- Jacob alerts me that our “throw duplicates of all accessions from an airplane flying across Africa” Gedanken experiment may be closer to realization than we thought.
- Reindeer in trouble. In other news, there are 7 subspecies of the things.
- Indonesia looks to its threatened livestock wild relatives.
- Agriculture (among other things) in North Korea.
- Buffalo distributed in Myanmar. From where?
- Local vegetables promoted in the Philippines.
- More inspirational stuff on the Millennium Seed Bank from Jonathan Drori.
- Organizations Involved in Organic Plant Breeding Projects and Education. Not as many as you’d think.
- “Learning centres” helping farmers identify challenges, adapt to climate change.
Conserving evolution
Salvatore Ceccarelli, for many years a barley breeder at ICARDA, tells us about evolutionary-participatory plant breeding, a holistic approach to adapt crops to agronomy, climate changes and people.
That the climate is changing is now accepted by most, and certainly by old farmers in developing countries who are telling us of less snow falls, less ice in winter, less rainfall, more dusty days, and more importantly declining crop production in face of increasing production costs (fuel to pump irrigation water, fertilizers, etc.).
One question farmers often ask is if and how the crops and the varieties of the crops they grow today, and which provide us with food and feed, will cope with the future climate. The question is not an easy one to answer because while we all know that the climate is going to be drier and hotter, nobody can tell the farmer who asks the question how precisely much drier and hotter it will be in the place where he/she lives. But the same farmers who ask this question also help us to find an answer when they tell us that in years of drought only those farmers who are still growing the old traditional varieties (landraces) are able to harvest something.
Many of these landraces, even when they are no longer cultivated are still kept in genebanks, under very special conditions (low temperature and humidity) to keep them alive for a long time. However, by “freezing” seeds genebanks also “freeze” evolution at the time the landraces were collected, and this is not ideal at a time when we need the crops to be exposed to the changing climate so that they can slowly evolve (adapt) and produce new types that can better endure the future climate. Even if we do not know precisely what the climate will be, we should give the plants the opportunity to find out.
These are the principles of “evolutionary – participatory plant breeding”, a program by which we make available to farmers of different countries populations made by mixtures of landraces of the most important (to the farmers) crops available in genebanks. The mixtures will be planted in contrasting locations, particularly those representing high intensity of abiotic and biotic stresses.
In each location, the population will be left to evolve under the joint forces of natural and artificial selection operated by the farmers — but also by breeders (this is why we call it “participatory”). The system can be considered as a sort of “evolving genebank”. Because the mixtures can be planted in a very large number of locations – and with time can be shared by an increasing number of farmers – the populations are expected to evolve differently, responding not to only to climate changes but also to different types of soil, different agronomy, different uses of the crops and different farmers’ preferences etc. Therefore, in addition to the most obvious benefit of generating better crops for the future climate, this program will give a major contribution to increase agricultural biodiversity with all the associated benefits.
As the populations evolve in different directions, genebanks can periodically store samples of these evolving populations, thus “conserving evolution”.
Africa, agriculture and climate change
“If agriculture in developing countries becomes more sustainable, if it increases its productivity and becomes more resilient against the impact of climate change, this should help to reduce the number of currently around one billion hungry people and offer better income and job opportunities,” said Alexander Mueller, FAO Assistant Director-General.
“Millions of poor farmers around the globe could help in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Peter Holmgren, FAO focal point for the UN climate change negotiations. ((Agriculture is essential for facing climate change.))
OK. But what about preparing those self-same farmers to cope with climate change by giving them access to agricultural biodiversty?
Africa’s market for milk, meat and staple food crops such as maize, banana, sorghum, rice and millet stands at over $150 billion a year which is more than what it fetches from pet cash crops like coffee, tea and flowers.
Researchers say that seven out of ten Africans earn their living by engaging in subsistence farming making the sub-sector to be the continent’s market leader.
It is for this reason that the farmers are encouraged to embrace modern farming methods to produce more food in order to make economic sense.
On the other hand, governments are obliged to ensure that farm inputs are affordable and farmers have access to markets to sell their harvests at competitive prices to reap fruits of the labour. ((Food crops edging out cash crops on rural Africa’s incomes.))
OK. But does “modern farming” mean abandoning their agrobiodiversity and the skills to use it? And why is it government’s responsibility to make sure inputs are affordable? If government distorts price signals, we can’t blame farmers for doing the most profitable thing in the short term, even if it means losing their agricultural biodiversity and the skills to use it in the longer term.
The Human Toll of Climate Change mapped
Science Progress has a great interactive map on the effects of climate change on different aspects of human life, including health and agriculture.
Clicking on the pin takes you to the original source of the information. And you can add your own pins. This is just the kind of model that we could use in developing our platform for an early warning system for genetic erosion.
Climate change to devastate crops, promote livestock
[B]y 2050, hotter conditions, coupled with shifting rainfall patterns, could make anywhere from 500,000 to one million square kilometers of marginal African farmland no longer able to support even a subsistence level of food crops. However, the land, on which some 20 to 35 million people currently live, may still support livestock.
Boosting livestock production could be an attractive alternative for millions of poor farmers across Africa who, in the coming decades, could find that climate change has rendered their lands unsuitable for crop cultivation yet still viable for raising animals, according to the study that appears this week in a special edition of the journal Environmental Science and Policy.
That’s from a press release put out by ILRI, the International Livestock Research Institute. The paper is from a special issue of Environmental Science and Policy on Food Security and Environmental Change, Food Security and Environmental Change: Linking Science, Development and Policy for Adaptation. Just skimming the contents gives me the willies.
By the way, Wikipedia says sub-Saharan Africa covers an area of 24.3 million square kilometers. It doesn’t say how much of that supports a subsistence level of food crops. So it is hard to know how much difference this prediction will really make.