Tulip prices and food crisis

The food crisis will be over, right?

Not quite. The food price crisis might take a holiday. Media and political interest might subside. But the underlying factors that are propelling us towards chronic supply/demand imbalances will not have been resolved. We have a major systemic problem to address. Prices are the effect. They can dip even within the context of a long-term upward trend, what the people at the Chicago Board of Trade would call a "secular bull market" in agricultural commodities.

The current food price crisis presents us with a rare opportunity to mobilise the resources to address the long-term problems of supply. We must not be fooled into thinking that the virtually inevitable upcoming price declines are anything more than the lull before the next storm.

Preparing for the storm

Our task in the agricultural community and at the Global Crop Diversity Trust is to prepare for the storm that is gathering on the horizon. Our job is to get agriculture ready! At the Trust, and in collaboration with partner institutes, we are:

• collecting remaining diversity from the field before it is lost due to climate change, development or replacement by new varieties - we'll need this diversity for the options it will provide for plant breeders and farmers;
• conserving crop diversity - securely and permanently in seed banks meeting international standards and in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault - without diversity agriculture can't survive;
• screening collections for traits essential to meet climate change, water, energy and food security challenges;
• developing new information technologies and systems to facilitate plant breeders and researchers in finding the genetic traits they need to make crops more productive and resilient; and
• moving newly found traits into breeding lines that can be used to create productive, "climate-ready" crops.

You can't get agriculture ready without crop diversity. It really is that simple. So this is the Trust's agenda, to ensure that agriculture is able to avert the next food crisis, adapt to climate change, and meet the challenges that expensive energy and chronic water constraints will pose.