Saving the Genes of Our Future Food
A new crop-breeding strategy that will help ensure food security
for the world's poorest has been developed by ICARDA. The objective
is twofold: to breed crops that will give greater yield stability,
and thus food security in the world's harshest environments; and
to preserve, through use, the plant biodiversity that is the raw
material of such crops.
ICARDA's new strategy includes:
- Using local landraces and crop wild relatives to breed new
crops, for example Arta barley, derived from landraces, which
has been returned to farmers' fields in the Middle East, and is
outperforming local landraces by 70 percent, despite a harsh environment
and lack of inputs.
- Bringing in farmers as partners in the crop-breeding program,
so that their feedback can be incorporated but also so that the
varieties thus produced are already in the fields when the process
is completed, making it easier for their neighbors to adopt them.
And it means that the genetic diversity used in the process stays
in the countryside and is preserved.
- Besides maintaining a genebank of over 110,000 accessions,
working with national programs on new ways of preserving wild
relatives and landraces in-situ, where they will continue
to adapt. This is being done through a project that may become
a model for in-situ conservation worldwide.
- Cooperating with IPGRI in the drive to preserve biodiversity
in West Asia, North Africa and the newly-independent republics
of Central Asia.
"Since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, organizations
like ICARDA have worked hard to spread the word that the store
of genetic material used in agriculture is the most vital area
of biodiversity to human existence," says ICARDA's Director
General, Adel El-Beltagy. "There have been numerous conferences
and seminars, but that's not enough. It's time to stop talking,
and act."
International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas(ICARDA)
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