Improving Seeds to Meet Future Challenges

Improving Seeds or Improving Small Scale Agriculture?

Perennial rice seeds

Will there be enough food to feed the world in the future? The global population will likely hit 9 billion by 2050, climate change is bringing about extreme weather and altering agricultural conditions, and around the globe, 925 million people still go hungry.

Scientists and agronomists are racing to develop seeds that are higher yielding, more nutritious, and drought and climate resilient to meet these challenges. But while some experts believe genetically modified seeds are the only solution to the problem, others claim small-scale organic agriculture is more effective and sustainable. This is a look at some of the ways seeds are being improved.

First, a definition of the different types of seeds that exist.

Open pollinated seeds are those produced from natural, random pollination. Traditionally, farmers saved the best of these seeds for use from year to year.

Hybrid seeds result from cross-breeding two parent plants that have desirable traits. The resulting plants realize their potential in the first season, but lose effectiveness in subsequent generations so farmers must buy new seeds each year.

Genetically modified seeds are created when one or two genes with the desired traits from any living organism are transferred directly into the plant’s genome.

Higher Yields

Higher yields are achieved when seed heads produce more seeds per head or bigger seeds; but plants with tall stalks cannot always support the added weight. In the 1960s, as India was facing famine, the American agronomist Norman Borlaug developed dwarf wheat varieties with stalks that could support larger seeds and brought them to Punjab. By 1970, wheat yields in Punjab had tripled, provided the seeds were given sufficient water and synthetic fertilizer.

Since the mid-1990s, however, Punjab’s crop yields have stalled, due to increasing complications from Green Revolution techniques. Excessive irrigation has resulted in rapidly falling water tables. Soil health has been depleted. The adoption of high yield varieties has led to more monocultures and decreased biodiversity. And farmers are now dependent on expensive inputs that profit big companies, rather than traditional farming methods that draw on local resources and skills.Between the mid-1950s and mid-1990s, Borlaug and other researchers succeeded in more than doubling the yields of wheat, rice and corn, averting a mass famine, and kickstarting the “Green Revolution.” Using hybrid seeds, fossil fuel-based fertilizer and pesticides, and intensified irrigation, the Green Revolution greatly increased agricultural output throughout the state.

Sub-Saharan Africa, where 239 million people go hungry, has not been able to recreate Asia’s Green Revolution. The reasons are many: poor infrastructure, political instability, little access to credit, minimal fertilizer use, and the limited availability of high-yielding seeds. Agricultural productivity here has been outstripped by the growing population.

Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, has 13 million people who depend on agriculture to survive. Many grow maize in depleted soil on small farms. For a time, however, Malawi experienced an agricultural “miracle.” During the 2004-2005 growing season, insufficient rainfall almost caused total crop failure. The Malawi government established a program to subsidize inputs, giving farmers coupons to buy improved open pollinated seeds or higher yielding hybrid seeds and fertilizer. With good rain, Malawi’s maize harvest doubled in 2006, and almost tripled in 2007. The government subsidy program transformed Malawi into a food exporter and became a model for other African countries. For a while, it seemed to herald a new African “green revolution.” But today Malawi is once again facing serious food shortages. Political corruption, economic mismanagement and severe flooding have derailed progress. Joyce Banda, Malawi’s new president, is now trying to establish a new food policy to get the country back on track.At the same time, The Millennium Villages Project, set up by the Earth Institute and the U.N. Development Programme to tackle extreme poverty through an integrated, sustainable approach, was established in the Malawi village of Mwandama. Here, households were given 10 kilograms of hybrid maize seed and the fertilizer needed to grow it; in return, they had to donate two bags of grain to the local grain bank for use by the schools.

Proponents of genetically modified seeds claim they can increase yield and are necessary to feed the growing global population. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given $9.8 million to British scientists researching ways to genetically modify corn, wheat and rice seeds so that they can extract nitrogen from the atmosphere, which would reduce or eliminate the need for expensive nitrogen fertilizer. Katherine Kahn, senior program officer of agricultural development at the Gates Foundation, said, “Improving access to nitrogen could dramatically boost the crop yields of farmers in Africa.”

A 2008 study undertaken by the World Bank, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and others from around the world, concurs. It reports that “…better use of local resources in small scale agriculture can improve productivity and generate worthwhile innovations, and agroecological/organic farming can achieve high production efficiencies on a per area basis and high energy use efficiencies, and that on both these criteria, they may outperform conventional industrial farming.”Physicist/environmentalist Vandana Shiva argues that Bill Gates is “totally wrong on this assumption that genetically modified seeds produce more.” She contends that small-scale, biologically diverse farms can produce more food with fewer fossil fuel-based inputs.

Climate Resilience

In the last 30 years, global corn and wheat production has decreased 3 to 5 percent as a result of the warming climate. According to the Rockefeller Foundation, by 2030, maize production in Southern Africa could drop 30 percent due to climate change.

Biotech companies are racing to develop drought tolerant seeds that will fare better in hot, dry conditions. Dupont and Syngenta have developed drought-tolerant hybrid corn varieties that have not been genetically modified. Monsanto touts its DroughtGard Hybrid genetically modified corn as biotech’s first drought solution that is “designed to help farmers mitigate the risk of yield loss when experiencing drought stress.”

A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, found that DroughtGard produces only “modest results”— about 6 percent more drought protection than non-engineered varieties—and only under “moderate drought conditions”; it does not reduce the crop’s need for water. The genetically modified corn would boost the overall productivity of the U.S. corn crop by only about 1 percent.

Genetically modified seeds are controversial because few tests of genetically modified crops have measured their effects on humans. Seeds genetically modified to be herbicide-tolerant or carry a built-in pesticide have led to the development of new super pests and super weeds. Genetically modified crops also have significant socio-economic impacts. Because the seeds are proprietary, farmers must pay royalties to use them and purchase new seeds every season, facing rising costs, and often increasing debt.

The Gates Foundation also funds the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa project which is developing drought tolerant varieties using conventional breeding techniques. More than 100 drought-tolerant varieties have been distributed to small farmers.

Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya (which means nine seeds) Biodiversity Farm in India is developing climate-resilient crops by saving 1500 varieties of seeds and growing them out, using organic methods that enhance natural processes and cycles, and allowing plants to naturally adapt to changing climate conditions. Navdanya has also established 111 community seed banks across India, creating stores of climate-resistant crops. Shiva’s research has shown that using compost instead of fossil fuel-derived fertilizer increases organic matter in the soil, sequestering carbon and holding moisture, which helps mitigate the effects of climate change.

Most grains are annual crops from which farmers have traditionally saved the best seeds for the next season, gradually improving the seeds. Because perennial grains do not need to be replanted each year, they have not been improved as much over time. Perennial grains put most of their energy into roots and not into large seeds, but the deeper roots make better use of rainfall and deep soil water resources and lessen erosion. Since the seeds do not need to be replanted each season, they block weed growth and thus save on costs of pesticides and herbicides, as well as on energy and labor. Scientists are using new plant breeding techniques to develop perennial grain crops which can match annual grain crops in yield yet retain their environmental benefits. More

 

The hunger wars in our future: Heat, drought, rising food costs, and global unrest

The mass unrest of the Arab Spring was triggered in part by rising food prices. In Algeria (above), the government slashed food prices in response to protests.

Photo by Magharebia

The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but we already know that its consequences will be severe. With more than one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of predictions. This, in turn, will boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported U.S. grains.

This, however, is just the beginning of the likely consequences: If history is any guide, rising food prices of this sort will also lead to widespread social unrest and violent conflict.

Food — affordable food — is essential to human survival and well-being. Take that away, and people become anxious, desperate, and angry. In the United States, food represents only about 13 percent of the average household budget, a relatively small share, so a boost in food prices in 2013 will probably not prove overly taxing for most middle- and upper-income families. It could, however, produce considerable hardship for poor and unemployed Americans with limited resources. “You are talking about a real bite out of family budgets,” commented Ernie Gross, an agricultural economist at Omaha’s Creighton University. This could add to the discontent already evident in depressed and high-unemployment areas, perhaps prompting an intensified backlash against incumbent politicians and other forms of dissent and unrest.

It is in the international arena, however, that the Great Drought is likely to have its most devastating effects. Because so many nations depend on grain imports from the U.S. to supplement their own harvests, and because intense drought and floods are damaging crops elsewhere as well, food supplies are expected to shrink and prices to rise across the planet. “What happens to the U.S. supply has immense impact around the world,” says Robert Thompson, a food expert at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. As the crops most affected by the drought, corn and soybeans, disappear from world markets, he noted, the price of all grains, including wheat, is likely to soar, causing immense hardship to those who already have trouble affording enough food to feed their families.

The Hunger Games, 2007-2011

What happens next is, of course, impossible to predict, but if the recent past is any guide, it could turn ugly. In 2007 to 2008, when rice, corn, and wheat experienced prices hikes of 100 percent or more, sharply higher prices — especially for bread — sparked “food riots” in more than two dozen countries, including Bangladesh, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Senegal, and Yemen. In Haiti, the rioting became so violent and public confidence in the government’s ability to address the problem dropped so precipitously that the Haitian Senate voted to oust the country’s prime minister, Jacques-Édouard Alexis. In other countries, angry protestors clashed with army and police forces, leaving scores dead.

Those price increases of 2007 to 2008 were largely attributed to the soaring cost of oil, which made food production more expensive. (Oil’s use is widespread in farming operations, irrigation, food delivery, and pesticide manufacture.) At the same time, increasing amounts of cropland worldwide were being diverted from food crops to the cultivation of plants used in making biofuels.

The next price spike, in 2010 to 2011, was, however, closely associated with climate change. An intense drought gripped much of eastern Russia during the summer of 2010, reducing the wheat harvest in that breadbasket region by one-fifth and prompting Moscow to ban all wheat exports. Drought also hurt China’s grain harvest, while intense flooding destroyed much of Australia’s wheat crop. Together with other extreme-weather-related effects, these disasters sent wheat prices soaring by more than 50 percent and the price of most food staples by 32 percent. More

Given the devestating flooding that has affected Pakistan in the last two years, with the associated destruction of crops, how will rising prices and potential shortages affect the country? Editor.

The world is closer to a food crisis than most people realise

Unless we move quickly to adopt new population, energy, and water policies, the goal of eradicating hunger will remain just that.

Food riots in Algeria in 2008. Photograph: Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

In the early spring this year, US farmers were on their way to planting some 96m acres in corn, the most in 75 years. A warm early spring got the crop off to a great start. Analysts were predicting the largest corn harvest on record.

The United States is the leading producer and exporter of corn, the world's feedgrain. At home, corn accounts for four-fifths of the US grain harvest. Internationally, the US corn crop exceeds China's rice and wheat harvests combined. Among the big three grains – corn, wheat, and rice – corn is now the leader, with production well above that of wheat and nearly double that of rice.

The corn plant is as sensitive as it is productive. Thirsty and fast-growing, it is vulnerable to both extreme heat and drought. At elevated temperatures, the corn plant, which is normally so productive, goes into thermal shock.

Time is running out. The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage – replete with soaring food prices, spreading food unrest, and ultimately political instability– than most people realise.

As spring turned into summer, the thermometer began to rise across the corn belt. In St Louis, Missouri, in the southern corn belt, the temperature in late June and early July climbed to 100F or higher 10 days in a row. For the past several weeks, the corn belt has been blanketed with dehydrating heat.

Weekly drought maps published by the University of Nebraska show the drought-stricken area spreading across more and more of the country until, by mid-July, it engulfed virtually the entire corn belt. Soil moisture readings in the corn belt are now among the lowest ever recorded.

While temperature, rainfall, and drought serve as indirect indicators of crop growing conditions, each week the US Department of Agriculture releases a report on the actual state of the corn crop. This year the early reports were promising. On 21 May, 77% of the US corn crop was rated as good to excellent. The following week the share of the crop in this category dropped to 72%. Over the next eight weeks, it dropped to 26%, one of the lowest ratings on record. The other 74% is rated very poor to fair. And the crop is still deteriorating.

Over a span of weeks, we have seen how the more extreme weather events that come with climate change can affect food security. Since the beginning of June, corn prices have increased by nearly one half, reaching an all-time high on 19 July. More