The Middle Eastern countries of the Fertile Crescent can be proud of their agricultural heritage. Without the innovations that gave rise to modern agriculture 10,000 years ago, settled communities and advanced civilizations would never have emerged.
Then, as now, this area – spanning from Egypt through Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq to Iran – was home to an incalculably valuable asset: a range of wild, edible plants with traits that could be enhanced through selection and breeding to give us the high-yielding, nutritious, high-energy crops upon which we rely today.
The genetic diversity of agricultural plants in the region – mainly cereals and legumes – is found among both the wild relatives of modern crops and early, domesticated varieties that adapted naturally to their changing environment. Traditional farmers, recognizing the benefits of maintaining a source of plant genes for adaptation to a changing environment, conserved these local varieties so they could cross-breed from them and select crops resistant to evolving threats from pests, diseases and harsh weather.
However, despite their long-standing value, many of the wild varieties (known as crop wild relatives) and the domesticated, locally adapted varieties (known as landraces) have more recently become gravely endangered. Increasing urbanization, habitat loss, environmental degradation, destructive farming practices and climate change are taking a severe toll on their diversity and spread.
Yet they have never been more needed, given that similar factors also threaten regional – and global – food security. Growing populations and climate change mean that the countries of the Middle East must now feed more people on less land, with less water and under harsher weather conditions.
These countries are bellwethers for the rest of the world: a recent studysuggests that if nothing is done to avert these threats, global food security could be so severely undermined that 2040 could see a systemic breakdown of the global food system and widespread food riots.
These challenges place an urgent imperative on Arab countries to quantify, conserve and take advantage of the crop diversity in their region. Some current crops we have today are unlikely to continue yielding in a different environment. According to Ehsan Dulloo, scientist at Bioversity International, wild relatives of domesticated crops serve as a reservoir of genetic material, with the potential to be used to develop new, improved varieties of crops. He explains, “By virtue of the fact that crop wild relatives have evolved in nature, they have been able to develop new adaptive traits that can be useful for farmers or breeders to produce varieties that can be more tolerant to climate change.”
In November last year I attended a conference in the United Arab Emirates, at which many Middle Eastern and North African countries were represented, and which focused precisely on this imperative.
At the meeting, entitled “The Role of Global Plant Genetic Resources for Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture in the Middle East” and organized by the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA) and the Global Crop Diversity Trust with the support of Bioversity International, participants identified the priorities for ensuring food security in the region.
One key requirement is the safeguarding of crop diversity both in the wild and on farmland. To achieve this, it is essential that investment is made to strengthen local and regional plant genebanks (“ex situ conservation”), to set up nature reserves where crop wild relatives can grow safely (“in situ conservation”) and to support farmers in the use and conservation of traditional varieties (“on farm conservation”). It is also important that investment is made in scientific programmes to identify, conserve and study the precious genetic material from these breeds so as to develop a new, resilient, climate-proofed generation of crops for the region and the rest of the world.
Crucial to these endeavors will be the development of national and regional plans and partnerships, and of new approaches, methodologies and best practices. Evidence suggests that this work will be most effective if undertaken by means of a partnership between the countries of the region alongside the Global Crop Diversity Trust and Bioversity International, which between them have a wealth of relevant experience, especially in ex situ and in situ conservation.
Confronting the threats to food security in the Middle East and beyond requires acknowledging and addressing the parallel threats to agricultural diversity. Grave though the situation is, implementing ambitious initiatives to quantify and protect this diversity, still today one of the region’s greatest assets could not only militate against change but also become the cornerstone of a new agricultural renaissance.
