Green Options » crop diversity

Africa Fails to Ensure Food Security

Kay Sexton — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:06:38 +0000

During a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting, the spokesman for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) said that the current global recession was simply ‘masking the next storm’. Akinwumi Adesina reported that global food supplies were far from secure and that market speculation, climate change and crop diversity were all major threats in the near future. While global grain reserves had been replenished in the last couple of years, this was simply a short-term achievement, but global food security, he said ‘remains a goal, not a reality’.

Food protests decline but food security doesn’t improve

Staple crop prices have declined rapidly from the 2008 peaks, which saw protests across the developing world at the unaffordable prices being charged for necessary foodstuffs, but this hasn’t solved an underlying problem which AGRA says is the lack of investment, infrastructure and markets for African farmers. The ‘green revolution’ they seek is one that has already happened in Europe and America and is happening in Asia and Latin America where crop yields have become higher, but Africa continues to produce a quarter of the world’s global crops – an average that has been maintained for more than thirty years.

Global Project to Create Sustainable, Climate-Proof Food Crops

Sam Aola Ooko — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:58:52 +0000

A new global project is screening food crops for useful traits that can be adapted for reversing the effects of climate change and boost their diversity and sustainable production.

This will involve the setting up of crop banks and seed vaults, so to speak, in developing countries that depend on staples such as corn and rice, to tap on their valuable ’sustainability traits’ as a way of conserving the diversity of the world’s food crops.

In attempts to boost food security, crops from banana to sweet potato will be screened to identify material that plant breeders can use to produce varieties adapted to conditions associated with climate change.

The Search is On for Food Crops That Will Survive Global Climate Change

Meg Hamill — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:33:32 +0000

This is a guest post by Meg Hamill who works at LandPaths in Partnership with The Open Space District of Sonoma County, California.

Here’s a question, not meant to keep you up at night, but definitely worth thinking about: Which of the foods in your refrigerator right now would be likely to survive a global climate change?

Lucky for us, this question is not going unanswered. The Global Crop Diversity Trust recently earmarked 1.5 million dollars towards screening the world’s food supply for natural resistances to floods, temperature change, and droughts. The Trust is also looking for higher yielding crops that need little water and less space to grow.

The overarching mission of the organization is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security, worldwide. In February of this year, they opened the doors of their “Arctic Seed Vault,” otherwise known as “Doomsday Vault,” a safe haven for seeds from all over the world. The vault was dug into a mountainside in Svalbard, a group of islands nearly a thousand kilometers North of Norway.