Category: Climate change

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Amman conference draws to a close with declaration

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the Amman conference on food security in the drylands has been all about germplasm and breeding, as far as adaptation to climate change is concerned. Cultural practices did get a look-in. Conservation agriculture in general, and zero tillage in particular, came up repeatedly, in fact. But of course, even when it’s not about germplasm, it’s really about germplasm. Because landraces and varieties are probably going to differ in their adaptation to these conditions. In fact, evidence to that effect is already there. An experiment at ICARDA showed last year that recently released varieties don’t do very well under zero tillage in general, but some do better than others. There’s bound to be a rush to screen all kinds of material under such practices.

Anyway, the highlight of the last day was a magisterial keynote from Peter Hazell of IFPRI on the role of agricultural policies and institutions in coping with climate change. It featured the first explanation of private weather index insurance that I’ve actually understood. He was very hopeful about the potential of such schemes, but said that the barriers to entry are still too high, which is why the 37 such programmes in 35 countries only add up to about a US$ 1 billion. Many many many times that will be needed. One of the main problems is the inadequacy of the system of weather stations in many countries. Another bit of infrastructure that is holding development back in rural areas.

Hazell also took part in the final panel discussion, which was very lively and lasted over two hours. He pointed out that the return to investment in agricultural research has really been rather good, and that probably the best hope for adaptation is more science. However, he did say that a breakthrough was needed from somewhere on the scale of the Green Revolution, and he did not see where that was coming from. He pointedly, I thought, did not mention biotechnology.

Well, it’s all over now. The panel session was followed by discussion of the draft Amman Declaration. Comments and amendments were considered, and the final version will be available in due course. But be not afraid, it features strong recommendations to collect and conserve biodiversity, and use it to breed new “climate-ready” crop varieties and build resilient production systems. And so to bed.

Read more on the conference at Rural Climate Exchange.

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Online map of interaction between climate change and population

Population Action has an interactive map which mashes up climate change (including its effect on total national agricultural production) with population dynamics. Here, for example, is the result for Africa. ((Sorry about the quality, I can’t see an easy way of downloading a decent image, but the thing looks well enough on the website itself.))

The source of the agricultural production data is a 2004 crop modeling study by the Godard Institute for Space Studies distributed by CIESIN. ((The BBC’s mashup of climate change, population and industrialization seems to use different data, and goes to sub-country level.)) Worth taking the guided tour to start off.

You can’t imagine how many different versions of this sort of map have been on show here in Amman at the conference on food security in the drylands. Somebody ought to do an inventory…

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Some answers from Amman

Ok, here goes with those answers I promised last night, or some of them anyway.

What’s so new about climate change? After all, breeders have been preparing for, and reacting to, environmental changes of various kinds since their beginning as a profession. Well, for one thing the speed of the changes, and the fact that this time there is fairly solid scientific information about long-term trends. One of the things Cal Qualset recommended is that there should be a sort of worldwide network of testing sites relevant to the anticipated environments of the most threatened countries.

He also talked about evolutionary-participatory plant breeding, a newish name for an old idea going back to Harlan and Allard. This topic was taken up by Salvatore Ceccarelli of ICARDA and others later in the day. Salvatore asked why, in this year of biodiversity, we are talking about varietal uniformity as if it were the only option. He’s set out an alternative vision here with us before.

It revolves around making large mixed populations available to farmers, getting them to plant them in lots of contrasting places, and letting natural and artificial selection do the rest. He’s been doing that in Iran and other places with a mixture of 1600 F2 barley lines deriving from some 300 parents. He thinks he can get improvements in yield stability and stress tolerance over time, but almost certainly not quality. He calls this a way to get a “local solution to a global problem.” The question that was asked, however, was how long this would take. Cal Qualset let slip almost as an aside that his group is seeing very little change in Turkish wheat landraces since the 1930s, and that the variation within landraces wasn’t as much as they had expected. He’s working on a project to introgress smut resistance into these landraces.

And speaking of farmer participation in evaluation and breeding, Cal Qualset also mentioned in his keynote that he was able to see 2% yield improvement per year in the maize Chalqueno landrace by designing and helping farmers implement, in their own fields, a mass selection scheme.

More later.

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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?