What if potatoes were as rare as truffles and truffles were extinct?
David Valentin Schweiger(CCAFS Coordinating Unit)
If your favourite dish was about to vanish from the scene because its main ingredient could no longer be grown, would you act?
Food has a unique power over all of us. Besides helping us fulfil one of our most basic needs, it can literally spice up our lives by making our daily routines more enjoyable. It also has the power to bring families, friends, and sometimes even entire communities, together.
Food may have this power, but it has an even larger potential. Our universal need to eat nutritious food is so basic, so irreplaceable, it may well harbour the potential to make people act in concert. We need to first know how threatened our food security is before we can act to effect a change. Once people envision their favourite dishes disappearing from the culinary map, due to a missing key ingredient, they may become more likely to fight to preserve that ingredient.
...the frost came at its time, the snow came at its time. It's no longer like that.
This is where Recipes for Change comes in. It is an initiative led by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), with technical assistance from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), which studied the extent to which certain food ingredients for popular dishes are threatened in a number of regions from East Asia to Latin America.
The results are varied, but indicate potential yield losses for all key ingredients studied, including truffle in Morocco, rice in Guatemala, catfish in Vietnam, and potatoes in Bolivia. Besides identifying these threats, the six validation reports from CCAFS also point toward the best available adaptation methods for each ingredient and region.
Video series: Recipes for Change
Partnering with a number of rural communities and celebrity chefs from those regions, IFAD has also produced a series of videos, explaining how its Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme is making a difference there.
Italian celebrity chef Carlo Cracco visits local farmers in eastern Morocco, where the indigenous truffle variety, terfass, is under threat from climate change.
The videos document the journey of each of the chefs to a region where climate change is threatening one of the selected key ingredient. The chefs get to prepare a meal with local farmers, sharing their passion for the food while learning about ways in which climate change is making a mark.
"Coming here is a humbling experience,” Chef Cracco says in the video. “It shows you how important man’s input is; the culture, maintaining a tradition… Because if you let it go, the desert will advance. It is essential to put in place something for those who live here, so they will not leave or move away from here,” he continues.
One of Bolivia’s top chefs, Marco Bonifaz, visits the Bolivian highlands, exploring the threats which climate change poses to the countries main staple, the potato.
"Nowadays we’ve been noticing that due to the climate changes we have less quantity and less variety of production of potato”, Chef Bonifaz says in the video.
There is no way to calculate the weather anymore,” says potato farmer Domitilla Rojas Sirpa in the same video. “Before, you could say, ‘On this day it’s time to plant and now we’re going to harvest.’ And the frost came at its time, the snow came at its time. It’s no longer like that,” she continues. “Everything has changed. There is not as much potato production anymore.”
The video concludes in saying “Bolivia’s culinary roots run deep and with the right tools to adapt to a changing climate, farmers like Domitilla can continue to grow potatoes for themselves and their entire country, ensuring Bolivia’s culinary identity remains intact.”
IFAD and CCAFS research aims to support farmers like Domitilla so that they can become more resilient to climate change by means of improved varieties, changes in farming practices, diversifying income, index-based crop insurance, agro-advisories and other innovations.
Learn more
Download the CCAFS validation reports on these selected ingredients: terfass (truffle) in Morocco, rice in Guatemala, catfish in Vietnam, beans in Rwanda, potatoes in Bolivia, and onion in Senegal.
Get the recipes in English, French, Italian or Spanish
Join the Recipes for Change online community, where you can discuss the ingredients and the issues with other followers.
Follow Recipes for Change on Twitter, Facebook at #recipesforchange
