INTERVIEW - New Crops Needed to Meet Climate Crisis
Date: 01-Dec-06
Country: UK
Author: Jeremy Lovell
With large parts of the world facing dramatic crop losses from rising temperatures and changed rainfall patterns, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) says action is needed immediately and at all levels.
"Finding disaster scenarios is not hard. Getting governments to take them seriously is," said Louis Verchot, principal scientist at Kenya's World Agroforestry Centre, one of 15 research centres supported by CGIAR.
"East Africa is already a disaster, and in Southeast Asia climate change will render half of the current wheat lands unsuitable for the crop -- that affects 200 million people," he told Reuters on a visit to London.
Scientists say average temperatures will rise by between two and six degrees Celsius by the end of the century due to burning fossil fuels for power and transport, causing droughts, floods and violent storms and threatening millions of lives.
"We have to deal with the causes of the problem but also prepare to adapt to the changes that are already happening," Verchot said.
CGIAR is an alliance of governments, international and regional organisations and private foundations funding a wide range of agricultural research from forestry to farming across the world from Asia to Africa and Latin America.
"NO TIME TO DELAY"
Some of the organisations that form CGIAR were involved in the green revolution of the 1960s when new varieties of wheat and rice were developed for Asia and transformed farming there.
Hoping for a political signal from their sponsoring governments but not willing to wait for one, CGIAR will set out to find the most vulnerable areas, breed the crops that can survive droughts and floods and adapt farming techniques.
"We want governments to decide at what level carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should be capped. That will give us a target and a timeframe. But we can't wait for them," Verchot said.
"We are looking at a crisis situation. The longer we wait the worse it will be," he added.
Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said last month taking action now to curb carbon emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change would cost one percent of the world economy. Delaying would boost the price to 20 percent.
"We have to get something working in the near future," Verchot said. "If we delay, the train will have left the station ... it will be impossible to catch up."
Trading in carbon emissions worth billions of dollars a year has sprung up since the Kyoto Protocol came into force last year aimed at curbing emissions of greenhouse gases.
Part of it is designed to channel money to developing countries through the Clean Development Mechanism.
But Verchot complained that it was skewed towards industry and largely ignored the poor subsistence farmers who will bear the brunt of the global warming crisis.
"Two-thirds of the CDM projects are end of pipe fixes, where is the development in that," he asked.
