I’ve written in the past on this blog about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, tucked deep in the ground in Norway. A kind of sci-fi Noah’s Ark, the vault acts as an important project to protect the biodiversity of our agricultural heritage and prepare us for a changing climate.
Cary Fowler is the brain behind the vault, and in a new TED talk he explains the importance of saving seeds in order to feed the world’s poor, who will be disproportionately affected by a changing climate.
From the talk:
“The most interesting thing about South Africa is that we don’t have to wait until 2070 for there to be trouble (with the food crops.)
If by 2030, the maize or corn varieties — which is the dominate crop, accounting for 50 per cent of the nutrition in southern Africa — are still in the field in 2030, we’ll have a 30 per cent decrease in production of maize, because of the amount of climate change already. Thirty per cent decrease in production, in the context of increasing population is a food crisis. It’s global in nature. We will watch children starve to death on TV.
Now, you may say that 20 years is a long way off — it’s two breeding cycles for maize. We have two rolls of the dice to get this right. We have to get climate ready crops in the field, and we have to do that rather quickly.
Watch the talk and leave your comments bellow
