GENEVA (AFP) – Agriculture can find solutions to counter the negative impacts of climate change on crops, but only if the sector is allowed to innovate, the International Seed Federation’s (ISF) chief told AFP.
“Farmers must constantly adapt” as climate change “brings new diseases to the fields” and challenges the agriculture industry through water shortages, ISF secretary-general Michael Keller told AFP during a recent meeting of the federation in Geneva.
Meanwhile “the world is permanently losing arable land” due to climate change, which causes excessive rainfall in some regions and desertification in others, he explained, while also pointing to the increasing use of concrete.
Faced with the climate crisis and food insecurity, the world must find ways to “increase yields”, said Keller, for whom “the call is very clear: let us innovate, but also let us use all the existing tools in terms of selection methods”.
The ISF, which represents the major global seed companies, in particular defends the development of so-called new breeding techniques, known as NBTs.
Such techniques change the genetic make-up of plants, for example by using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which can edit the genes of animals, plants and micro-organisms with extreme precision through snipping DNA.
That means there are no external additions, unlike with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and transgenics.
NBTs are a battleground between those who think such biotechnologies are essential in the face of climate change, and those who want them to remain strictly regulated, like GMOs, fearing what might happen when the plants derived from them spread through nature.
In June, European Union countries gave up on voting on a text deregulating these genetic biotechnologies, due to a lack of support.
Meanwhile in France, the food safety agency Anses in March recommended evaluation on a “case by case” basis before bringing anything to market.
“We need to innovate”, and innovation needs to be done “faster and faster”, Keller said, calling for new varieties to be developed within the next five years rather than within 10-15 years.
“The more selection methods we have within our reach, the more we will be able to bring new solutions to farmers,” he said.
While biodiversity is “a priority for the seed sector”, Keller stressed the importance of companies having access to plants’ genetic resources.
Earlier this month, the COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia approved setting up a fund whereby the profits of digitally sequenced genetic data from animals and plants will be shared with their communities of origin.
Companies profiting from such data will pay into the “Cali Fund”.
The 196 nations at COP16 hope that the mechanism will raise billions of dollars to finance nature protection.
The measures are “extremely important”, because they relate to “access and use of digital information, access to knowledge”, and not to the genetic resource itself, Keller pointed out.
He meanwhile stressed the need for greater “clarity” and “predictability”, warning that there remained “many grey areas” in how the mechanism would work, and in how a company could prove “it has not used” the information.
The digital sequencing of information on genetic resources – often drawn from species found in poor countries – is used among other things to make medicines and cosmetics that can earn billions for their developers.
Few, if any, benefits of the data – often downloaded from free-access online databases – ever trickle down to the communities who discovered a species’ usefulness in the first place.