“The private and public sectors are not in this together. The goal is to shorten the breeding cycle to four years to help farmers with few resources better cope with the rapidly changing climate and emerging disease threats. Now we need generalists, and there’s enough diversity to cope with unpredictable climate events – we just need to find and exploit it, but funding is an issue,” said Matthew Reynolds, head of physiology at CIMMYT’s wheat program (which Borlaug led until his retirement in 1979).Īfter six years, the program ends up with 50 or so new wheat varieties which countries can take and test before releasing to their farmers. “After the Green Revolution the focus was on breeding high-yield disease-resistant specialists for different regions, but the mega-varieties were not bred to cope with unpredictable climate conditions.
And now the climate crisis is making us pay. But the loss of diversity in crops, ecosystems and traditional sustainable practices came at a huge environmental and human cost. Uniformity, standardisation, and fossil fuel-driven technologies became the gold standard and Borlaug was awarded the Nobel peace prize as malnutrition declined. We have to keep the evolutionary wolf from the door Leo Crespo This was the birth of extractive industrial agriculture and Borlaug’s discoveries in Mexico changed the way the world farmed wheat, rice and many other crops. Global wheat production tripled after the Green Revolution in the mid-20th century after Norman Borlaug, an American plant pathologist deployed to Mexico by the Rockefeller Foundation, used a semi-dwarf gene from a Japanese wheat to create shorter stem varieties which when farmed with fertiliser and water improved yields beyond anyone’s dreams. But yields were often low as many wheats were tall and gangly, and would be harvested too early or else tumble in windy conditions. Wheat does best in temperate climates, but no matter where humans took seeds, wheat adapted to the local ecosystem, evolving over generations as each variety or landrace developed good and bad quirks.ĭiversity was the norm, and before the second world war thousands of landraces were being cultivated across the globe, often side by side with other crops – which partially buffered communities from ecological disasters such as disease epidemics and extreme weather. The wheat we eat today can be traced back to wild grasses domesticated by Neolithic farmers in western Asia and northern Africa, coming to Mexico relatively recently with Spanish settlers. Wheat is the most widely consumed grain globally, accounting for a fifth of our carbohydrate and protein intake, and is farmed in every inhabited continent to make bread, chapatis, pasta, couscous, noodles and pastries eaten by billions of people. We have to keep the evolutionary wolf from the door by breeding varieties which are resistant to a wide range of diseases and improve yields even if there’s drought or heatwave,” said Crespo, 39. But it’s a complicated, never-ending race against time, as global heating drives climate disasters and the emergence of new, adapted or more aggressive pathogens.
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