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December 5, 2008
Source:
The Global Crop Diversity
Trust
Southern Africa, 2030. A throng of
emaciated people waits for food rations to arrive. The maize
crop has failed, a victim of the heat and drought. Yet again. A
“food crisis?” Yes. That’s what we’ll call it in twenty-two
years. But not today.
If we want to do something about future food crises, we should
name them today, and name them properly. Problems unnamed or
improperly named are problems left unsolved. In many cases we
should be calling them crop diversity crises. That’s what
history’s biggest and most famous “food crisis” (the Irish
potato famine) really was.
A paper published earlier this year in Science, by a group of
scholars with whom we collaborate, predicts a drop in maize
(corn) yields of 30% in southern Africa by 2030 as a result of
climate change, unless new climate-ready varieties of maize are
developed. A huge drop in production of the region’s most
important food crop will bring instant famine.
What? A crisis, two decades away? It’s a question of
perspective. Breeding a new variety of maize – one sufficiently
drought and heat tolerant to cope with predicted new climates –
can take ten years. This means we’re only two complete crop
breeding cycles away from the disaster foreseen in the Science
article.
From the crop’s perspective, therefore, the time to act is now;
it is already a crisis. The financial crisis is an acknowledged
crisis, because it is in today’s headlines and because we are
paying the price now. But no policy maker, no TV newscaster, no
philanthropist can name the crop diversity crisis, and this is a
real and huge obstacle to mobilizing the will and the resources
to solve it.
Crop diversity crises lead to food crises. Thus it makes sense
to look at the situation from the crop’s perspective, because if
crops don’t adapt, neither do we. However, plant breeding can
only be as successful as the resources upon which it draws – the
genetic diversity of our crops. These are the colors on the
palette of the plant breeder, the genes that code for drought
tolerance, pest resistance, higher protein content, and
everything else.
Typically the most threatened diversity is located in seedbanks
in developing countries. The seed samples they are “conserving”
are often of varieties no longer grown in any farmer’s field.
The last remnants of a completely unique wheat or maize or
tomato are in seed that can be held in the palm of your hands.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust is partnering with those
facilities to rescue the endangered varieties and deposit safety
duplicate seeds of each variety in the Svalbard Global Seed
Vault. In the next few years this effort will rescue 100,000
varieties from the brink of extinction. It is quite possibly the
biggest effort to rescue endangered biodiversity in history. Not
a bad beginning if you want to get agriculture ready for what is
coming.
The next step is to put in place the funding needed to conserve
this diversity, crop by crop. Conserving the entire genepool of
maize forever would require an endowment of about $35 million.
That’s roughly the same amount the National Science Foundation
dispensed to sequence the maize genome, an investment made,
surely, on the assumption that the full genepool would be
available.
Diagnosis...
So why has the conservation of crop diversity not received the
attention and support it’s due? First and most fundamentally, we
are hardwired to deal with immediate threats. Moreover new
crises appear to displace old but still-unresolved crises. The
food crisis has been pushed off the front page (as predicted in
an earlier issue) by the financial crisis.
All successful politicians know the advantage of defining the
issues, seizing symbols, and engaging the opposition on your
terms. But, as observed above, our crop diversity crisis remains
effectively nameless.
We bear some responsibility. For too long too many of us working
with crop diversity failed to articulate an inspiring vision, a
“solution” linked to a timetable. In 1961, John Kennedy went
before the U.S. Congress and famously stated:
I believe that this
nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before
this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and
returning him safely to the earth.
Kennedy understood the necessity
of articulating a vision linked with a timetable. In the same
speech, just moments earlier, he told the nation:
I believe we possess all
the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the
matter are that we have never made the national decisions or
marshaled the national resources required for such
leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an
urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time
so as to insure their fulfillment.
He could have been talking about
conserving crop diversity.
Eight years later Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
...and Cure
We are now ready for an equally critical launch. There is an
internationally agreed plan and legal framework for conserving
crop diversity. Willing partners stand ready.
The Trust has a goal-oriented strategy and has established an
endowment fund through which reliable funding could be generated
to guarantee conservation over the long-term. Substantial
amounts have been committed; political will and vision at high
levels will be needed to complete the endowment. A modern day
Kennedy might consider it a worthy assignment.
In the next eight years we can secure all crop diversity,
forever. We can get agriculture ready for climate change. For
drought. For the next disease. For more mouths to feed. We can
do this and more, but only if we are willing to shoot for the
moon. Now.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE TOPIC
Lobell, D.B., Burke, M.B., Tebaldi, C.,
Mastrandrea, M.D., Falcon, W.P., Naylor, R.L. (2008).
Prioritizing Climate Change Adaptation Needs for Food
Security in 2030.
Science, 319, 607-610.
A good source of information about and links
to activities related to the maize genome work is:
http://www.maizegenome.org/ See also,
http://www.cimmyt.org/ for news about how one of our
partners is breeding maize for the coming African climates.
At
http://www.croptrust.org/main/rescue.php?itemid=289 you
will find more information about the Trust’s work with
genebanks in developing countries to rescue and regenerate
threatened crop varieties.
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