Pioneering study shows how traditional seed systems may cope with climate change (full article)
17 August 2011 | Permalink [1]
A new study throws light on the ways that smallholder famers will be able to obtain seeds that will cope with climate change. In doing so it has the potential to help researchers and extension workers around the world in their efforts to help farmers prepare for rapidly changing growing conditions.
Mauricio Bellon, Programme Director at Bioversity, and colleagues, surveyed Mexican maize farmers in four different agro-ecological zones - wet lowland, dry lowland, wet upper midaltitude, and highland - to find out where they got their seed and then modelled how climate change might affect their environment.
Across all the zones, seed saved from their own farms accounts for most of the seed lots farmers plant with less than a third originating off the farm. Most of that comes from family, neighbours and friends, with very little coming from shops, government programmes, or strangers.
Despite this, the system is quite dynamic: 25% of the farmers experimented with farmer landraces (a crop variety developed by farmers over generations) and modern varieties from further afield, with highland farmers especially likely to experiment. Geographically, more than 90% of all seed lots come from within 10km of the community and less than 50m higher or lower.
Because farmers are content to get their seed very locally, with little recourse to outside material, what they have is surely well adapted to local conditions. So how much will those conditions change?
All climate models predict that it will get dryer and hotter in the study areas. But locally, changes are not that great. "We looked in detail at how conditions changed in 1 km square "pixels" within the 10 km radius around the communities," Bellon explained. "And, except in the highland communities, the predicted future conditions are already present within the 10-km radial zones. That means that farmers should have relatively easy access to planting material adapted to the agro-ecological conditions predicted under climate-change scenarios."
Conico landrace - one example of Mexico's maize diversity found in the research area. Photo:CIMMYT
Things in the highlands will be more complex. Conditions for maize will change most in the highlands, and there is an absence of local material adapted for the predicted climate changes – so traditional seed systems probably will not be able to provide what the farmers there will need.
"But," says Bellon, "those farmers have a history of obtaining and experimenting with modern varieties and seed lots from further away. Perhaps researchers and extension workers should concentrate their efforts to help farmers prepare for climate change in those highland areas."
Bellon and his co-authors also point out that roughly half the highland maize grown in the developing world is outside Mexico. Farmers there will need to prepare too.
The approach pioneered in this research, of integrating information about seed systems with fine-scale examination of predicted climate shifts, is important because it has the potential to be applied in other regions and countries. This will help to identify priority areas where smallholder farmers that rely on traditional, informal seed systems for many other crops will need assistance to adapt to climate change. For instance, on the other side of the world, in Sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farmers suffer from very poor availability of adequate quantity and quality of seeds.
Insights into new methods and approaches provided by this study can help extension systems workers and research institutions better understand and enable access to the precise varieties poor farmers will need to cope with the extreme impacts of climate change. It also illustrates how Bioversity's research, carried out with its partners, could effect change on the ground.
Read the full abstract from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences :
Bellon, M.R., Hodson, D., & Hellin, J. (2011). Assessing the vulnerability of traditional maize seed systems in Mexico to climate change [2]
For more information, contact:
Mauricio Bellon [3]
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- [1] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/index.php?id=4798
- [2] http://www.pnas.org/content/108/33/13432
- [3] mailto:m.bellon@cgiar.org
- [4] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/announcements/seed_sytems_in_mexico.html
- [5] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/research/sustainable_agriculture.html
- [6] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/farmer_stories/a_fork_in_the_road_to_rio_nepal.html
- [7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6py3bF48aU
- [8] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/index.php?id=5876
- [9] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/browse_by/category/research/sustainable agriculture/
- [10] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/browse_by/tag/climate change
- [11] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/browse_by/tag/maize
- [12] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/browse_by/tag/mexico
- [13] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/browse_by/tag/smallholder farmers