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Global-warming resistant crops under development by researchers mongabay.com December 4, 2006 Researchers at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) are working to develop climate-resilient agriculture to reduce the impact of global warming on food supplies. Climate change is expected to disproportionately affect the world's poorest regions most dependent on agriculture for economic sustenance. CIGAR is working to develop crops that can better withstand heat, salt, submergence or waterlogging, and drought as well as to promote "more efficient farming techniques to help poor farmers better use increasingly scarce water and fragile soil." Further researchers are also looking for ways to use agriculture to reduce greenhouse gases emissions. "The impacts of climate change on agriculture will add significantly to the development challenges of reducing poverty and ensuring sufficient food production for a growing population," said Dr. Robert S. Zeigler, Director General of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), a CGIAR-supported research center. "The livelihoods of billions of people in developing countries, particularly those in the tropics, will be severely challenged as crop yields decline due to shorter growing seasons." "Anticipating and planning for climate change is imperative if farmers in poor countries are to avert forecast declines in yields of the world's most important food crops," said Dr. Louis V. Verchot, a climate change scientist with the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), a CGIAR-supported research center. "Yet, adaptation is not a substitute for reducing new and removing existing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere--our only long-term option."
"Developing countries, which are already home to most of the world's poor and malnourished people and have contributed relatively little to the causes of global warming, are going to bear the brunt of climate change and suffer most from its negative consequences," said Dr. Verchot of the World Agroforestry Center. "Poor countries are overwhelmingly dependent on natural resources, and, given their limited financial or institutional ability to adapt to profound change, they are severely at risk," said Zeigler. "Helping poor farmers adapt to climate change will require a concerted international effort to improve crops, techniques of cultivation, and soil and water management." "The task ahead may well prove bigger and more complex than what we faced at the outset of the Green Revolution," added Zeigler. "To feed a growing population, food production must be doubled over the next 25 years, but now poor countries must do so in harsh environments that climate change has rendered far less suitable to agriculture." CIGAR's research centers are working on a number of agricultural issues as related to climate change:
This article is based on a news release from CIGAR. Recommend this article? Comments? >Digg this article | >Hugg this article | Contact News options SHARE THIS ARTICLE:
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