Crop researchers are looking into ways farmers can breed their crops to survive impacts of climate change. Currently, poorer countries who rely on rice and corn staples may be in danger of losing mass crops due to water salinization, drought and other symptoms of climate change.

Unlike major biotech companies, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (the organization spearheading the project) is focused on maintaining plant diversity while at the same time zeroing in on aspects of particular foods—bananas, sweet potatoes, rice, corn, etc.—that might be bred into all types to survive under extreme temperature changes. Their approach is much more localized, it seems, taking into account what people eat in particular regions (culture) and how particular types of food could be bred without watering down diversity.

In addition, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is looking into setting up crop banks and seed vaults in as many impoverished countries as possible to ensure food security. Their web site states: “No country in the world is self-sufficient in crop diversity – agriculture everywhere depends on it. Yet this diversity, contained and stored in seeds, is at risk of disappearing. But we don’t have to sit back and let this happen.”

In what appears to be a response to the idea that world hunger can only be solved by large biotech companies who put together expensive packages of genetically modified seed, the GCD Trust says: “The conservation of crop diversity is neither technologically complicated, nor, considering the importance of the task, expensive. It is instead the reliability of funding which is so crucial to conserving seed...”

This organization also worked on the The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which we wrote about previously.

Sources: EcoWorldly and Global Crop Diversity Trust

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