Seeds for Needs

Climate change will drastically affect food security for people around the world, and there is little time to prepare. Farmers will need new varieties and even new crops to ensure that their growing systems remain productive.

But among the myriad accessions held in trust for the global community by the genebanks of the Centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (650,000 and counting), just how do we find the most valuable ones to meet farmers’ future needs?

Part of Bioversity International’s answer is Seeds for Needs, a project to steal a march on climate change by pre-selecting crops and varieties that are likely to perform well under future conditions.

Location coordinates — latitude and longitude — for where the accessions were collected are taken as a reasonable proxy for the growing conditions that suit those accessions. Plugging that information into geographical information systems can help to identify accessions already adapted to future growing conditions elsewhere in the world.

But the selected varieties still need to be tested, and this is where Seeds for Needs has already scored. A US$200,000 proposal to fund work with women farmers in Ethiopia was named a winner in the World Bank’s recent Development Marketplace 2009, marking Bioversity’s second straight success in this important competition for innovative solutions. Ehsan Dulloo, the Bioversity scientist who leads the partnership with the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation in Addis Ababa, says that in Ethiopia women are the custodians of seeds and diversity.

“They have to confront significant uncertainty in the climate every year and regularly face food shortages as crops fail,” Dulloo says. Locally available varieties may no longer be sufficient, and so, he adds, “communities need to look further than their neighbours’ fields for the best-adapted seeds.”

Pre-selected varieties “will provide women farmers with adapted varieties to help them cope with climate change,” Dulloo explains. The project will work with around 200 vulnerable women farmers at two target sites where durum wheat and barley are the basis of the farming systems. Seeds for Needs will develop a unique framework that combines three vital streams: available knowledge of the diversity of durum wheat and barley from a range of sources; an improved understanding of climate-change scenarios in Ethiopia; and the farmers’ own experiences, indigenous knowledge and adaptation strategies.

Crucially, the work will help prevent women farmers — who also often head the family — from falling deeper into poverty.

Seeds for Needs is also being rolled out in Papua New Guinea, where sweet potato and taro are the most important staple crops. Sweet potato alone accounts for two-thirds of total staple crop production in this South Pacific country. The project is working with genebanks and local partners, including communities and women’s groups, to identify sweet potato and taro varieties that can withstand extremes of temperature and rainfall as well as differences in the salt content of the soil and predicted shifts in pests and diseases. The pre-selected varieties will then be matched with places where they should continue to produce good yields under predicted future conditions.

Local farming communities are a vital element in the mix, as it is their needs, after all, that have to be met. They will be mobilized to apply their traditional knowledge, and they will be active participants in the research to identify suitable varieties and then test them. After testing, the best-performing and most adaptable varieties will be distributed to farming communities for multiplication with the help of local agribusinesses.

In Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere in the future, Seeds for Needs projects are a crucial step toward gaining the knowledge to meet the challenge of helping farmers achieve true food security despite climate change.