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Crop Breeding for Climate Change – A Moving Target

Credit: Calvin Qualset

Adapting our food plants to climate change is a challenge that is exercising the minds of the world’s plant breeders, including Dr. Calvin Qualset of the University of California Davis, who spoke at the Food Security and Climate Change conference in Amman today.

Breeding for uncertain environmental conditions is often like aiming for a moving target, said Dr. Qualset.

Dr. Qualset spoke about the range of tools that plant breeders can use to develop crop varieties that are resilient in the face of variable climatic conditions, increasing water shortage and increasing consumer demand.

He highlighted the way in which plant breeders have changed their approach over the last few decades, moving from the solutions of the Green Revolution – where a small number of relatively homogenous varieties could be grown across large areas – to a focus on landraces and their development.

Many of these landraces are re-emerging from the seed collections in which they have been preserved, serving to increase crop genetic diversity, a vital tool in the kit for adapting to climate change.

At the conference on Tuesday, Dr. Luigi Guarino from the Global Crop Diversity Trust emphasized the importance of good seed collection strategies, including looking for rare traits, conducting threat assessment and identifying new areas of species richness not previously sampled.

“Countries are interdependent on one another for obtaining genetic resources for food production. The political framework exists to share these resources for efficient use in a changing climate,” he said. “The Global Crop Diversity Trust and its partners are working to prepare for, and address, climate change through these means.”

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