The Executive Committee has met 38 times since its establishment.
Apart from its role in the nomenclature of poplar cultivars and the registration of their names through its subcommittee, the Executive Committee is the prime mover of the IPC. Its essential function is to select a topic for each session; this theme has been announced to the member countries about two years before the session, in order to mobilise efforts for drawing up a special report by each member country. The set of special reports has represented a rich source of documentation that has been at the root of the strides made in the past five decades. It should be said, however, that the response of member countries has not always been prompt and exhaustive.
The Executive Committee also has given its opinion on the candidacy of countries offering to organise the regular sessions while the Director-General of FAO consults the Executive Committee on all matters concerning poplar and willow cultivation and timber use.
The Executive Committee has the important job of synthesising the information and knowledge gathered and spreading it as widely as possible. It was one of the first tasks of the first Executive Committee to prepare a monograph that appeared in 1956 in the FAO Forestry and Forest Products Studies (No. 12), entitled "Poplars in Forestry and Land Use". It was a collective job with contributions by the members of the Executive Committee. With Ph. Guinier as Chairman and G. Houtzagers as Vice-Chairman, the first Executive Committee was composed of F.W. Bauer, E. Gaillard, G. Giordano, A. Herbignat, H. Johnson, T.H. Peace, G. Piccarolo, J. Pourtet and R. Regnier. The publication of the monograph in English, French and Spanish met with considerable demand, and the edition was quickly exhausted. Some 12 years later, therefore, the Executive Committee decided to rewrite the monograph in order to cover the evolution of knowledge and techniques, rather than re-issuing the old text with amendments. This project was carried out in 1979 with the publication of Volume No. 10 in the FAO Forestry Series entitled "Poplars and Willows in Wood Production and Land Use", in French (original text), English and Spanish, and for which M. Viart served as the chief editor. As for the future, rather than attempting to rewrite the whole monograph it was decided to publish a series of leaflets, which could be collected together in a standard binder; the first two leaflets, on insects and diseases of poplars and willows, were under preparation in 1997. They will constitute the basis also for a proposed expert meeting to prepare Guidelines for the safe movement of the Salicaceae (with the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute -IPGRI).
The Executive Committee in 1992 requested the Working Party on Breeding to prepare a project on the conservation, exploration, and improvement of the genetic resources of species of poplars and willows growing in arid, semi-arid, and subtropical regions. The recommendation was acted upon by the Secretariat, who prepared outline proposals for projects to explore the status of such poplars. Two of the projects were subsequently funded by UNDP:
The objectives of both projects were to explore the status of these poplars and to prepare proposals for their conservation. Results of the latter were presented to the Working Party on Breeding in 1996 (Budapest), while the former has not yet been completed.
FAO has also carried out studies, especially into the status of P. euphratica, in the main countries of its distribution, the results of which were presented in a paper to the Working Party on Breeding.
Reports of the two most recent Sessions of the IPC have been put on the FAO Forest Resources Division homepage, while the possibility has been reviewed of including the Directory of Poplar and Willow Scientists, prepared by the Istituto di Sperimentazione per la Pioppicoltura (Casale Monferrato, Italy) on the homepage.
It was agreed at the XX Session in 1996 that a small group should be set up to develop ideas for future directions of the IPC, and a small organising committee, drawn from member countries, should also be established to help prepare for future sessions, in particular to relate the papers of the working parties to the general theme of the sessions.
Provisions were included in the programme of the XI World Forestry Congress (Antalya, Turkey, October 1997) for a satellite meeting to mark the 50th anniversary of the IPC, with the theme The contribution of poplars and willows to sustainable forestry development in the 21st century. This was linked to the general theme of the Congress, Forestry for sustainable development through the 21st century.
At its VII Session in 1953, the IPC decided to set up a Subcommittee of the Executive Committee on Nomenclature and Registration with responsibility for investigating the best way of establishing a register of poplar names by adapting the nomenclature used by the IPC to the rules on nomenclature of cultivated plants. This job became of special importance as a result of the designation of the IPC as the official body for the registration of forest cultivars of the genus Populus (International Code of Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants, Utrecht, 1958).
As the success of poplar cultivation depends very largely on the appropriate choice of cultivars, poplar breeders have been and are engaged in research leading to the creation of new cultivars with the properties of fast growth where the objective is poplar wood production, and with the greatest possible resistance to pests and diseases. In this way, the number of usable cultivars has been gradually increasing. It therefore became necessary to identify them correctly and as precisely as possible, to avoid possible confusion and to facilitate exchanges among users regardless of whether or not such exchanges were on a commercial basis.
Under the chairmanship of J. Pourtet, who headed the Executive Committee from 1969 to 1975, the Subcommittee made great progress. In September 1971, its work resulted in a registration form with the code number FAO/IPC/71/30 to be used for describing poplar cultivars of the section Aigeiros. The latest revision, dealing mainly with extending the possibility of registration to poplars of the section Tacamahaca (Balsam poplars) and their hybrids with those of the section Aigeiros, was made at the XV Session held at Rome in December 1975. The revised form was designated FAO/IPC/75/49. It consisted of 85 columns, 40 of which were reserved for descriptive characteristics alone. As J. Pourtet wrote, "This document is not perfect but it has stood the test and makes it possible, especially in temperate Europe, to classify, identify, separate and group the principal clones cultivated there." At that time, 52 cultivars were described in accordance with this revised form while another eight names were being considered.
The Subcommittee recommended in September 1982 that the revised form should be further revised to take into account the scientific progress achieved in this field by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (IUPV). This was to be achieved principally by adding those characteristics that can improve the identification of the poplars of the sections Aigeiros and Tacamahaca, and thereby broaden the possibilities of identifying the poplars of the sections Leuce, Turanga, and Leucoides while retaining the present grouping of characteristics. The Subcommittee also recommended that the scale of annotations used by IUPV for each characteristic should be adopted in order to facilitate passing from one registration form to the other, and that the IUPV form should be used for the genus Salix as well. All these recommendations were subsequently endorsed by the Executive Committee at its 31st Session late in 1982.
Accordingly, two sets of forms for the identification, nomenclature, and registration of poplars were produced about two years later, one by M. Viart and the other by S.K. Hyun for the poplar species of the section Leuce and their hybrids. They were submitted to the XVII Session of the IPC in October 1984 via the 32nd Session of the Executive Committee held just before the IPC session. It was recommended that the two proposed forms should be harmonised, that studies of isoenzymes and cytogenetical characteristics should be carried out with the co-operation of investigators from other countries, and that only material of commercial productive value should be submitted for registration.
At its XVIII Session, organised by Canada in September 1988, the IPC recommended that:
Accordingly, between September 1988 and March 1990 a proposed brief description sheet for poplar clones whose names were to be submitted for registration, and a draft international catalogue based on responses from 12 IPC member countries, were circulated to national poplar commissions, after having been submitted for comments to the chairman of the International Commission on Nomenclature and Registration of Cultivated Plants.
These two papers were adopted by the Executive Committee at its 35th Session in Buenos Aires in March 1990, subject to some remarks made during the discussion and to some further remarks by the chairman of the commission mentioned in the preceding paragraph. The chairmen of the national commissions were requested to submit their proposed amendments no later than 31 May 1990, and the secretariat was asked to ensure publication of the first edition of the International Catalogue of Poplar Cultivars by the end of 1990.
At the end of July 1990 another draft of the International Catalogue of Poplar Cultivars was thus circulated to national commissions for additions or corrections. It already contained more than 200 names of cultivars though it was far from being complete.
The following points arose from discussion of the catalogue during the XIX Session of the IPC in September 1992:
The meeting confirmed that the International Catalogue of the Names of Cultivars of Poplars met these four points.
At its subsequent session in October 1996, the Chairman of the Subcommittee drew attention to some weaknesses in the functioning of the present system:
Therefore, the Secretary of the IPC was requested to circulate a letter to the member countries concerning the catalogue, with an example of the registration form, recalling the responsibilities of the IPC for the registration of the names of poplar cultivars, and the procedures. In addition, each member country should be requested to designate a correspondent with responsibility for providing information necessary for registering new cultivars and for co-ordinating with national authorities responsible for the control of forest reproductive material. The coherence of the catalogue with registers published by other organisations should also be checked. The Secretariat, finally, should examine means of involving non-member countries in the registration of names of poplar cultivars, in collaboration with the Subcommittee.
