Crop scientists are seeking ways to work on international crop networks to systematically tackle threats to global food security as a result of less predictable weather and population.
According to Illustrious scientist and wheat breeder, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Matthew Reynolds in an opinion piece published this week in the journal Science, “research focused on specific crops achieves progressive genetic gains, but scientist need to adopt a more internationally oriented and integrated approach to leverage technology, expertise and infrastructure with greater efficiency and purpose.”
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) informed that 795 million poor people do not get enough food to eat. Stating that by 2030, people living in poverty might increase between 35 and 122 million in great measure because of the effect of climate change on the agricultural sector.
“We understand how to make crops more resilient to heat and drought, but we’re at a point where we need to accelerate our work.” said Reynolds, backed by a team of co-authors from the scientific community. “Since these problems are transnational in nature, a more global network could accelerate our efforts while increasing efficiency and helping to avoid duplication.”
To enhance root access to water using controllable sensing, scientists plan to position the new Global Crop Improvement Network (GCIN) to take comparative approaches across all major crops and environments enhancing such traits as root access to water using remote sensing, which often requires costly mobile, airborne or satellite technology.
Since early 1960s, the International Wheat Improvement Network (IWIN), through successful wheat-oriented collaboration has made economically efficient and environmentally sound impacts on crop improvement, which serve as a template for projected success of GCIN.
Testing new wheat genotypes at 700 field sites in more than 90 countries, scientists within IWIN undertake breeding efforts aimed at 12 different wheat mega-environments. Delivering international public goods, each year they produce some 1,000 high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat lines.
Through IWIN delivering an economic punch of $2.2 billion to more than $3 billion a year for resource-poor farmers and consumers, a recent study shows that CGIAR varieties cover but half of the world’s wheat growing area.
“The benefit cost ratio of the investment is 100 to 1, even without taking into account the avoided cost of disease pandemics and the land saved from cultivation due to increased yields; economic analysis indicate at least 20 million hectares of natural ecosystem have spared the plough,” Reynolds said.
“High transaction costs and instability of crop funding have hamstrung urgently needed research,” he added. “This is senseless in light of the extraordinary return on investment to IWIN which could be transferred to GCIN.”
Through a crop-wide collaboration, international scientists can boost benefits from practical work with national agricultural research systems, improving the value of “in kind contributions,” he said.
Targets include improving data and phenotyping techniques to best standard, ensuring that information can be shared and decoded globally.
Reynolds stated that the approach will also support upstream researchers to venture from working exclusively in controlled facilities to realistic field environments, bringing cutting edge technologies with them.
Currently, data is often only available selectively and a network would promote it through open access programs while data sharing could lead to more accurate descriptions of environments and experimental treatments.
Expectedly, climate change leads to overall warmer temperatures and increase the intensity of droughts, floods and storms, harmfully affecting food security and livelihoods. Climate modelling indicates that sea levels will rise and patterns of flooding and drought will change due to hostile melt at high altitudes.
Higher temperatures will affect crop yields and erratic rainfall could affect both yields and quality. For poor people spending most of their income on food, related price hikes could make it much more difficult to cope.
“A more globally oriented, problem-solving research effort will increase the efficiency of global investment in agriculture and help ensure food security,” Reynolds emphasised public-private partnerships could harness to drive globally coordinated research.
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