LONDON (AlertNet) - The race is on to develop new crop varieties that will help farmers in poorer countries keep up yields under pressure from the impacts of climate change.

A study by researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) warned in December that global warming will cause yields of rice and wheat to fall in all regions of the world by 2050, compared to a future without climate change.

Scientists who specialise in plant breeding say efforts must be stepped up dramatically on all fronts, from searching in far-flung corners of the world for wild varieties that are resilient to climatic extremes, to identifying useful genetic traits and manipulating them to produce hardier and higher-yielding seeds.

"With the onset of accelerated climate change, it is going to be important that farmers can adapt, so researchers need to accelerate progress in making crops more resilient to droughts and floods," says Lawrence Kent, an agricultural development officer at the U.S.-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "Plant breeders need to do more and faster, and they need more resources to do it."

Developing “climate-ready crops”, as they are often called, will be essential to avoid production declines in the face of more extreme weather conditions, and to feed a growing global population in the coming decades.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 50 percent of the increase in crop yields in recent years has come from new seed varieties, while irrigation and fertiliser account for the rest.

But a major FAO report released in October notes that public investment in crop improvement has declined in many countries since the late 1990s. Efforts to build public seed production systems in the 1980s and 1990s proved costly, leading donors to cut their funding. That made way for the private sector to take over in commercial crops like maize and wheat, the FAO says.

For other crops with fewer profit opportunities, "seed production systems have essentially collapsed in many countries", though public involvement may be picking up again in some places, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Yemen, the report says. Donor agencies and philanthropic organisations have also increased their funding in recent years, although it can be unpredictable.

PAYBACK TIME

The food price crisis of 2008 highlighted the urgent need to reduce food insecurity in some of the poorest and most politically volatile parts of the world. At a 2009 summit in Italy, rich governments promised to channel around $3 billion a year to strengthen agriculture. But less than two years on, with international food prices heading back toward record levels, not even a tenth of that money has materialized, Jeffrey Sachs, a leading development economist, told Reuters.

Carlos Sere, director general of the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute, says the world is suffering the consequences of failing to fund crop science during the preceding era of low food prices.

 "Over the last 20 years or so (up to 2008), we did not have a major food crisis, and if we look at what has been invested in agricultural research - except in China, India and Brazil - it is now coming to haunt us," he told AlertNet.

An international report on how to make food and farming globally sustainable, published by the British government in January, calls for agricultural research to be given a higher priority, with a focus on adapting farming to climate change and cutting the greenhouse gases it produces.

But the report recognises there is no easy way to achieve high levels of productivity and recommends “a careful blend of approaches”, including biotechnology.

It endorses collaboration between the public and private sectors to enable low-income countries to access technologies like genetic modification that could enhance crop resistance to drought, excessively high and low temperatures, increased salinity and pests - traits that could help farmers maintain and even improve yields in the face of global warming.

This "product development partnership” (PDP) model - bringing in companies, academic researchers, governments and international agencies - has been used in the health sector to develop treatments for neglected diseases. It is now being promoted as a way to address the lop-sided nature of plant breeding, where the bulk of effort is focused on producing new crop varieties for sale in rich nations.

DROUGHT-TOLERANT MAIZE

One example in the agriculture sector is the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) initiative, which aims to develop and make drought-tolerant maize available royalty free to small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. It is managed by the Kenya-based African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), and part-funded by the Gates Foundation.

As part of the effort, the non-profit International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is providing conventional breeding expertise and high-yielding maize varieties that are adapted to African conditions, while the multinational agricultural firm Monsanto is contributing advanced breeding tools and drought-tolerance gene sequences it has developed with BASF.

National agricultural research systems in Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda, together with farmers' groups and seed companies, will test, multiply and distribute the seeds.

Field trials of the genetically modified (GM) maize varieties were carried out in Kenya and Uganda late last year, after the crops received regulatory approval. But farmers will likely have to wait until 2015-2017 before they can start planting the new GM, or transgenic, seeds. Other conventional hybrid varieties also being developed by WEMA are expected to be available in 2013.

WEMA project manager Sylvester Oikeh, an agronomist with AATF, hopes the new maize plants will yield 25 percent more on average than existing varieties during moderate droughts.

“If we can get this dream materialised, (in those conditions), we would be able to feed 14 million to 21 million more people in the countries where we’re working,” he explained.  

Kent from the Gates Foundation believes joint projects like this are a “great idea”, because they will allow the world's poorest farmers to benefit from the cutting-edge biotechnology companies have so far deployed mainly for commercial markets in industrialised economies.

"We want to help people out of poverty and make them more productive on their farms. As long as the technologies are effective and safe, we should try them," he says.

 Many farmers WEMA is working with can’t wait to get their hands on the new seeds, according to Oikeh.

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