By 
In an effort to ward off a looming, future global starvation crisis, scientists and agronomists have begun a global scavenger hunt to identify food crops that will stand up to various climate change scenarios, including (but not limited to) excessive moisture, moderate drought, and warmer or unstable temperatures such as late or early frosts.
The project, under the auspices of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT), is currently searching seed banks to identify "climate proof" varieties of maize, rice and other food crops, in the hope that such crops will make a hungry world immune to the havoc of increasingly unpredictable growing conditions.
This project, operating under the auspices of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and named, "Thinking of this World", is moving toward creating a world seed bank under the direction of Cary Fowler, an honor's graduate of the university's sociology program.
This program, and others like it, comes none too soon. The earth is running a fever. The hottest 11 years on record have all occurred in the last 13 years. The single exception to this trend was the winter of 2007-08, but global chilling is now largely attributed to extreme melting of Arctic Ocean ice. A secondary and highly disputed cause is a persistent lack of sunspots indicating a prolonged solar minimum.
As Fowler notes, global growing conditions are changing rapidly, predicating a future in which crops will face radically new environments. The only way to stave off the devastating surprise of corn that shrivels before it can form ears is to "screen" both modern and old-time seeds for adaptability. These useful traits will then lead to sustainable production.
For example, the banana currently sold in supermarkets around the world, the Cavendish, is only one of 10 varieties grown throughout the world in more than 130 countries. That isn't even counting plantains, a close relative of the banana. Almost 90 percent of bananas are grown on small, rural farms in the tropics. In East Africa, bananas represent a staple food for about half the population, delivering more than 75 percent of daily carbohydrates. In the U.S., annual consumption can exceed 880 pounds per person. Bananas and plantains represent the most exported fruit in the world, as well as the fourth most profitable crop in developing nations, after rice, wheat and maize (corn).
The Cavendish, bred for disease resistance and other traits that make it a good shipper, was once thought to be immune to Panama Disease, which wiped out its parent cultivar, Gros Michel. Unfortunately, like many cultivars grown for years via propagation rather than sexual reproduction, Cavendish is now beginning to succumb to the dreaded Panama Disease.
Another cultivar will have to be developed, from an increasingly limited gene pool, which withstands not only pests but also the kinds of climactic changes already taking place in the Asia-Pacific region. This includes heightened summer and winter temperatures, severe storms that can inundate growing regions with salt water, and an increasingly polluted groundwater resource.
Rice, maize and wheat face similar problems. Canadian hard red wheat, once grown from southern Minnesota and South Dakota into Saskatchewan and west into Alberta, no longer grows well south of the Canadian border due to rising winter temperatures and increasingly dry conditions.
Maize, or native South American corn, is declining not only due to changing weather patterns but an increasing tendency in Mexico and South America to grow genetically modified (GM) strains of corn in response to NAFTA tariff agreements and the influence of such agribusiness giants as Monsanto.
Rice, adaptable to warming but not to drought, no longer does well in California, where the governor's task force warns that the state must change its laws and build new dams, canals and desalination plants or face economic and ecological disaster. The same is true in rice-growing regions in the South, most notably Arkansas. Globally, rice production is similarly impacted, with only Vietnam growing and exporting record amounts of rice. Scientists are also now saying rice-developing countries may have to radically change the way they produce rice, since this major Asian staple is believed to produce more emissions, in the form of methane, than industrial operations and power plants.
The process of getting from here to there will be arduous and expensive. Scientists must first identify seeds with built-in hardiness, then either breed and propagate them or genetically manipulate them to make these characteristics genetically dominant. Given the spread of GM seed, many "old fashioned" varieties are no longer available. This limited genetic pool offers fewer opportunities for creating climate-hardy crops, and is one of the major arguments environmentalists present in opposition to GM crops.
However, once hardy candidates have been identified, they will be put into an open access database, allowing researchers worldwide to draw on the cutting-edge discoveries of superior plant breeders and geneticists. Some seeds will also be entered as part of a "pre-breeding" stockpile, allowing further manipulation. This process - of integrating one or two hardiness genes, or traits, from a heritage species into a modern variety - takes a lot of time and money, and most breeders therefore hate starting from scratch, so the pre-breeding stockpile will be an invaluable resource for further developments.
Current Global Crop Diversity Trust projects include screening over 20 varieties of taro, a root crop, to make them drought- and saline-resistant. Taro, rich in carbohydrates, is eaten by the poorer residents of New Guinea and other Pacific island communities, and provides an essential source of energy as other staples like rice become too expensive.
Other programs focus on the grass pea, also known as blue sweet pea, chickling vetch, Indian pea or Indian vetch. This superbly hardy annual, which is perennial in warmer climates like Bangladesh, is good at fixing nitrogen in the soil and high in protein. It also survives when nothing else can, and serves as a forage food for animals and humans in times of want. Unfortunately, grass pea contains a neurotoxin, which increases with drought, so eating too much can cause paralysis, or lathyrism. Scientists are searching for subtypes which contain less of the neurotoxin, in the hopes that this unfortunate side effect can be bred out of the species.
The advantages of a global database are obvious. Knowledge shared and amplified upon by each successive agronomist or breeding expert moves the idea of sustainable crops forward that much faster. High-speed communications and instant messaging drive the effort.
"The experts have, among other things, helped us identify which are the most important seed collections in terms of genetic diversity," Fowler says. "This has provided us with the scientific foundation for almost everything else we do."
The Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is also responsible for the "Doomsday" seed vault - sometimes known as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault - a $9 million project located in the Arctic, hopes to create a comprehensive profile of various crops and the "climate-proof" traits they contain over the next year or two. Those in favor of GM crops hope that the Trust's efforts will bring widening public support for GM food, but Fowler himself sees that as a secondary concern.
This vault was recently highlighted in Discovery Magazine as one of the 10 greatest science projects in modern history, and stores seeds from more than 100 countries. It is a joint project between the Norwegian government - which funded the construction, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given about $750,000 to the effort.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, 30 percent of earth's plant species may become extinct within this century as the earth warms and climate changes. Many have disappeared in just the last half century, and safeguarding the "wild" relatives of today's domesticated crops may be the only way to protect the world's food supply when formerly viable species succumb to unfamiliar climactic conditions.
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