17.08.2022
To cope with drought, we need to be open to new ideas
Dear readers,
This year, nearly everything is in short supply. Supply chains have been interrupted. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prevented the usual supply of wheat from reaching the global markets. Electricity and gas shortages loom. And now water is an issue as well, following a summer with almost no rain in much of Europe. This poses an enormous challenge for agriculture. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, soil moisture levels are below average in large areas of the continent. Switzerland has also been affected by this lasting drought. As the Tages-Anzeiger reports, a study conducted by ETH Zurich and MeteoSwiss has found that Switzerland’s summers have become significantly drier over the past 40 years. Moreover, lack of rain is not the only cause of the drought. As temperatures rise, evaporation increases.
This has consequences for agricultural production. The Berner Zeitung published an article about a fruit grower in Konolfingen named Reto Schürch who has found himself with 30 tons of plums that can’t be sold because they are too small – by just four millimeters. Which means his Fellenberg plums fall short of the standard for retail sale. The farmer helps himself by opening his plant for self-picking. If he does not find buyers, the drought leads to food waste. Livestock farming is also affected. Meadows and fields have withered in many places, resulting in a lack of fodder. In addition, the farmers can no longer let the animals outdoors all day because of the extreme heat. So they are forced to tap the fodder reserves for the winter.
To cope with the drought, we need to be open to new solutions. Switzerland’s Federal Council has commissioned the development of an early detection and warning system that will allow farmers to better prepare for future dry spells. A new network for measuring soil moisture is intended to warn farmers about dry spells several weeks in advance, allowing them to take appropriate measures in a timely manner. This early warning system is scheduled to be available by 2025.
Switzerland is not the only country that is affected. In northern Italy, some parts of the river Po are running lower than ever before. The Po Valley is one of Italy’s most important agricultural regions. But the dry fields are more like a desert. No rain has fallen since the beginning of last winter, and crop losses are estimated at 50 percent. Irrigation is impossible, not least because salt water from the Po Delta is flowing inland, contaminating the soil with salt and rendering irrigation canals unusable. The water has a salt level of four grams per liter. But water can be used for agricultural production only when it contains no more than one gram of salt per liter. The consequence: more and more farmland is becoming salinized and unusable for agricultural use. This is all the more painful because fertile farmland is already an increasingly scarce resource.
Soil salinization is a global problem. This is a challenge people have been struggling with in the Mekong Delta, South India and Bangladesh for years, for example. Soil salinization poses a threat to rice production. In this case, too, we need to be open to new solutions. Salt-tolerant plants are needed. In 2006, the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute were able to cultivate a salt-tolerant rice variety that can withstand significantly higher salt levels than conventional varieties. Many new varieties have been introduced since then, making it possible to grow rice in the country’s southern region again.
Farmers in the Po Valley, too, might benefit greatly from salt-tolerant varieties. That requires research. Traditional breeding, genetic engineering and new technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas, can all make a contribution.
Skepticism doesn’t move things forward. To achieve innovation, we need to take advantage of every technology available – including green genetic engineering. It’s time we recognized that new technologies offer opportunities in the fight against climate change and environmental destruction. It is crucial to understand the following: Precision breeding, for example with CRISPR/Cas, poses fewer risks than conventional breeding. Currently, conventional varieties are bred by random mutagenesis, by irradiation or addition of chemical substances. Through this random process, undesirable traits always appear in the plant. These have to be removed by backcrossing, in a lengthy process. New breeding techniques produce an equivalent result, but are much more precise and therefore lead to the goal more quickly. Even classical cross-breeding is based on random processes. Those new technologies therefore do not entail more risks than conventional breeding. Urs Niggli, a pioneer in the field of organic farming, made that point in the online magazine Der Pragmaticus: “The evidence is clear: There is no fundamental difference between the new breeding methods and traditional cross-breeding when it comes to their impact on (agro-) ecosystems and human health.”
Wheat has become the subject of much discussion this year due to the war in Ukraine. A drought-tolerant variety from Argentina holds considerable promise. Field trials involving soybean plants that had the HB4 sunflower gene introduced showed that the plants produced around ten percent higher yields during drought than conventional varieties. A drought-resistant wheat variety debuted on the market in Argentina last year. HB4 wheat produced yields in field trials that were 20 percent higher than those of conventional varieties.
Still a good source of information concerning plant breeding is the article by ETH Professor Achim Walter, which we have published already on swiss-food.ch. Walter reminds us of the importance of plant breeding for the food we consume every day. The vast majority of the crops we are familiar with today were cultivated by humans, and they never occurred in nature in their current form.
We also need to be open to new agricultural methods. The combination of agriculture and energy production lends new meaning to the term companion planting. The fact is that demand for both food and electricity is set to increase dramatically in future. Concurrently, there will be less free space available. So why not use farmland to produce food while simultaneously generating power? This could be done using solar panels that produce electricity several meters above the ground. Plants that require more shade could grow beneath them. And the solar panels could also provide protection from hail or heavy rain. Overall, the goal is for agrophotovoltaics to make land use more efficient. If such ideas are to be put into practice, regulations need to be more flexible. This requires more openness to innovation on the part of policymakers and public authorities.
Policymakers also need to ensure that intellectual property is protected. And it is not only huge corporations that protect their innovations, as a report about Planted, a startup that produces meat alternatives makes clear. The newspaper Standpunkt der Wirtschaft notes that protection for the company’s intellectual property is crucial to its success.
As we have already noted, coping successfully with drought requires a bundle of measures. And it needs openness to new solutions as well as their protection. Otherwise, researchers will leave – which leads to brain drain and causes the research pipeline to dry up. In addition, new cultivation methods must be permitted. The authorities are called upon to take action with regard to approval and licensing practices. They, too, must wake up and demonstrate a new openness to innovation. An effective response to extreme weather and water shortages will require a wide range of measures: from drought-tolerant varieties to solar panels installed over the fields.
The swiss-food editorial team
