain – that really is an unqualified success) is based on genetic pure lines that are not Russian; it’s all bought,” he said.
The fact that Russia’s agricultural success is based on imported genetic material means that in the event of imports suddenly becoming unavailable for any reason, domestic production could collapse within a few months.
“There’s a specific instruction from the president to protect the country from the event of the introduction of certain sanctions, so as not to risk the collapse of the poultry industry, for example. Incidentally, poultry is currently one of the main sources of protein for Russians,” says Kaem.
President Vladimir Putin called last year for Russia to become completely self-sufficient in food production by 2020.
“The corporations that own the genetic material entirely logically protect their market,” says Kaem. “Take poultry, for example. There is an industrial generation – that’s what we eat. Then there is the parent generation, i.e. the first generation, the one that produces the egg. And then there are grandparents and great-grandparents. It’s clear that there are very few specimens at the level of great-grandparents, who are very close to the genetic pure line, compared to how many are needed for the final product.
“At the moment we really are producing a lot of poultry, but the poultry bred in Russia is at best at the parent level, and is often imported in trade volumes, either as eggs or chicks that eventually we eat,” he said.
The specimens imported into Russia are not infertile, and can breed at the level of parents, but the desired qualities that exist in the source flock get lost over time, says Kaem.
“Qualities such as resilience disappear or dwindle. It’s not just about qualities such as the speed of weight gain, fat content, body size, but to a large extent about resilience to antibiotics and vaccines – to that which makes it possible in industrial production to have a large stock of birds without being at risk of losing them.
“Russian agricultural production is based on models of major agro-holdings, and the risks associated with vaccines and the need to protect the flock medically are very high,” he added.
This situation is not specific to Russia: regardless of the type of biological agricultural produce, there are from three to eight companies on the market that are in practice monopolists in the production of genetic material: the pure lines. In Russia, according to Kaem, the proportion of domestic genetic material ranges from 3 to 20 percent. All the rest is imported.
The proposed centre’s tasks would consist firstly of studying and cataloguing the genetic database and using genetic markers to identify desirable qualities.
Then there are two options. The traditional method would be to identify the desirable characteristics among certain breeding lines and then breed those together to produce a genetic pure line over several generations.
The second option is faster, but is more complex and borders on genetic modification, which is banned in Russian food production. It involves artificially transplanting the desirable genetic material of one variety of tomato, for example, into another.
“There is an ongoing debate over this: is it GMO or isn’t it? Because it’s intraspecific breeding, speeded up,” says Kaem.
Once the proposed genetic centre has identified and produced the desired genetic line – via whichever method is chosen – the rest of the work would be down to selection enterprises that would distribute the lines at the level of grandparents and great-grandparents to agricultural enterprises that would continue to breed them.
“We’re trying to form our own kind of consortium of genetic and selective work at the earliest stages, which are the most difficult and whose necessity is not so obvious to major industry: we can carry out this work at Skolkovo and in this way, we can solve a major part of the problem of agricultural security,” says Kaem.
To read the full interview with Kirill Kaem in Russian, click here.