Farmers and scientists are developing innovative crops such "hardy corn" and promoting better agronomic techniques to help the 2.7 billion people who will be living in water-scarce regions by the year 2025, says the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
(Ismail Serageldin, Chairman of the World Water Commission, is also Chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). He will discuss innovations in water-scarce agriculture at his 6:00 p.m. briefing Tuesday.)
Farmers and scientists are developing innovative crops such "hardy corn" and promoting better agronomic techniques to help the 2.7 billion people who will be living in water-scarce regions by the year 2025, says the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
CGIAR scientists have also helped to create a new global database called The World Water and Climate Atlas for Agriculture that will serve as a high-tech tool for managing water resources for farmers, agronomists, engineers, conservationists, meteorologists, researchers and government policy makers.
"The world is facing a serious water gap: some 20 percent more water is needed than is available to feed the more than 2 billion additional people who will be alive by 2025. We must change our practices now!" says Ismail Serageldin, CGIAR Chairman, as well as World Bank Vice President for Special Programs. "Better farm management techniques, crops that are improved to flourish in low-water environments, and this powerful new tool, the Water and Climate Atlas, make up one important component in an overall global water strategy."
Mr. Serageldin is also Chairman of the World Commission on Water for the 21st Century, which was formed to call public attention to the water crisis and to find solutions. The World Commission presented its report on a vision for the future of global water resources and their management at the Second World Water Forum, being held March 17-22, 2000 in The Hague, the Netherlands.
The World Water Commission says the currently nearly 450 million people in 29 countries face water shortage problems. The entire Mediterranean region, including parts of southern Europe, North Africa and Middle East, India, parts of China, most of Sub-Sahara Africa and major regions in North and South America, especially the western United States, will face severe water shortages in the coming years. Europe also faces serious problems.
The innovations that CGIAR is developing to help a water-short world include:
Hardy Corn: Researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known as CIMMYT, one of 16 CGIAR centers, have created hardy new breeds of tropical corn that can increase harvests by 40 percent in the tough environments of the developing world.
Corn, more generally known as maize, is native to the Western Hemisphere, but has become one
of the most important crops in both the developed and developing world. Maize grows marvelously in the temperate climates of North America and Western Europe, producing an average of seven tons per hectare (2.47 acres), compared with an average of just 2.5 tons per hectare for farmers in the developing world.
One-half of the 60 million hectares (148 million acres) planted in corn in the developing world is subject to periodic droughts. Some 13 million hectares (32 million acres) are located in Latin America, 7 million (17 million acres) in Africa and 8 million (19.8 million acres) in Asia.
One of the new corn varieties was specifically developed to grow under drought conditions, with a much higher yield than traditional corn gives in the same conditions.
Drought caused the loss of an estimated 24 million tons of corn in 1993 in the developing world, a drop of 15 percent from the potential crop without any drought.
The new corn will also help the environment by allowing farmers in the developing world to stay on what was becoming non-productive lands, thereby saving virgin rain forests and other fragile tropical lands.
Drought interrupts the key stage in corn growth -- when the male flower, called the tassel, on top of the stalk, pollinates a part of the female flower called the silks, borne near the middle of the stalk. Those silks are attached to florets that, when fertilized, develop into grains of corn.
During drought, the tassel usually wins the competition with the silks for the carbohydrates that feed the plant, thereby stunting or preventing the formation of grain, and yields can drop to zero. To develop a drought-resistant corn, CIMMYT researchers began selective breeding with the "Tuxpeño" variety that was already well adapted to tropical lowlands.
Researchers bred this drought-tolerant Tuxpeño corn under drought conditions, selecting, at flowering, those plants where the silks appeared soon after the male flower emerged. When tassel and silk development most nearly coincided, grain production was highest. The selected plants were then bred further over an eight-year period, in order to achieve even greater drought tolerance.
Scientists found that such plants allocate more carbohydrates, or energy, to the ear, which allows the plant to produce more grain with less moisture. This selective breeding led to the "Tuxpeño Sequia" variety and others like it, which can be grown under a wider range of tropical conditions.
The research has already produced new varieties that, in times of severe mid-season droughts, produce 2.8 tons per hectare, a 40 percent increase over regular maize yields under similar drought conditions, the report says. The improved varieties have now been sent out for further field testing to 22 countries that suffer periodic droughts. CIMMYT believes that as many as 20 developing countries in the next 10 years can begin full-scale production of drought-tolerant corn.
Better Farm Management Techniques: New, water-saving techniques are being developed that could save up to 25 percent of the water now used to grow rice, according to scientists at two CGIAR centers -- the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in Manila, the Philippines, and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Such techniques are especially important for Asia, where demand for water is expected to increase sharply over the next 25 years – more than 50 percent in Southeast Asia and India alone, and 40 percent in China – and where about half of irrigated land is planted in rice.
It takes twice as much water to produce rice than any other cereal crop – more than 2,000 tons of water is used to grow one ton of rice. With the projected growth of Asian cities and industries and their increased need for fresh water, rice farming must become more water efficient. Despite the constraints of water scarcity, rice production must rise dramatically over the next generation to meet the food needs of Asia’s poor.
The new rice techniques include wet seeding, intermittent rice irrigation, land leveling, improved weed management, and management of cracked soils. Many of the major rice-producing countries are developing nations categorized by the World Bank as "low income economies." In most of Asia, rice is not only the staple food, but also constitutes the major economic activity and a key source of employment and income for the rural population.
Asian farmers till about 90 percent of the world’s harvested rice area and account for 90 percent of global rice production. In the majority of the Asian rice countries, rice occupies one-third or more of total planted area. Of the 25 major rice-producing nations, 17 of them are located in Asia, extending in a rice arc from Pakistan to Japan.
The link between water and rice is crucial, especially since fresh water is a scarce resource that is getting scarcer. The number of water-scarce countries is expected to increase to 48 countries by 2025, peaking at 55 countries by mid-century, 2050.
More than half of the world’s population will depend on rice as their principal food source in 30 years. Rice production must increase by more than 40 percent from the present production to
avoid a rice shortage. But available land for cultivation is expected to decrease because of erosion, desertification, salinization, and rapidly increasing urbanization.
The growing water shortage means there is a pressing need to devise methods of growing rice with less water, without any penalty to production. Many of the new techniques are aimed at reducing dependence on the traditional method of growing rice, in which farmers raise seedlings (young rice plants) in the seedbeds and then transplant the 25-30 day old seedlings in paddies that are kept flooded with about 2 to 7 centimeters (0.8 to about 3 inches) of standing water throughout the growing season. Water consumption for irrigated rice in most Asian countries is therefore very high.
Durable Wheat -- Researchers have been able to modify wheat, once mostly restricted to temperate and subtropical zones, to make it productive even in hot climates. One main reason for growing wheat is it requires less water than rice.
Wheat is also a cash crop that has relatively few natural insect enemies. Thanks to years of intensive plant breeding work, modern wheats now have strong built-in resistance to major diseases. That means poor farmers in developing countries are assured of stable yields and can more easily adapt pest management procedures that make maximum use of biological control measures, minimizing chemical use.
About 75 percent of all spring bread wheat varieties now grown in developing countries (not counting China) are either crosses developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), or crosses developed by national agricultural research programs in developing countries, using genetic material from CIMMYT and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (CARDA).
Since the 1970s, average wheat yields in developing countries doubled from 0.5 ton per acre (1.2 tons per hectare) to 1 ton per acre (2.46 tons per hectare), the fastest productivity growth of any basic food crop. In the last two decades, four-fifths of the additional wheat output of the developing world has come from yield increases; only one-fifth came from more land planted.
In 1994, Asia harvested 217 million tons of wheat, outpacing Europe's 119 million tons, and North America's 90 million tons, the combined production of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Despite the huge gains in wheat production in developing countries, these countries also account for about two-thirds the world's total wheat imports, indicating that demand in the developing world has risen even faster than domestic output.
Increased wheat productivity has greatly reduced the pressure to open new and increasingly more fragile lands for agriculture. If wheat yields per acre had not improved since 1970, developing world farmers would have needed the equivalent of some 222 million acres (90 million hectares) of additional land, or almost double the amount of land they had under wheat in 1970/75.
The World Water and Climate Atlas for Agriculture -- Scientists at another CGIAR center, the International Irrigation Management Institute (IIMI), along with Utah State University, have created a new global database that will serve as a tool for farmers, agronomists, engineers, conservationists, meteorologists, researchers and government policy makers.
"The Atlas integrates the available agricultural climate data into one computer program and represents the most comprehensive, quality-controlled climatic data set in existence," says Mr. Ismail Serageldin. The project was funded by the Government of Japan through the CGIAR.
The Atlas enables users for the first time to zoom in on any 1-square mile (2.5 sq. kilometers) region of the globe and extract critical data such as precipitation and probability of precipitation, maximum and minimum temperatures and average temperatures.
All of this data is converted into maps that clearly delineate climatic conditions, no matter how remote an area of land may be, in a user-friendly computer program that agronomists can use to assist even the poorest farmers. The Atlas will help identify the agro-climatic conditions appropriate for specific crops."
Practical Applications
The Atlas will provide an extremely powerful base for further mapping of water-related data -- for river basins, land usage projects and population centers -- and as the basis for exploring the changes in agricultural potential that would result from independent estimates of climate change. The Atlas itself is not a predictor of such changes, but will be a valuable tool in interpreting the effects of any changes.
Using this meteorological encyclopedia, engineers can develop very specific plans for irrigation and water conservation projects for districts, states and entire countries. The quality of irrigated land in many places is declining due to increasing soil salinization, over-pumping and contamination of groundwater aquifers.
The Atlas demonstrates how the two most important measured values -- available water and temperature -- influence plant growth, crop yields, and the choice of various management practices. Scientists can combine the long-term data with crop growth simulation models to assess the value of different plants and plant traits for plant selection and/or plant breeding.
The Atlas will serve the interests of small and poor farmers in at least three ways:
- International funding agencies such as the World Bank and regional development banks, along with national and local governments, will have a much clearer picture of how to direct increasingly scarce agricultural investments resources;
- Extension agents can print and distribute data generated by the Atlas for specific areas to help improve the performance of integrated sol, water and nutrient management, ultimately leading to improved crop production by poor and small-scale farmers;
- By helping poor farmers to increase their incomes, the Atlas would help to better preserve the Earth's environment -- where too many people are poor, hungry or unemployed, preservation of nature, forests and wildlife will deteriorate.
The Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research is a global agricultural research network that works to promote food security, poverty eradication and the sound management of natural resources in the developing world. (www.cgiar.org)
Future Harvest builds public understanding of the importance of international agricultural research to global peace, prosperity, environmental renewal, health, and alleviation of human suffering. (www.futureharvest.org)
