Des Moines, Iowa
October 16, 2008
Responding to what appear to be
the four horsemen of the apocalypse—the energy, food, climate,
and financial crises—the director of the world’s only
organization charged with securing the world’s seeds called on
the US and nations around the world to support efforts to secure
the world’s crop diversity collections today.
In the face of continuing rapid population growth, coupled with
uncertain energy supplies, less water, no new land to expand
into, and climate change, breeding new crop varieties will be
vital to meet the world’s future food needs.
“When it comes to food, the most underappreciated,
undervalued—and the most potent—tool we have to address all of
these crises lies in the crops themselves, in the natural
diversity that exists within each crop,” said Cary Fowler,
Executive Director of the
Global Crop Diversity Trust. “There are more than 30,000
unique varieties of corn and 200,000 distinct types of wheat for
example. This diversity is a treasure trove of traits that can
be used by plant breeders and farmers to breed new crop
varieties that are heat, insect and disease-resistant,
drought-tolerant and climate-ready.”
Fowler spoke before the World Food Prize 2008 Borlaug Dialogue
in Des Moines. Senators McGovern and Dole have been awarded this
year’s prize for a program which has fed over 22 million
children in 41 countries and also significantly boosted school
attendance. The award of the prize highlights the moral
imperative of feeding the hungry, but it is not just for their
moral vision that they have been chosen for this award, it is
also for their political leadership.
“If we are to achieve the goal of ending world hunger, we need
the vision to identify threats before they become crises, and
the political leadership to take timely action,” said Maggie
Catley-Carlson, Chair of the Global Crop Diversity Trust
Executive Board. “One of the achievements of the Senators was to
have built a broad non-partisan consensus for anti-hunger
programs. We need to build on that leadership to ensure that the
foundation of our food supply is safe.”
The biological foundation of agriculture—crop diversity— is
being lost, both in the US and abroad. At the end of the 1800s,
7,000 named apple varieties were grown in the United States.
Now, 6,800 of those are extinct. Around the world, crop
diversity collections—or genebanks—with unique collections have
been destroyed in the last few years by war and natural
disaster, including Afghanistan, Iraq and the Philippines. (Abu
Ghraib used to be more famous for its genebank than its prison.)
Other collections are losing their seeds every day due to poor
management and unreliable funding. Genebanks in many developing
countries are often unaware of what is stored on their shelves,
nor whether that seed is alive or dead, effectively dismantling
humanity’s defense in the face of growing threats.
“Providing the next crop variety is just as important as
providing the next meal,” said Fowler. “It’s easy to view hunger
only on a short timescale. Miss the next four meals, and that
spells trouble. By comparison, 2030, for example, seems a long
way away. But if we think in crop breeding cycles, 2030 is just
two cycles away. And we know that the climate will pose real
dangers to food production by 2030.”
The answer to many crop woes in the US, for example, may be
found in an obscure variety cultivated, or even growing wild in
Asia, Africa, South America or the Middle East. US agriculture
needs the genetic resources of collections of crop diversity
around the world to combat pests and diseases and to adapt to
environmental changes, said Fowler.
“International cooperation is essential. No country is
self-sufficient in crop diversity. Even a country such as the
US, with one of the world¹s best genebanks and for which corn is
the most important crop, has only five percent of globally-held
corn samples,” said Fowler. “Energy independence may be a
realistic objective, but crop diversity independence is
impossible.”
Fortunately, there is no need for any country to be independent
in crop diversity – the Global Crop Diversity Trust will ensure
that crop diversity is safely conserved and available to all.
The Trust is undertaking a massive effort to search crop
collections—from Israel to Nigeria—for the traits that could arm
the agriculture of the future against the impact of these
changes. With the government of Norway, the Trust opened the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault, dubbed the “doomsday seed vault” in
the Arctic Circle, which serves a backup collection for this
effort to search, save, and use today’s crop diversity
collections.
Diversity is being lost, but it can be conserved easily,
according to the Trust. The costs are totally insignificant
compared to the benefits – the entire biological foundation of
agriculture could be conserved, forever, for the cost of one
Boeing 747.
“But confronting crisis starts with the political will to make
long-term investments before the crisis itself makes those
investments politically palatable,” said Fowler. “Conserving
crop diversity is the logical first step, a prerequisite for
solving the food crisis and ensuring that agriculture copes with
climate change and other crises. It is painfully evident that
short-term thinking has led to long-term problems that will not
be solved with more short-term thinking.”
A few short decades from now, agricultural crops will face
entirely new growing environments, according to climate change
researchers. In many countries, the coldest growing seasons of
the future will be hotter than the hottest ever recorded in the
past. The 11 hottest years on record have all occurred in the
past 13 years.
“Should we assume rice, wheat and corn varieties will continue
to feed us in environmental conditions they have never
experienced?” asked Fowler. “They won't. If today's corn
varieties are still in the field in southern Africa two decades
from now, production will drop by 30 per cent because of climate
change, and we will watch babies starve to death on television
due to our own lack of foresight and preparedness.”
The mission of the Trust is to ensure the conservation and
availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide.
Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to
the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and
diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization
working worldwide to solve this problem, and has already raised
over $140 million. |
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