Category: Climate change

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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?

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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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    Nibbles: Orissa, Salatin, Economic impact, Olives, Food security, Lettuce, Chayote