The many faces of development
IMS
Will there be enough food for our children and theirs?
Photos: © Global crop diversity trust, International center for tropical tropical agriculture
Developing plant diversity to protect the agricultural development
Seeds against hunger! Around 12% of the worl population suffer from starvation. Developing seed diversity and quality supposed to reduce this problem and provide more food for the next generations.
By Farnaz Bernhardt
E
stimations say, that over the next decades the population of our planet will probably increase to 9 billion people. This means that the demand for food will increase as well. However, feeding the growing population will be a major challenge as climate change leads to rising temperatures and more instable weather patterns that cause floods and droughts and spread pests and diseases. The United Nations predict that an increase by only one degree Celsius in global temperature will decrease agricultural yields by at least 2 percent. But that is not all: Booming urbanization and erosion reduce the amount of land available for agriculture. Therefore, the world needs plants with a higher productivity that are at the same time adapted to a changing climate and adverse conditions. However, agriculture is also important for overall economic growth and poverty reduction. Investments in agriculture in general create more income for a larger amount of people when compared for example to investments in industries, mining or services. African nations, for instance, could prosper by investing properly in their agricultural sectors. Agriculture is the engine for overall economic development – and it all starts with the seed. Seeds are the basis for the plant varieties we need for our future. However, precious seeds are under stress as well. For example, during the last hundred years, more than 90 percent
of the varieties of fruits and vegetables have been lost. In the early 1970s, scientists first found out that many seeds had been irrecoverably lost, although Earth is a highly diverse biotope. Nature provides over 350.000 plant species of which about 50.000 are eatable. However, humankind just lives from just 300 of these species. In order to broaden the basis of human agriculture, scientists in the 1970s and 1980s started a massive effort to collect a wide array of known and unknown seeds around the world. At the same time, the international community decided to store this huge amount of plant genetic material systematically. For this purpose, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was founded that supported a network of international agricultural research centers around the world. In several of these centers – eleven today – genebanks were constructed to maintain the collected plant species.
Banks for Plants A genebank or seedbank stores seeds for the case that plants will be destroyed in natural disasters, outbreaks of disease or war. Moreover, genebanks protect biodiversity by storing rare or very sensitive species. In addition, genebanks provide the material for scientists to produce new plant varieties with better traits that can support the development of agriculture. For example, many developing countries suffer from drought. Scientists, however, can develop plants that need
Collecting and maintaining high-quality crop
less water to grow properly. Thus, they can improve agriculture. The so called Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s during which developing countries like Mexico or India became large agricultural producers began in the genebanks of the CGIAR institutes.
Developing AfricaN Agriculture To Fight Hunger
Why crop diversity matters? In 2004, the CGIAR established the Global Crop Diversity Trust (Crop Trust), which today is located in the city of Bonn, Germany, to finance the work of the genebanks around the world. The aim of the Trust is to collect 500 million USD from the international community and private supporters and finance the genebanks through the interests generated by that money. Moreover, the Crop Trust has the objective of making the management of the genebanks more efficient and improving coordination between the different banks. Finally, the Crop Trust maintains the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic. The Seed Vault is a backup storage deep inside a mountain designed to stand time, disaster and even war. In the Vault there are more then 700.000 exemplars of different plant varieties stored, copies of the varieties stored in the genebanks around the world. Today more than 60 percent of all calories consumed by humans, come from three main crops: wheat, rice and maize. These crops originated from specific places in the world – for example rice was first cultivated about 10.000 years ago in China, whereas wheat was domesticated about the same time in the area between today’s Iran and Turkey. However, today these crops are grown from East Asia to the Americas. As they spread, they have to face new challenges but they also diversified. Quickly farmers and professional breeders realized that this bio diversity could be used to create new varieties more resistant to cold or dried to increase yielding. This is why preserving crop diversity remains the best way to help agriculture adapt to the challenges and demands we face. Therefore, farmers maintained it in their fields while scientists have established gene banks in the world to save this diversity.
In 1971, Germany became a founding member of the CGIAR and since 1997 the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) supports the CGIAR and behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Corporation and Development (BMZ). Germany supports the maintenance of genebanks, the “crown jewel” of agricultural research for development, as well as research projects that create improved crop varieties, new management practices or technologies for poor farmers. The main focus of work of the CGIAR is on Sub-Sahara Africa where hunger and poverty are still very dominant. More than 230 million people in Africa suffer from hunger. In entire Africa, more than 530 million people work in agriculture, almost 50 percent of the entire population of the continent, while it contributes to between 30 to 60 percent of national gross domestic product (GDP) of African nations. In comparison, in Germany only 2 percent of the entire population is engaged in agriculture, and the contribution of agriculture to GDP is only at 1 percent. Therefore, Crop research has yielded important results in Africa: • From the late 1990s to the early 2010s, the use of improved varieties increased from 22 percent to 36 percent on the total amount of
agricultural land. That is a major success. However, this level was achieved in Asia already in the early 1970s and in Latin America in the 1980s. So Africa is still the backlight of agricultural development worldwide. • From 1971 to 2005 farmers have planted improved maize varietie coming from the CGIAR in West and Central Africa on about 60 percent of the total maize area. Thereby an additional annual income of roughly 2.9 billion USD was created. • In the dry savannas of West Africa improved varieties of cowpea, which provide foods and feed for livestock, have been adopted, thus generating an economic benefit of up to 1.1 billion USD. • In Eastern and Southern Africa, also improved varieties of beans, which were jointly developed with farmers, created impressive improvements. About 50 percent of the total bean area in the region is planted with improved varieties of the CGIAR. These new varieties create more food and generate additional money for about 5.3 million rural households. The current total value of bean improvement research in Africa is at about 200 million USD per year – while it only costs 16 million USD!