Opinion
Protection of Biodiversity Key to Boosting Food Production
By Norman E. Borlaug
Dr. Borlaug is widely known as the “Father of the Green Revolution.” In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work and is credited for saving over 1 billion people from hunger. He is a Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M University, and President of the Sasakawa Africa Association.
In 1914, the year I was born, the world’s population topped 1.6 billion. Today it stands at over 6.5 billion, and is growing by more than 75 million per year. Since the middle of the last century, breakthroughs in agricultural science and technology have permitted global production of rice, wheat and other cereals to stay ahead of population growth, allowing millions to escape the pain of constant hunger.
Norman E. Borlaug (centre); Cary Fowler (right), Executive Director, Global Crop Diversity Trust; Ambassador Kenneth Quinn (left), President, World Food Prize Foundation
Still, there is no room for complacency. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 800 million people remain hungry. Most of them live on less than US$1 a day, and many of them are smallholder farmers in developing countries, who live in areas where drought and other stresses make agriculture both risky and costly.
As in the past, such circumstances call for scientific and technological innovation. We know from long experience that advances in agricultural technology can buy time for political, social and religious leaders to bring into better balance the growth in human population and the carrying capacity of our planet.
Even with slowing world population growth, global cereal demand is likely to increase by 50 percent or more over the next 25 years. Feeding future generations in environmentally sustainable ways is a daunting challenge. But it can be done.
In 2005, agricultural scientists delivered to the world a remarkable tool in the fight against hunger—the complete genetic sequence of rice, the world’s most important food crop. Understanding its full genetic composition will ultimately enable plant breeders to develop rice varieties that are nutritionally enriched, higher yielding, and adapted to the extremes of environments to come. This feat—along with similar work on other food crops—has brought the world closer to achieving a sustainable global food supply. But there is a catch.
The genetic diversity of rice and other major food crops is itself under threat as habitats are challenged. And many of the facilities built during the 20th Century to safely preserve this diversity are suffering from neglect. These facilities are called crop genebanks, and plant breeders go to these banks to withdraw the currency of future agriculture—seeds that provide the genetic raw material to develop improved plant varieties, including those that are indispensable to the fight against hunger.
These plant collections,—many of them under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization—are absolutely critical to ensuring the continued availability of crop diversity. They represent the largest stocks of diversity for the major food crops in the world. They are the genetic lifeblood for future crop improvement, since they will provide new sources of resistance to diseases and pests, tolerance of climatic and environmental stresses, improved nutritional quality and higher yield potential.
To ensure that the most critical collections of rice, wheat, maize (corn), potatoes and the other staple crops that feed the world continue to be protected, the Global Crop Diversity Trust deserves continued support. An independent international organization, the Trust has created an endowment whose proceeds will be used to conserve collections of crop diversity that are at risk.
Repeated international agreements have recommended action on protecting crop biodiversity, but paltry sums have followed the fine words. The Trust, the world’s only organisation addressing this problem, remains under-funded. World leaders should commit to allocating to the Trust the relatively modest sum needed to get the job done.
Increasingly, nations—rich and poor—are shaping their development policies with the goal of achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The Trust’s efforts will support at least two of the MDGs—to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and to ensure environmental sustainability.
At a time when science is providing the keys to understanding how best to use the contents of these precious food crop genebanks in order to benefit humanity and the environment, the collections themselves are under threat. The Global Crop Diversity Trust will help protect these irreplaceable sources of global biodiversity, ensuring that their promise is fully realized.
Dr. Borlaug is widely known as the “Father of the Green Revolution.” In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work and is credited for saving over 1 billion people from hunger. He is a Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M University, and President of the Sasakawa Africa Association.
In 1914, the year I was born, the world’s population topped 1.6 billion. Today it stands at over 6.5 billion, and is growing by more than 75 million per year. Since the middle of the last century, breakthroughs in agricultural science and technology have permitted global production of rice, wheat and other cereals to stay ahead of population growth, allowing millions to escape the pain of constant hunger.
Norman E. Borlaug (centre); Cary Fowler (right), Executive Director, Global Crop Diversity Trust; Ambassador Kenneth Quinn (left), President, World Food Prize Foundation
Still, there is no room for complacency. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 800 million people remain hungry. Most of them live on less than US$1 a day, and many of them are smallholder farmers in developing countries, who live in areas where drought and other stresses make agriculture both risky and costly.
As in the past, such circumstances call for scientific and technological innovation. We know from long experience that advances in agricultural technology can buy time for political, social and religious leaders to bring into better balance the growth in human population and the carrying capacity of our planet.
Even with slowing world population growth, global cereal demand is likely to increase by 50 percent or more over the next 25 years. Feeding future generations in environmentally sustainable ways is a daunting challenge. But it can be done.
In 2005, agricultural scientists delivered to the world a remarkable tool in the fight against hunger—the complete genetic sequence of rice, the world’s most important food crop. Understanding its full genetic composition will ultimately enable plant breeders to develop rice varieties that are nutritionally enriched, higher yielding, and adapted to the extremes of environments to come. This feat—along with similar work on other food crops—has brought the world closer to achieving a sustainable global food supply. But there is a catch.
The genetic diversity of rice and other major food crops is itself under threat as habitats are challenged. And many of the facilities built during the 20th Century to safely preserve this diversity are suffering from neglect. These facilities are called crop genebanks, and plant breeders go to these banks to withdraw the currency of future agriculture—seeds that provide the genetic raw material to develop improved plant varieties, including those that are indispensable to the fight against hunger.
These plant collections,—many of them under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization—are absolutely critical to ensuring the continued availability of crop diversity. They represent the largest stocks of diversity for the major food crops in the world. They are the genetic lifeblood for future crop improvement, since they will provide new sources of resistance to diseases and pests, tolerance of climatic and environmental stresses, improved nutritional quality and higher yield potential.
To ensure that the most critical collections of rice, wheat, maize (corn), potatoes and the other staple crops that feed the world continue to be protected, the Global Crop Diversity Trust deserves continued support. An independent international organization, the Trust has created an endowment whose proceeds will be used to conserve collections of crop diversity that are at risk.
Repeated international agreements have recommended action on protecting crop biodiversity, but paltry sums have followed the fine words. The Trust, the world’s only organisation addressing this problem, remains under-funded. World leaders should commit to allocating to the Trust the relatively modest sum needed to get the job done.
Increasingly, nations—rich and poor—are shaping their development policies with the goal of achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The Trust’s efforts will support at least two of the MDGs—to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and to ensure environmental sustainability.
At a time when science is providing the keys to understanding how best to use the contents of these precious food crop genebanks in order to benefit humanity and the environment, the collections themselves are under threat. The Global Crop Diversity Trust will help protect these irreplaceable sources of global biodiversity, ensuring that their promise is fully realized.