84 / SEEDWORLD.COM JANUARY 2019 Exploring ideas and views on all aspects of the seed industry. USMCA SIGNING AN IMPORTANT STEP FORWARD National Corn Growers Association President Lynn Chrisp released the following statement applauding the important step taken by U.S., Mexican and Canadian officials in signing the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). “U.S. corn farmers are proud of the strong trading relationships NAFTA has enabled us to build with our North American trading partners, exporting more than $3 billion of corn and corn products to Mexico and Canada last year. Today’s signing is an important step toward cementing a modernized relationship with these important partners. NCGA commends leaders from all three nations and looks forward to engaging on next steps as the USMCA moves to Congress for consideration.” TOP UNIVERSITIES JOIN FORCES TO FIGHT HUNGER WORLDWIDE The top 5 agri-food universities, called the A5, in the world have agreed to fight hunger together: UC Davis, Cornell University, China Agricultural University, University of Sao Paulo and Wageningen University & Research. The main collaboration will first focus on education with a special role for students and staff exchange: subsequently, they will work together on research. This was agreed at the international SDG Conference, held in Wageningen on August 30 and 31. The next generation is instrumental in the decision by the 5 agri-food universities to work together. The universities want to give young people more say in how to organize their future. As Wageningen Rector Magnificus, Arthur Mol expressed, “The youth presented the most valuable part of the conference.” SCIENTISTS DEVELOP NEW ‘CLIMATE PROOF’ CROPS WITH HELP OF NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY To help protect crop-based food sources, a group of plant breeders, plant physiologists, agronomists and plant biotechnologists and experts from the IAEA, in cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), teamed up to develop new “climate proof” crop varieties through a five-year IAEA coordinated research project. The team began by studying how rice and common bean plants react to normal and aberrant – meaning any climate condition to which a variety of crop is not normally adapted to – climate conditions, and identifying genes related to heat tolerance and higher yields. With this information, they targeted plants with desired traits and bred for these traits using irradiation to speed up the natural process of mutation in plants. This breeding process increases diversity of plants’ traits, allowing scientists to more quickly test and select plants with the desired characteristics. The result was a series of “climate proof” rice and common bean plants that can tolerate high temperature conditions better while producing higher yields compared to local varieties. One of these new rice varieties called “Guillemar,” which is drought tolerant, is now being used in Cuba and has boosted crop yields by 10 percent. Other countries such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Tanzania and Senegal are also preparing to release new, high-yielding rice varieties suited to each countries’ temperature conditions, while experts in Colombia and Cuba have had success with new varieties of heat-tolerant, higher yielding common bean and tepary bean plants, which they expect to release to farmers by 2020-2021. “TODAY’S SIGNING IS AN IMPORTANT STEP TOWARDS CEMENTING A MODERNIZED RELTATIONSHIP WITH THESE IMPORTANT PARTNERS.” — LYNN CHRISP