Your Voice: ‘The Food Crisis Isn’t Going Away’
FrontLines - June 2009
By Nina Fedoroff
Your Voice, a continuing FrontLines feature, offers personal observations from USAID employees. Nina Fedoroff is the science and
technology adviser to both the Secretary of State and the Administrator of USAID. This column was excerpted from a letter Fedoroff wrote to
Andrew C. Revkin, a New York Times reporter whose blog—dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com—covers environmental issues.
Feb. 27, 2009 [posted on blog March 3]
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Nina Fedoroff
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Dear Andy,
I write you from the far frozen
north of Norway. Near the village
of Longyearbyen, on the island
of Spitzbergen, is a remarkable
structure called the Svalbard
Global Seed Vault. In chambers
deep in a mountain whose temperature
never rises above freezing
is a storage chamber, further
cooled to a temperature of—15
degrees Celsius. In it are seeds of
some 70,000 varieties of the 64
of the world’s major food crops.
Marking the Vault’s first anniversary,
a small scientific meeting
focused on how climate change
will affect humanity’s ability to
grow food.
It’s cold here. But a deeper
chill settled on us as we listened
to the climate scientists’ scenarios
for the coming decades.
Even if we all stopped driving,
flying, and turned every light out
tomorrow, the CO2 we’ve already
poured into our atmosphere over
last 100 years means that [the]
next hundred will be much hotter
than the last 100.
It seems we’ve begun to
absorb the notion of hotter, drier
summers, rising sea levels, and
more extreme weather—bad
enough. But who’s thought
much about what a changing
climate might mean at the grocery
store? No matter whose
projections, no matter whether
the best, worst, or most probable
scenario, our crops will suffer—
and I mean OUR crops, not just
those in some distant land.
Here’s a real example of what
a higher temperature can do.
In 2003, France and Italy had a
summer that was just 3.5 percent
hotter than their usual summer.
It rained as usual, but the yields
of major crops were still down
by 20 to 36 percent. Projections
show that this will be the average
summer by 2090.
And within the next few
decades, it’s nearly certain that
we’ll be recording summer[s]
hotter than ever recorded. Many
of our crops fail completely if the
temperature goes much above 100
degrees Fahrenheit for just a few
days at a critical flowering time.
During my days as a corn geneticist,
I watched the tassels turn
brown and sterile [as] the summer
hit 108 degrees in Columbia, Mo.,
at pollination time.
To put this in perspective:
the food crisis of 2008 called
attention to how close we are
to the limits of the global food
supply. But unlike the financial
one, the food crisis isn’t going
away. This is because the number
of people on the planet is
still growing and by mid-century
we’ll need to roughly double the
food supply—which, of course,
starts with growing crops,
whether to feed us, or to feed
pigs and cows and chickens. Yet
the amount of land on the planet
that’s good for growing crops
hasn’t changed much for more
than half a century.
Will the warming climate
open lands for cropping farther
north? Probably, though how
much is uncertain. What is
quite certain by now is that
climate change will squeeze
those farther south as soil moisture
declines. This will affect
the most populous countries,
countries whose populations are
growing fastest.
So what do we do? The Global
Crop Diversity Trust
(www.croptrust.org/main/arctic.php),
which funds the
Vault, is dedicated
to the preservation
of the genetic
diversity in our food
crops. They are
motivated by the
belief that it is this
diversity that will
be the source of the
genes we will need
to develop plants
that can grow on a hotter, drier
planet.
Maybe. But the fact is that
over the entire (more than)
10,000-year history of agriculture,
the CO2 levels in the
atmosphere were between 180
and 280 ppm [parts per million].
We’re at 389 now.
It’s not unlikely that we’ll
hit 700 ppm before we get this
problem under control. That’s
going to mean that it’ll get hotter
and drier than anything but desert
plants have seen before. Desert
agriculture isn’t new, but scaling
it up will be a challenge and may mean venturing outside the limits
of our current stable of crops.
I rather think we should also
be scrambling to explore and
understand organisms—not just
plants—that have evolved to
survive and thrive in the parts of
the earth that are already the hottest
and driest. We’ll need to
understand how they survive.
We’ll need to capture the genes
that make it possible. If we’re
lucky, we’ll be able to use these
to arm some of our super-productive
crops plants to survive
and thrive under such conditions.
If we’re lucky. And if people
stop being so reluctant to use
modern molecular science to enhance crops.
★
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