New rice and green bean plants are now being rolled out to help farmers grow more of these staple foods despite higher temperatures caused by climate change. These new ‘climate proof’ crop varieties were developed as part of a five-year project aimed at helping countries to improve food security and adapt to changing climate conditions. The project specifically addressed the improvement of tolerance of rice and bean plants to high temperatures in drought-prone areas.
“Climate change is forcing food producers and farmers to change how they approach agriculture,” said María Caridad González Cepero, a scientist at the National Institute of Agricultural Science in Cuba. “New plant varieties, such as these ‘climate proof’ rice and bean plants, offer a sustainable option for adapting to some of the negative effects of climate change, which is important for ensuring food security today and in the future.”
One of the major consequences of climate change has been the extreme fluctuation in global temperatures. Higher temperatures have a direct and damaging effect on plant development and yields. In many agricultural locations worldwide, temperature extremes are causing plants to suffer, including staple crops such as rice and green beans, also known as the common bean, which are essential to the diets of millions of people worldwide.
To help protect crop-based food sources, a group of plant breeders, plant physiologists, agronomists and plant biotechnologists and experts from the IAEA, in cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), teamed up to develop new ‘climate proof’ crop varieties through a five-year IAEA coordinated research project.
The team began by studying how rice and common bean plants react to normal and aberrant – meaning any climate condition to which a variety of crop is not normally adapted to – climate conditions, and identifying genes related to heat tolerance and higher yields. With this information, they targeted plants with desired traits and bred for these traits using irradiation to speed up the natural process of mutation in plants. This breeding process increases diversity of plants’ traits, allowing scientists to more quickly test and select plants with the desired characteristics. The result was a series of ‘climate proof’ rice and common bean plants that can tolerate high temperature conditions better while producing higher yields compared to local varieties.
One of these new rice varieties called ‘Guillemar’, which is drought tolerant, is now being used in Cuba and has boosted crop yields by 10 per cent. Other countries such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Tanzania and Senegal, are also preparing to release new, high-yielding rice varieties suited to each countries’ temperature conditions, while experts in Colombia and Cuba have had success with new varieties of heat-tolerant, higher yielding common bean and tepary bean plants, which they expect to release to farmers by 2020-2021.
