Category: Breeding

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Some questions from day 2 in Amman

Got to go out to dinner, so not much time to blog, but I thought I’d tease you with some of the more interesting questions that were posed by speakers during this second day of the Amman conference on food security in the drylands under climate change. I’ll post (some of) the answers later.

Calvin Qualset: What’s so new about climate change for breeders?
Jose Cubero: Why are there no commercial faba bean hybrids?
Raj Paroda: Is aerobic rice the answer to decreasing methane emissions?
Theib Oweis: Shouldn’t we measure productivity on the basis of unit of water consumed rather than of land used?
Ken Street: Can’t we think of a better way of identifying germplasm for evaluation than core collections?
Salvatore Ceccarelli: Why, in this year of biodiversity, are we still wedded to the idea of varietal uniformity?

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Nibbles: Amman again, DNA hype, Blight-resistant spuds, Seeds, Sorghum, Brassicas, UK Food Security

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Day 1 at the Amman drylands conference draws to a close

The afternoon plenary (see here for the morning) consisted of talks by Drs Adel El Beltagy (GFAR) and Mark Rosegrant (IFPRI). Again, here’s what struck me particularly out of the many interesting things they said.

  • Svalbard Global Seed Vault provides a Noah’s Ark for the world’s crop germplasm collections, which we’ll need for both adaptation and mitigation.
  • Transboundary livestock diseases will increase, but there are opportunities for mitigation through better livestock genetics, feeding and management.
  • Agro-ecosystems will be disrupted by climate change, and we don’t have the methods to predict what the new ones will look like, or whether they will be able to function.
  • Nanotech can be used not just in a bunch of molecular genetics applications, but also for smarter delivery or inputs.
  • It’s not just climate change: there’s a host of both demand and supply drivers behind the bad stuff that’s happening to food security.
  • Biophysical models predict following changes in global production: irrigated rice -27% (but N. China a winner); rainfed rice -13%; irrigated maize -13% (it will reach the Canadian border!); irrigated maize -16% (N. China a winner again); irrigated wheat -42% (disaster in India); rainfed wheat -28% (India again in trouble).
  • Add economic models to that and you have a predicted doubling of prices by 2050, a 22% drop in calorie consumption in developing countries and a 21% increase in child malnutrition in developing countries.
  • To fix this, via expansion of irrigation, better roads and more research, will cost an extra $7 billion a year, on top of the current $12 billion being spent on those things now.
  • Increased productivity is fundamental, sure, but let’s not forget rural infrastructure.
  • There may well be a potential $150 billion a year up for grabs for agriculture if a decent C trading system develops. But will need low-cost monitoring and verification, and innovative payment schemes.
  • We’re going to need better local scenarios, but the danger of that is that you begin to not see the wood for the trees (too much weather, not enough climate).
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    Day 1 at the Amman drylands conference

    The international conference on Food Security and Climate Change in Dry Areas got off to a stirring start with a long, passionate and scientifically very literate speech from the guest of honour, HRH Prince El Hassan Bin Talal. That was followed by keynotes from Drs Mahendra Shah and Mahmoud Solh, who have a huge amount of experience at the highest level of agricultural research and strategic planning in this region and beyond. Now, I did tweet some key points from their talks via my mobile, but as I write this over lunch they haven’t turned up in our stream yet. For all I know, they never will. Wifi access in the conference room is problematic, so you may have to be satisfied with these occasional summaries.

    Anyway, here are some selected soundbites — the agrobiodiversity themed ones, mainly — from the morning session, including the Q&A:

  • We will need to trade an extra 500 million tons of cereals by 2080.
  • 175 million extra people (over the 1 billion hungry today) will go hungry due to climate change by 2080. Remember we were supposed to cut that figure by half.
  • In the dry areas, production increases will need to come almost exclusively from yield improvement. 90% of potentially new arable land is in only 7 countries!
  • Genebanks are key to the intensification that will be required if agriculture is to adapt.
  • Synthetic wheats, winter sowing of chickpea, IPM of Sunn pest are some of the success stories of crop diversity use for adaptation.
  • ICARDA has identified those small ruminant local breeds which are expected to be most adaptable to climate change. What about the poor others, though?
  • Both “protected agriculture” (greenhouses, hydroponics etc.) and conservation agriculture have a role to play in adaptation (and possibly mitigation too).
  • Why are we closing down agricultural extension services around the world?
  • Global models for the effects of climate change are fine, but downsizing to community level is often problematic, and THAT is where adaptation occurs. Or doesn’t.
  • What can we learn from how local people manage the oasis ecosystem?
  • Governance is a problem, sure, but let’s not hide behind the failings of politicians in assessing why science and technology innovations haven’t worked.