Crops

By Eleanor Milne

At last year’s Forest Day, it seemed that there was one word on everybody’s lips: ‘landscapes’. We heard it in conversations, in presentations, even the event itself was held under the theme of ‘Living Landscapes’, representing a new collaboration between Forest Day and Agriculture, Landscapes and Livelihoods Day. A collaboration which explores the relation between forests, farming and people; which recognizes that every landscape is a patch-work of different land covers; and that these land covers interact with and impact on each other. It is an idea which understands that if we are to simultaneously address climate change, save forests and feed people, a landscape approach at a landscape-scale is needed.

However, conducting landscape-scale measurements and modeling has proved particularly difficult in developing countries. Read more »

By Alejandra Martins, BBC Mundo, 24 October 2012

When researchers from totally different continents met this year in Uruguay, they were looking to resolve one of the future’s great challenges: How to feed a growing world population that will reach 9 billion people in 2050.

The South American country has achieved rice yields comparable with what would be expected of the most fertile zones of the United States, thanks to a model that could contain vital lessons for other nations. The advance is one of those high-impact innovations that will be discussed at next week’s international summit, the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD).

“We estimate that in 2035 it will be necessary to produce 116 million tons more of polished or dry rice every year to satisfy global demand,” said Achim Dobermann, the director of the International Rice Institute in the Philippines, to BBC Mundo. The current global production of dry rice (the kind that reaches the consumer) is close to 480 million tons. Dobermann is one of the experts who recently visited plantations of rice in Uruguay, together with representatives from Africa, Asia and other regions. “The advances in this country can offer lessons that could be adapted for other countries. We are looking at Uruguay in that context,” said Dobermann. How has Uruguay achieved its high yields? And to what extent can this strategy serve for other nations as well?

Read more »

by Ronnie Vernooy

Genebanks appear to be at a crossroads. Thanks to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), the scene has been set for an unprecedented level of global co-operation for the conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. In practice, however, the situation is largely static and many actors are unwilling to assume more proactive roles.

The survey on genebank managers, Availability of plant genetic resources in times of climate and policy change, revealed that a number of priorities have been identified that linked to recent climate change. Most notably, there is increasing interest in collecting and characterizing the wild relatives of some crops, in the hope of finding useful traits of particular interest, such as tolerance to extreme heat or cold. Despite their desire to collect and characterize wild relatives, CGIAR genebank managers also report that it is becoming more difficult for most of them to access new germplasm, with the exception of materials from well-established genebanks in Europe and North America. Read more »

by Stefano Padulosi

The world´s food basket is shrinking and most concerning is the reduction of species and varieties used by humankind in food and nutrition security which raises serious concerns about the sustainability of feeding the world today and in the future. Yet, whereas we deploy consistent efforts in monitoring the status of wild biodiversity, very limited is the research in monitoring diversity of plants used by farmers, assess threats of genetic erosion, understand how diversity is helping farmers in coping with climate change. In the light of this, Stefano Padulosi, Senior Scientist at Bioversity International, set out to present his poster-project, prepared for the World Conservation Congress, held by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), on farm conservation, traditional crops and climate change. Here he summarizes his experiences during the conference: Read more »